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  • Published: 30 July 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473532526
  • Imprint: BBC Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: John Sackville
  • RRP: $32.99

Auschwitz




The definitive history of Auschwitz

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 about 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, escape and survival, and a powerful account of how human tragedy of such immense scale could have happened.

© Laurence Rees 2005 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

  • Published: 30 July 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473532526
  • Imprint: BBC Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: John Sackville
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Laurence Rees

Laurence Rees has won the British Book Award for History Book of the Year 2006 for his international bestseller Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution'. His career as a writer and filmmaker, focusing on the Nazis and World War II, stretches back nearly 20 years and includes the acclaimed television series Nazis: A Warning from History, War of the Century, Horror in the East and, most recently, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution'. The body of work has won him a myriad of awards including a BAFTA. a Grierson Award and an international Documentary Award. He was educated at Solihull School and Oxford University and is Creative Director of BBC TV History programmes.

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Praise for Auschwitz

A key to understanding man's inhumanity to man

Ian Thomson, The Guardian

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

Excellent

Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Ibelieve that Rees's book will be included in the canon of fundamental works shaping our knowledge about the Holocaust.

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, former Polish Foreign Minister and one-time inmate of Auschwitz

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.

Washington Post

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

This magnificent book is exciting and disturbing at the same time

Rafael Nuez Florencio, El Mundo, Spain

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