The German Trauma
A journalist who sat across from Nazi perpetrators reflects on how they explained themselves, and how Germany reckoned with them.
Gitta Sereny’s collection of essays and reportage on Germany from 1938 to 2001. Sereny spent decades interviewing people who served the Nazi regime, among them Albert Speer and the Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, as well as their families and victims. These pieces gather that work with her reflections on how ordinary people came to accept and excuse terrible crimes, and on how Germany faced its past after the war.
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Dorothy Rowe
And we learn quite a lot through Gitta about those individual Germans and how their acceptance of Hitler and their lies developed. In Why We Lie I’ve written quite a lot about those lies. Gitta’s work is so important because she keeps a record of what those people said and the lies that they told.
Interview · May 2010
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