Word: gitta
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...mental cases (turnips, potatoes, a blessing, really, you understand, that they should be put out of their misery). What a slope was there. Stangl ended up as the kommandant of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp, presiding over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and others. Gitta Sereny wrote a book about Stangl called "Into that Darkness," one of the most important moral lessons of the twentieth century...
...rambling psychobiography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (Knopf; 757 pages; $35), Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny examines her subject's troubled life and problematic writings in microscopic detail. Sereny extensively interviewed Speer and his wife Margret at their retirement home in Heidelberg and talked with dozens of acquaintances. Her conclusion: emotionally crippled by an unhappy childhood, Speer was a frustrated romantic whose reciprocated love for Hitler--a sublimated, nonsexual but homoerotic devotion--blinded him to dark realities he chose not to see or hear. In effect, Speer existed in what the Dutch Protestant theologian Willem Visser 't Hooft...
...some degree, the revelations in West Germany complemented the stories provided by new witnesses in Brazil. In her attractive white house in the affluent hillside community of Petropolis Park, outside Sao Paulo, a nervous Gitta Stammer, who had earlier come forward to support and supplement the Bossert account, told her story to TIME's Jacqueline Reditt. Her face pale and worried, her hands trembling, the slight, 65-year-old Hungarian-born woman described how she and her family had kept a longtime lodger's secret for 22 anxious years...
...that point, the Stammers asked Gerhard to find another home for his friend. He promised to do so, but nothing happened. Weeks turned into months, months into years. Pedro stayed. Why did the Stammers not report their guest to the police? Because, said Gitta, Gerhard told them their lives would be in danger if they talked. Even after Gerhard had left Brazil, and died in Austria in 1978, said Stammer, she feared retribution from his "friends" if ever she went to the authorities. Throughout, Pedro never once threatened her family; he even went so far as to chide Gerhard...
...twelve, Gerhard had become a member of the Hitler Youth and later boasted of being a committed Nazi. Nonetheless, in the Austrian town of Graz last week, Gerhard's 26-year- old son Adolf firmly rejected the stories told of his father by the Bosserts and Gitta Stammer. "It's easy to put the blame on my dead father," he said. In fact, he continued, he himself knew nothing of Dr. Mengele, and could not "even remember a single unmarried man who would have visited our parents while we were in Brazil...