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In this compelling book, highly acclaimed author and broadcaster Laurence Rees tells the definitive history of the most notorious Nazi institution of them all. We discover how Auschwitz evolved from a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners into the site of the largest mass murder in history - part death camp, part concentration camp, where around a million Jews were killed.
Auschwitz examines the mentality and motivations of the key Nazi decision makers, and perpetrators of appalling crimes speak here for the first time abouty their actions. Fascinating and disturbing facts have been uncovered - from the operation of a brothel to the corruption that was rife throughout the camp. The book draws on intriguing new documentary material from recently opened Russian archives, which will challenge many previously accepted arguments.
This is the story of murder, brutality, courage, excape and survival, and apowerful account of how human tragedy of such immense scale could have happened.
Author ProfileLaurence Rees, writer and producer of the BBC / PBS landmark series
Auschwitz is also Creative Director of History Programmes for BBC Television and a former editor of the Emmy-winning
Timewatch, BBC TV's history documentary series. He has written five previous books, including
Nazis: A Warning from History (BBC Books 1997)
, War of the Century, about the Hitler / Stalin war (BBC Books 1999)
and
Horror in the East (BBC Books 2000), an examination of the war against Japan. He was educated at Solihull School and Oxford University.
ReviewsThank God that occasionally books of the stature of Laurence Rees's superb
Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution are published... Fascinating.,Excellent,A key to understanding man's inhumanity to man,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,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,This magnificent book is exciting and disturbing at the same time,Scrupulous and honest, this book is utterly without illusions. Rees, a distinguished journalist and historian at the BBC, layers these details with little fanfare but great craftsmanship. Reading this book is an ordeal - not through any failure of the author's but because of his success. Rees's research is impeccable and intrepid. Rees also makes good use of the records that became available only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites. spare, heartbreaking prose.
