A classic case  of the use of a faked post-mortem “interview”is to be found in a work by Hungarian-American author, Gitta Sereny. It first appeared in 1974 and was entitled Into That Darkness. This work purports to be based on an interview with Franz Stangl, an SS officer who ran a camp in occupied Poland during the war where many prisoners were later stated to have been gassed. The book contains a lengthy section quoting Stangl, who according to Sereny’s version, fully admits his part in the purported killings and asks for forgiveness from God and his victims. The balance of the work consists of various supplementary testimonies from former associates and family members, all attesting to the evil nature of Stangl’s activities and all clearly acknowledging his willing cooperation in a state-sponsored program of genocide.

Sereny, it should be noted, has made a comfortable living writing books and articles dealing with holocaust killings. But this particular book shows with great clarity the pitfalls that occur when a journalist, as opposed to a legitimate academic historian, produces a work which is not only entirely anecdotal in content, but ideological in thrust. There is no documentation, whatsoever, in this work which relies almost entirely on the author’s purported interviews with various people. Stangl died on the day following Sereny’s visit to him in prison where he was appealing his life sentence.

Herein lies the key to the questionability of the entire book. Stangl had been sentenced to a life term in prison as the result of his easily-foreseen conviction as a camp commander. He, through his attorneys, was appealing this sentence. It is highly doubtful if either Stangl or his attorneys would permit such a damaging interview to take place and to permit Sereny, whose extremist views were well known, free and unfettered access to the prisoner. There would appear to be no question that Sereny and her photographer husband, Don Honeyman, did indeed visit the prison and did see Stangl. Sereny’s husband took several photographs of him, photographs which are extensively reproduced in the book. The published pictures, however, do not support statements alleged to have been made by the former Austrian SS officer, but merely prove that he permitted himself to be photographed by his visitors. By making such incriminating statements as Sereny placed, post mortem, in his mouth, Stangl would have irrevocably destroyed any chance he might have had in his pending appeal before the German courts.

It is beyond reasonable belief that such statements were made under the circumstances indicated. A dead Stangl, however, could comfortably be alleged to have made any statement that the author chose to put into his mouth, and without the possible embarrassment to her or her publisher of an instant denial or possible legal proceedings.

A careful reading of the book not only disclosed the author’s prejudice towards Stangl and the system he served, but also is entirely devoid of any facts to support her thesis. She notes that a number of witnesses died before the book was published, of course including her main source, Stangl. Much of the anecdotal material Sereny has put together to support her case is of such a nature as to preclude its ever being introduced in a court of law. Several examples are set forth as illustration.

      In one, Sereny claims that Stangl’s wife wrote her a letter following an interview Sereny had with the wife in Brazil. In this letter, which is not reproduced, Frau Stangl allegedly states that in 1945 she was interviewed by two members of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence agency, and that they knew of her husband’s whereabouts in an American jail. “I examined their papers,” she is quoted as writing, “I have no doubt whatever that they were genuine.” The flaw in this scenario is obvious. It is simply not believable that the wife of an obscure SS officer would have the slightest idea what “genuine” U.S. CIC identification papers looked like. But Sereny states that the woman would have no reason to invent the incident. Perhaps the invention did not originate with Stangl’s wife, but with the author herself.

      At another point, Sereny introduced “Franciszek Zabecki” who she alleges was a Polish railroad worker, stationed in the vicinity of the Concentration Camp at Treblinka in German-occupied Poland. Sereny has this man counting all the trains carrying prisoners to the camp, standing outside in all kinds of weather and at all hours for a period of two full years. From his unrecorded and highly questionable comments, “Zabecki” states categorically that 1.2 million persons were killed in Treblinka during that time.

It is anecdotal and imaginative material, at charitable best, that suffuses and supports the entire untenable structure of this work. Unfortunately, a large proportion of what purports to be important historical studies are based either on entirely faked documents or on the wishful thinking of mendacious and ideological journalists. Generations must pass before the fictive is eventually weeded out from the factual, and in the meantime an appellation which has been applied to the Sereny book, Dialogs with the Dead, could well be applied to other mendacious creative writing essays now so prevalent in published historical works