Subtitled “An Examination of Conscience,” Gitta Sereny’s under-read (by which I mean it should be required reading for every human being) masterpiece, Into That Darkness, is a book-length interview with Stangl. It’s the product of the seventy hours that Sereny spent in conversation with the ex-commandant, after he was arrested in Brazil (where he had fled with the help of the Catholic Church), tried for his crimes, and incarcerated in the Düsseldorf prison.
 But Kurtzman’s other work for EC Comics in the 1950s was, in its own way, just as radical. The war comics that he edited, wrote, designed, and occasionally drew before creating Mad were unlike anything else in American entertainment. Where Hollywood movies and other pulp fictions, including comic books, served up conventionally heroic narratives leavened with heavy doses of jingoism, Kurtzman, in his own words, “pursued moral truths.” He explains in a 1981 interview:
| I was absolutely appalled by the lies in the war books that [comic book] publishers were putting out. What they did when they produced a war book is they focused on what they thought the reader would like to read, which was, “Americans are good guys and anybody against us is the bad guys. We’re human. They’re not. And God is always on our side.” This trash had nothing to do with the reality of life. |
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