Promotional Information

An excellent history of Auschwitz with an intellectual honesty that the subject badly needs

About the Author

Laurence Rees is the writer and producer of the major BBC television documentary series World War II: Behind Closed Doors, War of the Century, Horror in the East and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution'. He won the British Book Award for History Book of the Year in 2006 for his international bestseller Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution'. Rees' career as a writer and filmmaker, focusing on the Nazis and World War II, stretches back nearly 20 years. His body of work has won him several awards, including a BAFTA and a Grierson Award. He was educated at Solihull School and Oxford University and is the former Creative Director of BBC TV History programmes.

Reviews

"Thank God that occasionally books of the stature of Laurence Rees's superb Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution are published... Fascinating." -- Andrew Roberts Evening Standard "Excellent" -- Boyd Tonkin The Independent "A key to understanding man's inhumanity to man" -- Ian Thomson The Guardian "Well-written with striking testimonies from bystanders, perpetrators and victims. The interviews with SS men, and sundry European Fascists, are genuinely revealing, and must have been exceptionally difficult to negotiate" -- Michael Burleigh Daily Telegraph "Devastating. Rees's research is impeccable and intrepid. Ultimately he does at the gut level what Hannah Arendt achieved some 40 years ago at the level of philosophy: he forces the reader to shift the Holocaust out of the realm of nightmare or Gothic horror and acknowledge it as something all too human. Scrupulous and honest, this book is utterly without illusions" -- David Von Drehle Washington Post, USA