Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny was born on March 13, 1921 in Vienna, Austria.

Sereny had Jewish heritage and was the daughter of a Hungarian father and a German mother. Her father died in 1923. She was raised by her mother, an actress. She studied in England and then in Vienna, Austria, at the drama school founded by Max Reinhardt. In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, she was physically removed from the drama school by fellow students wearing swastika armbands. Sereny had to leave for France, where she became a volunteer nurse for displaced children from German occupation. She later immigrated to the USA. When Sereny returned to Europe after the war in 1945, she claimed to be a Catholic. Later, she continued to publicly deny her Jewish heritage, probably because of security reasons and out of fear of prejudice.

She married her husband, Donald Honeymoon (a Vogue photographer) in 1948. She is survived by their daughter, Mandy Honeymoon; a son, Chris Honeymoon; two grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

She exposed Martin Gray's bestselling autobiography "For Those I Loved" (first published in 1972) as a forgery. In her 1979 article "The Men Who Whitewash Hitler", she wrote that Gray confirmed to her in an interview, that he never was in the Treblinka extermination camp and never escaped from there. Other parts of his autobiographical writings are fictions, too.

Some critics of her book "Into That Darkness", about Nazi commander Franz Stangl (first published in 1974), accused Sereny of being more sympathetic to the villain than to his victims - a criticism that would return years later with her depiction of Mary Bell. Murderers, she argued, were the products of their environment and therefore not totally responsible for their crimes. Like Mary Bell, Stangl had lacked the 'freedom to grow: within family, within human society as a whole.' This obsession with the denial of personal responsibility reached a climax in her biography - critics would say hagiography - of Hitler's favourite architect Albert Speer. It even led to accusations that she was a Nazi sympathiser, because her analytical approach was too naive and lacked scrutiny, accepting some of Speer's lies and justifications as historical facts and helping to whitewash his image.

She is known for her work on Channel 4 News (1982), History (2000) and Reputations (1994). She was married to Don Honeyman.