Gitta Sereny is one of the world's most respected journalists and historians. This book gathers together the best of her writing on Germany from over sixty years. It amounts to an extraordinary portrait of the country and its people, how they have come to terms with their Nazi past, both collectively and in specific instances - and how the burden of their guilt has altered the national identity. She writes about key individuals - Stangl, Speer - and the questions which their lives raise. Thepenetration and conviction of her writing throughout is startling and she constantly reminds us why it...

Albert Speer was Hitler's architect before the Second World War. Through Hitler's great trust in him and Speer's own genius for organisation he became, effectively from 1942 overlord of the entire war economy, making him the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in Spandau Prison at the Nuremberg Trails, Speer attempted to progress from moral extinction to moral self-education. How he came to terms with his own acts and failures to act and his real culpability in Nazi war crimes are the questions at the centre of this book.

In 1968, 11-year-old Mary Bell was found guilty of the manslaughter of two young boys. This study asks why one child would murder another, and provides the background to the Bell case. The author also gives her account of the case of James Bulger, now that the debate has tragically re-opened.

Franz Stangl, commandant of a Nazi extermination camp, was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter of over 900,000 people. In this biography, Sereny, after weeks of talk with him and further research, shows us Stangl as he saw himself.