"Every day when I make my way to the tubby." The Brides in the Bath murders

Everyone likes a good murder. So much of our TV still depends on whodunit, and in shows like 'NCIS', 'CSI:Somewhere' and 'Law and Order: Cops and a Lawyer', the forensic evidence is always a key part of the case. This science has come a long way since police photographers took a shot of the eyeballs of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, hoping an imprint of the killer would still be there. One of the key figures in this transformation was Sir Bernard Spilsbury.

Spilsbury was a pioneer of forensic medicine in the first half of the 20^th Century. Indeed, he became a superstar, his appearances making headlines and his pronouncements accepted as fact. Two cases that made his name were the cases of Dr Frederick Crippen and George Joseph Smith, the Brides in the Bath murderer. Jane Robins’ new book, The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath, examines Spilsbury’s early career, which covers both these cases and another, all of which depended on Spilsbury’s evidence to hang murderers.

George Joseph Smith it seems was charismatic and dominating. He would marry women after a whirlwind romance. Then, within weeks, he would then have them make wills with him as beneficiary, get any money from their family that they were entitled to, and murder them by drowning them in a bathtub. He did it three times (meanwhile conning other women out of their money) before he was caught. He used false names so it took a while before anyone noticed the similarities. Spilsbury’s evidence was crucial to the conviction.

Robins in actually far more interested in the women who were the brides than Spilsbury or Smith. She examines their lives, and more broadly the roles of women in Edwardian society, to find what led them to marry and be killed by George Smith.  It’s an interesting and worthy idea and I wish she or her publisher had more courage to back this idea than pretend the main focus is Spilsbury. Why not “The Brides in the Baths”? It is always good to give the victims of famous murderers their due as human beings, and Robins does this well.

There are some odd aspects to the book. In examining the human remains in Crippen’s house, Spilsbury identified some skin as scar tissue, thus identifying the body with Crippen’s wife, while his colleague found traces the poison with which she was killed. In both cases they were looking for what they found. In other words, their findings could well have been coloured by their expectations. But Robins says this didn’t seem to bother anyone. Yet within two pages, she reports the defence barrister asking if they had been told what they were looking for. It seemed to bother him.

And in her conclusion to the Crippen trial, she reveals an alternate defence that was mooted at the time by another lawyer but never presented, which incorporated all the scientific evidence but put a different spin on circumstances and motivation. Then she says the lawyer was suggesting the scientific evidence could not be relied upon. But there is no such suggestion in the theory, quite the contrary. Why say this? I can only conclude that she was so keen to demonstrate that Spilsbury’s work was not as infallible as he, and the courts, liked to think, that she too was seeing what she wanted to see.

And it seems Spilsbury’s work was not as good as was thought. As he got older and more famous, the acclaim went to his head and he was not as careful as he should have been, and his pronouncements made with more certainty than was proper, and accepted by courts too readily. Late in his career, during World War Two, he was asked to assist with Operation Mincemeat, when a dead body was floated ashore in Spain with false plans for an invasion of Sicily. When a suitable body was found, they asked Spilsbury to examine it to see if it were possible to know that the man had not drowned. Spilsbury said there was nothing to worry about but he was wrong. The man had died by taking poison and there were burns in his mouth and throat and any worthwhile pathologist would have spotted this relatively easy. Wrong or arrogant? Did Spilsbury make a mistake, or just assume that a Spanish doctor would not have spotted it? Either way, this error, which was documented in an earlier book, does not make its way into Robins book, though she it suits her argument and she specifically mentions Operation Mincemeat. And to be fair, the ruse was not discovered; maybe Spilsbury was right all along. But Robins doesn’t give herself space to examine the later career of Spilsbury, when his flaws became more apparent. Instead she whips through the latter part of his career in a chapter, and her conclusion is weak from lack of detailed argument.

Spilsbury himself eventually realised his work was deteriorating, and the idea broke him. He gassed himself in his laboratory soon after the war.

This book is worth reading, particularly if you like a good true crime story. However, with a clearer focus and a more open approach, it could have been better.

"All my games are real." Chess and politics

War, said Claus von Clausewitz, is politics by other means. The Cold War was war by other means. The USA and the USSR tried to defeat each other by any means short of actively fighting a war against each other. The means ranged from machinations in the UN to wars by proxy to assassinations through to, perhaps oddest of all, chess.

Daniel Johnson is an English journalist and chess amateur. His 2007 book, White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was fought on the chessboard, traces the history of chess as it was used as a tool of politics. For the Soviets, this was a deliberate step. The intellectual nature of the game attracted them to the idea of using it as a way of demonstrating Soviet superiority over the west. (Star Trek uses three-dimensional chess to show Vulcan superiority over human intellect. But I digress.) They threw millions at it, both of money and of hours. Like everything else, it was entirely government controlled from the Grandmasters' championships to local clubs.

And for a long time it worked. The USSR dominated world chess throughout the Cold War. To do this, they relied heavily on non- Russians and Jews, which in the racist, insular, anti-Semitic system that was the USSR rankled with many. But they could overlook that as long as the USSR produced the world champion. And with the exception of Bobby Fischer (himself a Jew, albeit an anti-Semitic one) they did. They rigged competitions, and dominated and bullied the World Chess organisation FIDE to get their way. They lost their dominance for the same reason they lost the Cold War, a ruined economy, a country that was moribund in terms of technology and an oppressed people who finally had enough. Their last champion, and one of the strongest players in history, Gary Kasparov, became a dissident and is currently one of the opposition leaders against the increasingly despotic Putin regime, facing imprisonment or worse. The present world champion is Indian Viswanathan Anand.

Johnson puts this extraordinary campaign in the context of both the history of chess and of the world, with the main focus on 1945-1993. I have little idea of chess beyond the idea of how the pieces move, but I found it fascinating, and easy to follow, even for the chess patzer such as I. It’s a dramatic story with extraordinary characters. Bobby Fischer is not the only madman in the book. Johnson makes a good argument that for Fischer and others like him, it was not chess that made them insane. It was chess that kept them from going insane, and when they abandoned playing, their powerful minds turned on themselves. And certainly the paranoia and neuroses of Fischer was shared by many of the Grandmasters, increasing as the championships become more and more seen as the clash of civilisations.

Like a good non-fiction book should, it made me want to learn more about the subject.  And I’m now thinking of trying to learn to play chess properly. And it leads to the broader subject as well. Natan Sharansky was a great player who never become world champion. He did become a cause celebre in the USSR, enduring imprisonment, exile and a decade long separation from his wife because of his religious and political views. After finally being allowed to emigrate to Israel, he pursued a poltical career. He has now written two books (as well as his autobiography) that I feel I must read. One book, The Case for Democracy argues that Western democracy has core values that are strong enough to overcome radical Islam. Another book, Defending Identity, makes the case that strong identity, whether it be religious or nationalistic, can be forces for good and are essential against totalitarian movements. Given the history of the Jews in general, and the Jews and the small countries in the USSR, one begins to see his point.

Emmerson said in every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts. In good writing, we can also recognise the thoughts we have, but have not been quite able to articulate. I have been thinking that in our attempt to be tolerant, pluralistic, non-judgemental, all good qualities, we present a picture to the world that we stand for nothing and care about nothing. And it is this vacuum that fundamentalism and other fanaticisms rush to fill. The other way is to drift into a nihilistic world of the next sensation, the next way to avoid boredom and ennui.

Or to try and put it another way, a functioning society tells a story of where it has come from and where it is going. And members of the society should be in broad agreement with that story. In a healthy society, we will argue, discuss, and try to shift that story one way or the other, but the broad outline must exist. I don’t think we have a story anymore. We must rediscover it.

Wow, how did I get here? From 32 lumps of wood on 64 squares to the future of Western Civilisation as we know it. In a pale safe shadow of the journey of Sharansky and Kasparov I seem to have found a move from chess to politics.

"I'm not dead yet." Neil Gaiman and (kinda) Douglas Adams

Phew! After two world wars and the Holocaust – not to mention one of the angriest men to get on a playing field – I was happy to find lighter reading: two novels of fantasy. Both have enormous popular and critical followings, and both bridge the popular and literary genres. They like killing off characters who sometimes aren’t nearly as dead as they appear to be - sometimes. They have something else in common.

Television and film are not the only areas happy to trade on past glories, remaking classics and relabelling old material and presenting it to us as new. They are all after money and a market and the easiest way to sell something is to sell something the buyer already knows and likes and wants more of. And it’s a lot easier than thinking of something new.

However, literature is not immune from this concept. For a while there, it looked as if we were under attack from the League of Living Dead Writers. Virginia Andrews would not lie down, Alistair McLean kept publishing, and Desmond Bagley apparently took his typewriter to the grave, sending his agents new manuscripts.  Closer inspection of the covers of these would reveal other authors “from an idea by” or “based on the characters of”.  To be honest, I’m not sure how many ideas Virginia Andrews had before she died but they seemed to be awfully similar. And these were all genre writers and one could argue how distinctive they were in the first place. Still, one is tempted to brand all this as somewhat cynical.

Douglas Adams however seems a different case. A beloved writer, almost to the point of cult worship in some cases, he had a distinctive voice and worldview. It would seem almost blasphemous to attempt to write more of his material, yet it was his widow Jane Belsen who let Eoin Colfer do just that. In 2009, he released ...and another thing, the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.

Adams’ last book Mostly Harmless was in his own estimation a bitter and dark book, written during a bitter and dark period of his life. He killed off everyone of his beloved characters. And he often said he wanted to write a sixth book, but his early death circumvented that. So on the 30^th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Colfer’s addition was published, as a commemoration and celebration. There is no attempt to fool us even briefly that this is Adam’s work. The title and the author’s name are the largest print on the cover by far. The series and Adam’s name appear at the top of the dust jacket. It is Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series, writing a story using Douglas’ characters.

This was a big risk for the Belsen and Colfer. If it failed, they would look at best ridiculous, at worst greedy and cynical. Happily, it does not fail. (I’ve no idea how well it sold.) It comes across as a solid Adams book, laugh out loud in parts, but perhaps lacking those moments that Adams could do. Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Adams would include throw-away jokes or stories that would suddenly suggest enormous ideas about life, the universe, and well, everything. But it’s great to be back with Dentarthurdent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Breeblebox, and Trillian. To add a cherry to the cake, the god Thor appears, but sadly, Marvin the Paranoid Android does not. The book has an open ending with Arthur seeing familiar yellow ship appear in the sky. This is of course where we came in, and I suspect this is where we say goodbye – for the last time.

Neil Gaiman is far from dead – I hope. But he is also a man who likes to recycle and revisit old stories and old characters, his own as well as myth, legend and fairy tale,  and fashion something new from it. His novel Neverwhere is based on the TV series he wrote for the BBC, which was televised in 1996, the same year the book was published. I have not seen the series, but I am assured the book contains much that was cut from the series for time, budget and other considerations.  I often find that stories are best encountered in the format the creator first envisioned for it ie the novel is better than the movie, unless the movie came first in which case the novel is dire. Gaiman seems to have been writing the novel and series concurrently so each is the original version – a situation that seems appropriate to the author.

Neverwhere is story of a man who falls through an act of kindness into London Below, a mysterious world with odd parallels and enormous differences to the city above. There are black friars under Blackfriars, an Earl and a Raven in their respective courts, an angel named Islington, and more. We meet some of these characters, others we only hear of, but it is a world that is magical, frightening, both alluring and forbidding. And our hero, with a dream of being killed by a great beast, may or may not survive to return to his safe life in London Above.

I love Gaiman’s writing, and this book lived up to my expectations. I read it in hours. It doesn’t have the scope of his later novel, American Gods, but has the imaginative dazzle of Gaiman’s best work. It’s also had another life as a graphic novel, adapted by another writer. I preferred the book. None of the pictures from the TV or the comic have lived up to the ones in my head. I guess that’s why we keep returning to words, words, words.

"Enemy coast ahead." The Dambusters

As I mentioned earlier, more information is forthcoming about World War Two, as more information becomes declassified and more sources are made available. But some sources are becoming more scarce. I refer to the veterans themselves, both combatants and non-combatants, military and civilian. Historian Max Arthur is aware of this and is publishing oral histories of the world wars, combining published sources and new interviews to bring us their stories in their own words. Such primary sources are invaluable, and offer an insight obviously unavailable in any other way.

Arthur’s lastest book is Dambusters the story of perhaps the most famous aerial attack in WWII when 617 Squadron attacked three major dams in Germany using Barnes Wallis’  ‘bouncing bomb’. The raid has already been a book, by Australian Paul Brickhill as well as a movie, both called ‘The Dam Busters.’ The name of their first raid stuck to the squad through other astonishing missions of precision bombing.  But this book gives us the story through the pilots, the crew, the ground crew, the scientists, and the civilians who lived underneath the dams themselves. It’s an interesting, affecting read.

The campaign by Bomber Command from 1939-1945 has been the subject of some controversy, particularly the further we get from the war itself. Some have said the area bombing of major German cities was a war crime, some even going so far as to compare it to the Holocaust. While the latter comparison is as silly as it is offensive, the overall question does deserve some attention.

My reply is always, what else were they to do? Britain had no other way to fight back against Germany except through Bomber Command. Speer, the organising genius of the Reich, said the bombing was like a second front. In using artillery, troops, aircraft, and other resources for defence and rebuilding, it was impossible for Germany to turn its full might on Russia. The Eastern front was a brutal, ugly, protracted fight – and a near thing. If Germany had been able to keep minimum resources at home and on its Western defences, who knows what may have been the result.

That said the campaign was not beyond criticism. If Arthur Harris had backed the Mosquito instead of the Lancaster, precision bombing using much lighter loads and fewer crew for better results might have resulted, with fewer civilian casualties. But this is decision much easier to see from here, and not from then, when aerial bombing was still a new tactic, subject to much argument. Certainly it can be argued that Harris continued with area bombing when other tactics were available.

The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 by British and American crews is still a source of controversy. For some time, details came from the Nazis, and then the USSR, both of who had an obvious motivation in making the Western Allies look as bad as possible. The city was a major junction for troops heading for the Eastern Front, and the attack was in part requested by the Soviets, who for decades denied such a request existed. It was also the site of factories making parts for bombsights for German bomber, making Dresden as legitimate a target as any other city.

The story of Dresden as a source of shame for the allies was propagated by David Irving. Irving based his figures for civilian casualties on a German source, which was later shown to have been forged, the figures exaggerated by a factor of ten. Nearly twenty thousand casualties became 200 000. Irving also included stories of Allied fighters attacking refugees, for which there was no credible source. Irving’s great shame, and evidence of his lack of credibility, was that once the forgery was discovered, he kept quoting the false figure, even through later editions of his book.

But let’s not forget the 20 000.  Dresden was not the most severe raid of the war, but it was late in the piece with Germany on the edge of defeat, and while not a war crime, it could well be morally questionable. I suspect WWII had the greatest parity between civilian and military casualties of any war to that time, and mainland Europe took the greatest brunt of that. The line between civilian and soldier had been blurring through some years and advances in technology, and the bomber erased it completely. You should read Frederick Taylor’s Dresden: Tuesday February 13 1945 for a balanced assessment.

In any case, the argument about Bomber Command should take nothing away from the courage, skill and sacrifice of the young men in the airplanes.

Meanwhile the Dambusters raid was an astonishing feat of visionary engineering combined with courageous and superb flying, and worth revisiting. Peter Jackson is working on another big screen adaptation, with Stephen Fry writing the script. Recently it was announced that the dog belonging to Squadron Leader Guy Gibson would be called ‘Digger’. It seems a small point, but the dog died the night before the raid, and in memoriam, his name used as the codeword for a successful breach of a dam wall. So what? In reality, the dog’s name was Nigger, and this was the codeword that captured the great moment of triumph. (Yes the dog was black – Gibson had many positive qualities but racial sensitivity or a sense of irony was not among them). Fry was immediately accused of rewriting history. But again I ask, what else could they do? Even in the 1954 film, the name was dubbed ‘Trigger’ for the American release, and to use the N word, however accurately, in a 21^st century film is commercially unthinkable. And phonetically, Digger is the better substitute, the tongue being in a very similar position on the hard ridge of the palate for the /d/ phoneme as for the /n/, even if the soft palate is doing something altogether different. Perhaps instead of the Director’s Cut DVD, they could release the Historical Stickler’s Cut with the dog’s real name dubbed as necessary – and a prominent offensive language warning.

Meanwhile, surely they won't touch the music?

"A great ball player from a long time ago." Ty Cobb

In ‘Field of Dreams’, Shoeless Joe Jackson mentions all the players who want to come back to play, and includes Ty Cobb ‘but none of us could stand the son of a bitch when he was alive so we told him to stick it.’ Ty Cobb also featured in a story in a book I had as a boy about American heroes. As a young player he is told to bunt, but hits a home run instead. He is then fired for disobeying the manager’s orders.  I’ve also seen part of a film called ‘Cobb’ where Cobb is old, bald and looks a lot like Tommy Lee Jones. That was the extent of my knowledge of Ty Cobb.

I was rummaging in a rather large bargain bin called ‘Borders’ and I saw a book called Cobb for not much. Intrigued by one quote on the cover: “[Author Al] Stump has resurrected Cobb in all his terrifying malevolence,” I decided to buy it. Inasmuch as I have ever thought about it, I have a romantic view of baseball. Sure like all professional sports it’s more business than game these days but surely there was a golden, more innocent era, and perhaps Cobb’s ‘terrifying malevolence’ was relative.

Boy, was I wrong.

A lot of modern day sportsmen like to talk about the killer instinct, ruthlessness, wanting it more, compare their games to war, and so on. Cobb got there first and makes them look like – well, young men playing games. His ferocious style of play resulted in multiple leg injuries and open wounds, but he would keep playing even as they bled or grew infected. He would deliberately wound opposition players, barrelling into them if they were between him and the plate or sliding in with sharpened spikes raised and slashing – in a non-contact sport. He beat up spectators, verbally abused and threatened opposition players, and, to be fair, took as much as he handed out. Off-field he was worse, his temper exploding into violence that should have seen him in jail several times. He was also perhaps the greatest player of the game ever. In the inaugural induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame, voted for by sports writers, he gained the 222 of a possible 226 votes, or 98.23%, above other inductees such as Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson. (I judge baseball players on the basis of if I have heard of them or not.)  Yet at his funeral, only three men from professional baseball attended. It was true: great as he was, none of them could stand the son of a bitch.

Not that the rest of the baseball world was innocent. Baseball was a rough and coarse life for most of the players. In teams owned by millionaires, pay was low and conditions dire, creating opportunities for corruption, which culminated in the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. And if Cobb injured other players, abused them, psychologically destroyed them, it didn’t stop them (or the crowd, for that matter) trying to do the same to him. He just did it better, more viciously, and with more success.

He was an early champion of players rights, not only getting good pay for himself (which he did) but arguing for better pay for all players, better conditions, and more freedom of movement. And unlike many sportsmen, he was a shrewd businessman too. Among many successful investments and businesses, early shares in Coca-Cola certainly paid off, and he died a wealthy man.

His rage was astounding. We can only speculate on what drove it, in our half-arsed sub-Fruedian way. His mother killed his father in dubious circumstances in his first year of professional baseball, and was found not guilty of manslaughter. He helped her for a few years then later shut her out of his life. His teammates in his rookie year tormented the teenager from the South, less than a generation away from the Civil War, by ways and means that would appal today. He grew up in a society and an era that turned a blind eye to his overt racism. And he was a great player. It’s not only now that sportsmen get away with illegal and immoral behaviour. On the other hand, if people did say no to Cobb, he would never take that for an answer.

He is a fascinating character. A great player, an appalling man, a neglectful father and abusive husband, yet not without saving graces. To call him psychopathic is too easy, and denies him his moments of empathy. Despite his legendary meanness, he could be generous with money or advice, giving regular money to poor ex-ballplayers that he liked ie who didn’t back down from confrontation, and establishing scholarships for poor students from his home state.

And there is one story that deserves a wider audience. Shoeless Joe Jackson of course was one of the players banned for life after the Black Sox Scandal. Years later, in the middle of nowhere, Cobb was in a store and recognised the man behind the counter, who gave not a sign of recognition in return. Finally, Cobb said “Joe, it’s me Ty. Don’t you know me?” Jackson replied, “Sure I know you. But a lot of them other fellahs, they don’t want to know me.” So while that line in the movie was true, it’s a little sad they had to give to Shoeless Joe to say it.

"There, but for the grace of God, go I." Franz Stangl

I have just read the most chilling book. Once I finished it I could not stop thinking about it, to the point where I had to start reading it again. It is the story of a fairly ordinary man, who did extraordinary things. Normally this story inspires, but not this one. This man was Franz Stangl, the commandant of the death camps Treblinka and Sobibor, and co-responsible for the death of 900 000 people. This astonishing book is called Into that darkness: From mercy killing to mass murder by Gitta Sereny.

Gitta Sereny is a Austrian-born writer whose career in part has been dedicated to trying to understand the German mind of WWII. As a school child she was forced to watch one of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. After the war, she was part of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and encountered the victims of various Nazi programs, as well as attending the Nuremburg Trials. She wanted to interview someone who was part of the administration, someone with enough intelligence and self-awareness to provide some insight to their own thoughts and actions. After the war Stangl escaped to Brazil, and was finally arrested there in 1967 and deported back to Germany to stand trial. Convicted, he was sentenced to life in prison. The Chief Prosecutor who knew of Sereny’s wish, alerted her that this might be that person. Watching him Sereny thought that this might be a man with a conscience, however repressed.

Stangl is no monster. He’s actually likeable, as his guards attest. There is no rabid anti-semitism, no mad devotion to the Nazis or Hitler. Indeed, as far as can be told, he never whipped, hurt or touched one of the prisoners. He had a lonely youth, married happily, was a good father, and became a policeman. He was ambitious, and weak. He was first assigned to the Euthanasia program, checking death certificates and making sure families received the personal effects. Then he was transferred to the army and into Poland.

There is a difference between concentration camps and the death camps. Neither were a guarantee of a long life and while millions died in the concentration camps, the five death camps had no purpose except to kill the Jews. Victims arrived by the trainload and were whipped, stripped, all their goods stolen, and then they were gassed, shot or injected. Within hours of arrival, every man woman and child on a train would be dead. And Franz Stangl ran the most efficient camps in the system.

How can you do that and not become bestial? How can you live with such knowledge? The short answer seems to be to focus on his immediate task – running the camp; administration, inspections, building, all the time repressing somehow the knowledge of what it all led to. And yet he would, as part of his job, supervise the unloading of the trains, and the movement of the now naked prisoners, with their heads shaved, into the wire tunnel that led to the gas chambers. He could not bear, he said, to be in the hut where they were stripped of their clothes and other possessions and had their heads shaved. As Sereny observes, he could watch the people come off the train, and he could see the dehumanized mass walking to their death, but he could not watch the transition from people to, as he called them, cargo. And he drank – who would not?

 The book is full of such nightmare imagery as seeing piles of rotting corpses, or the ground erupting as frozen corpses in mass graves thaw and release pent up gasses. When Stangl arrived at Treblinka, he had to drive along a road littered with bodies and then actually wade through piles of money and other valuables stolen from the arrivals and not yet sorted. That was his job and his triumph, to make Trebilinka an efficient place for killing the Jews disposing of the bodies and distributing their goods. And he aided the psychological deception, beautifying Treblinka until it looked like a spa, with spruce train station and attractive landscaping. (The clock on the station tower was painted on. Who would ever have time to notice?) He was awarded an Iron Cross for his efforts.

And the book explores the system further. If you want to know how the Holocaust worked in practice, this book tells you. The Nazis had a collective genius for horror. They played off the divisions within the Jewish people, Eastern Jews and Western Jews. The whippings and other degradations were part of the system devised by people higher up the administrative scale. A cowered people, naked and anonymous, half-starved, covered in their own filth, were easier to herd to their deaths, and easier for the guards to avoid thinking of them as people. And though Stangl would say how horrible he found it all, he never took any steps to alleviate it.

And it was not just the dead who were denigrated. The work-Jews were a small group who lived in the camp and sorted out the belongings and building, sewing, goldsmithing and other skilled tasks. Their lives depended on the trains coming. Imagine that, if you can – your life dependent on thousands of others dying, thousands whose only crime was the same as yours, to be born into a particular religion. One talks about his relief when the trains resumed after a break. The work-Jews in two camps eventually rebelled, and Treblinka was burned to the ground. (So much for the myth the Jews went uncomplaining to death.) Many of the work-Jews were killed either in the outbreak or afterwards but some did escape - the only Jews to survive the death camps.

Sereny also interviews Stangl’s wife, his sister, his daughter, other camp guards and survivors, their stories often contradictory or conflicting, either from genuine lapse of memory or the tendency or need to remember things differently. This is a book of creeping horror. And all the time, Sereny is asking Stangl, could you have said no? He says not, but he also breaks down into tears often. I am not trying, nor was Sereny, to excuse Stangl. He was a large part of this monstrous crime. He was lucky to be sentenced to life and not hung. Perhaps if he had been tried in the immediate aftermath of the war, he would have been. He knew what was happening, was helping it to happen, and did nothing to change the situation, and not much to get out of it. But I cannot with confidence say I would not have been equally cowed or frightened or conditioned enough to do the same thing in the same circumstances.

Sereny also looks at the twenty years Stangl spent on the run. He was aided by Catholic Clergy through Rome to Damascus to Brazil. It’s possible they didn’t know who he was or what he had done, but it’s also possible that at least one key figure, Bishop Hudal, did.  Stangl never stopped using his real name, registered at the Austrian Embassy in Brazil with his wife and family, worked under his real name and yet it took decades before Austria issued an arrest warrant and it took Simon Wiesenthal to ‘discover’ where Stangl was. Very strange indeed.

It is only at the conclusion of his interviews with Sereny that Stangl, almost thirty years after the events, and six months after being convicted, is able to go beyond his argument that he was merely doing his job and following orders and say out loud that he was responsible for the deaths of almost a million people. Nineteen hours later, his heart, already scarred from previous heart attacks, stopped. There was no evidence of suicide. When he was able to admit to himself and to someone else what he had done, his body gave up. How can you live with this knowledge? Perhaps you cannot.