Gitta Sereny er død og med henne har verden mistet en av sine største journalister. Den som har lest hennes 800 siders biografi av Albert Speer vil ikke glemme henne. Hun var et resultat av sentraleuropeisk kultur og dannelse. For å si det med et sitat fra filmen Sunset Boulevard: They don’t make them like that anymore.

Gitta Sereny was in fact born on March 13 1921 in Vienna into a family of Anglophile, Protestant Hungarian landowners. Her father died when she was two and it appears that young Gitta had a difficult relationship with her actress mother. When seated in Anthony Clare’s Psychiatrist’s Chair on BBC Radio she alluded to a relationship which was possibly even abusive.

Owing to her father’s love of the English, she attended during her early youth Stonar House, a boarding-school in Kent. It was there, extraordinarily, that she read Mein Kampf. In 1934, when travelling home to Vienna, her train broke down in Nuremberg and at the age of only 13, courtesy of the German Red Cross, she found herself taken to see the Nazi Party Congress.

She was swept away by its pageantry: “One moment I was enraptured, glued to my seat; the next, I was standing up, shouting with joy along with thousands of others.” When she returned to school, she described the scene in an essay entitled “The happiest day of my holiday”.

Four years later, she was studying at the Max Reinhardt Drama School in Vienna when the Nazis arrived. She heard Hitler speak and joined “the mindless chorus” that welcomed him. The euphoria apparently died the following day when she noticed “a band of men in brown uniforms, wearing swastika armbands” surrounded by a laughing crowd.

As she drew near she saw, in the middle of the crowd, a dozen middle-aged men and women on their knees, scrubbing the pavement with toothbrushes. One of them she recognised as the Jewish paediatrician who had saved her life when she was four and had diphtheria.

Although apparently only 17, Gitta Sereny remonstrated with the brownshirts accusing them of humiliating a great physician. It seems that her protest succeeded, for within minutes the crowd had dispersed. In the longer term it did little good. The paediatrician was gassed at Sobibor in 1943.

Gitta Sereny left Austria for Switzerland in May 1938 and was sent to a finishing school near Lausanne. She did not like it and ran away to London, where she sought a place at the Old Vic Theatre School and auditioned for Alexander Korda in an effort to get into films. Neither attempt worked.

When war broke out, she was in France where, after the German invasion, she worked for a year and a half as a volunteer nurse, looking after refugee children, hiding “a couple of shot-down British airmen” and treating the Germans with contempt.

One night a German officer warned her that she was about to be arrested. She fled across the Pyrenees, outwitting the guards who intercepted her by convincing them that she was only popping across the border for a week to visit her boyfriend.

At the end of the war, she went at once to Germany as a child welfare officer working for the United Nations: her first assignment was the care of child prisoners from Dachau. Back in Paris, she met and fell in love with Donald Honeyman, an American photographer with Vogue magazine. They married in 1948 and, after stints in New York and Paris, she moved with him in 1958 to London.

By then she was already working as a writer. A novel, The Medallion, was published in 1957 and she freelanced for papers and magazines, acquiring a reputation for persistence in pursuit of a good story; Magnus Linklater, who worked with her on The Sunday Times, described her as “one of the most remarkable journalists I know”.

Her great strength was her ability to get people to tell her things that they would tell no one else — something she achieved by a combination of sheer doggedness and a knack of making people feel she was genuinely interested in what made them tick.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, working for The Daily Telegraph magazine, she spent several months attending trials of Nazi concentration camp personnel held in Hamburg and Düsseldorf, and found herself instinctively looking for someone from among the accused who might be able to help her towards an understanding of how individuals could be brought to commit such terrible acts. Her choice fell on Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, whose story became her book Into That Darkness (1974).

The book won acclaim for the light it threw on the bureaucratic, careerist character of a minor player in the Nazi machine, but Stangl himself was the one subject who quickly exhausted Gitta Sereny’s considerable reserves of sympathy. Not only did she find him physically repellent, despite herself she seemed to sense a malignity about him which she could not entirely rationalise. She became ill and began hearing the voices of crying children when travelling by train.

Given what he told her during punishing weeks of interview, this is hardly surprising. Of the 900,000 people for whose deaths he had been held personally responsible, Stangl remarked: “It is all a matter of accommodating oneself to one’s situation.” While he regarded his human victims as “cargo”, he had been shocked into giving up tinned meat after seeing cattle herded into slaughterhouse pens in Brazil.

Yet Gitta Sereny insisted that Stangl was “not an obviously evil man” and when he died 19 hours after her last interview with him, she ascribed his death to her success in making him face up to the truth.

She adopted a different approach to Albert Speer, the subject of Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995). In 1945 she had briefly attended the Nuremberg war crime trials where she caught her first glimpse of Hitler’s architect and all-powerful armaments minister in the dock, though it was Speer who first contacted Sereny in 1977, to praise an article in which she had disproved claims made by the historian David Irving that Hitler did not order genocide.

Encouraged by this overture, she befriended Speer and his wife and, although it had been Speer who, more than anyone, assisted Hitler, she confessed to liking the former Nazi notwithstanding his delusions of innocence.

Despite suggestions that the handsome Speer had charmed her out of her customary objectivity, her book was only superficially sympathetic. Importantly it proved for the first time that Speer had known about the plan to exterminate the Jews as early as 1943 but went along with it because of his love for Hitler, an admission she only secured after weeks of dogged questioning.

Gitta Sereny
Gitta Sereny, the author who has died aged 91, 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.