Gitta Sereny
Gitta Sereny (born
March 13 1921) is a Hungarian-born British
biographer,
historian and journalist. She is a
stepdaughter of the
economist Ludwig von Mises.
Born a
Hungarian in
Vienna,
Austria in
1921, Sereny read
Hitler's
Mein Kampf at the age of 13 and heard him address a rally in
Vienna four years later. After the Nazi takeover of Austria she moved to
France were she worked with refugee children until the German occupation when she fled to the
United Kingdom. After
World War II she worked for the
UN with refugees in occupied Germany. Among her tasks was reuniting children who had been kidnapped by the Nazis to be raised as "Aryans" with their biological families. This could be a traumatic experience because the children did not always remember their original family.
She was briefly an observer at the
Nuremberg trials, which she attended for four days in
1945. It was here that she first observed
Albert Speer about whom she would later write the book
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth.
When
The Case of Mary Bell was first released Sereny was criticized in the British press and by the British government because she had paid the murderer
Mary Bell to cooperate in writing the book. In 1998 she was again embroiled in a new controversy in the press when it was learned that she was writing her second book on Mary Bell,
Cries Unheard [
1].
Educated in
England and
France in addition to her Austrian schooling, her writings include:
*
The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered (
1972, second edition
1995)
*
Into That Darkness: from Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, a study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka (
1974, second edition
1995)
*
The Invisible Children: Child Prostitution in America, West Germany and Great Britain (
1984)
*
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (
1995)
*
Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell (
1998)
*
The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections, 1938-2001 (
2002)
The second edition of
The Case of Mary Bell contains an appendix on the murder of
James Bulger.
*
BBC biography*
Spike Magazine Interview
