Gitta Sereny (born 13 March 1921) is an Austrian-born British biographer, historian and journalist whose writing focuses mainly on the Holocaust and child abuse. She is the stepdaughter of the economist Ludwig von Mises.
Sereny was born in Vienna, Austria in 1921. Her father was a Hungarian Protestant, Ferdinand Serény, and her mother was a former actress from Hamburg, Margit Herzfeld, of Jewish origin.
When she was thirteen, her train journey to a boarding school in the United Kingdom was delayed in Nuremberg where she attended one of the annual Nuremberg rallies. After writing about the rally for a class assignment she was given Mein Kampf to read by her teacher so she might be able to understand what she saw there. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, she moved to France where she worked with refugee children during the German occupation until she was warned of her imminent arrest. She then fled to the United States.
After World War II, she worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration with refugees in Allied-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, but she also accompanied a trainload of such children back to Poland and saw the delight of the original family members at the restoration of the children.
She attended the Nuremberg Trials for four days in 1945 as an observer and it was here that she first saw Albert Speer about whom she would later write the book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. It was for this book that she was awarded the 1995 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
The Case of Mary Bell was first published in 1972 following Mary Bell's trial; in it Sereny interviewed her family, friends and the professionals involved in looking after Mary during her trial.
In 1998, she was embroiled in a controversy in the British press when her second book on Mary Bell, Cries Unheard [1] was published and she announced that she was sharing the publishing fee, from MacMillan Publishers, with Mary Bell for collaborating on the book. Sereny was initially criticized in the British press and by the British government, though the book quickly became, and remains, a standard text for professionals working with problem children.
British historian and convicted Holocaust denier David Irving initiated a libel case against Sereny and the Guardian Media Group for two reviews in The Observer where she asserted he deliberately falsified the historical record in an attempt to rehabilitate the Nazis. Irving maintains a personal animosity for Sereny, whom he calls "that shriveled Nazi hunter", for successfully refuting his claims since the publication of his book Hitler's War. When, in 1977, Sereny cross-checked the source he cited for his assertion that Hitler knew nothing about the Final Solution, and therefore could not have ordered it, she found he had excised a caveat which would have contradicted his claim. "I know many of the same people as he does who were of Hitler's circle," Sereny said. "That is scary for him. He says we jostle at the same trough. The difference is that he loves that trough, and I don't... There is, I think, [for him] despair in all of this." Although the case has not gone to court, the cost to The Observer for preparing their legal defense amounts to £800,000.
In the 2004 New Years Honours List, Sereny was awarded a CBE for services to Journalism, which she received at a special ceremony at the Foreign Office.
