Negative things about franz stangl trial#

What had hitherto been seen as the heroic pertinacity of a writer who had spent much of her life uncovering the facts about individuals associated with the Holocaust, began to be presented as mere ghoulishness and opportunism.

The controversy focused the spotlight on the author, who found herself accused of threatening to destroy what rehabilitation Bell had achieved, wreck her daughter’s life, and reopen the wounds inflicted on the families of the murdered boys. In the ensuing media frenzy, the whereabouts of Mary Bell and her young daughter (who had been unaware until then of her mother’s true identity) became known, and a letter from Gitta Sereny justifying the book to one of the victims’ mothers was also published in the press.

But Gitta Sereny’s admission that Mary Bell was paid about $77,000 for her collaboration caused an outcry, as did what many considered to be the author’s sympathy for the woman and her too willing acceptance of Mary Bell’s uncorroborated claims that she had been sexually abused as a child by her prostitute mother and her mother’s clients, and her contention that this abuse was irrefutably the causal basis of Bell’s homicidal behaviour. In her later book she attempted to go beyond the facts of the case, to understand the psychological factors that drove her to murder. Over the years, she remained in touch with Mary Bell’s relatives, monitoring her life throughout her 12 years in secret homes and prisons, and then the years of freedom that followed.

Negative things about franz stangl trial#

In 1972 Gitta Sereny had published The Case Of Mary Bell, which chronicled the trial of the 11-year-old Tyneside girl convicted in 1968 for the murder of two boys, aged three and four. But it was with the events surrounding the publication of Cries Unheard (1998) about the child murderer Mary Bell, that the climate of public opinion became most frenzied. Her book on Albert Speer, though widely acclaimed, caused some to say she must be a Nazi sympathiser. Others took issue with her rejection of the concept of evil, her unreconstructed belief in the moral perfectibility of the individual and controversial claim that the root causes of terrible acts can usually be found in childhood trauma. Certainly there was something uncomfortable about the pleasure she seemed to take in feeling personally close to the people she chose to write about. Her attempts to explain why such people committed monstrous acts led some to accuse her of being more sympathetic to the villains than to their victims. She chose for her subjects the sort of perpetrators of “evil” that other writers feared to touch - the child murderers Mary Bell and the killers of James Bulger, the Nazi architect Albert Speer, and the commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl.

Gitta Sereny was celebrated for her detailed studies of iniquity, of which she had had unusual experience as a child living in Central Europe between the wars.