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Their Darkest Hour
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  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448116287
  • Imprint: Ebury Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

Their Darkest Hour

People Tested to the Extreme in WWII

Formats & editions
EBook
31 Oct 2011
Audiobook
30 July 2020
Paperback
27 Apr 2022
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A collection of chilling first-hand accounts that dive under the skin and psyche of people in World War II, from bestselling and award-winning author Laurence Rees - part of a reissue series celebrating his classic works

How could Nazi killers shoot Jewish women and children at close range? Why did Japanese soldiers rape and murder on such a horrendous scale? How was it possible to endure the torment of a Nazi death camp?

Award-winning documentary maker and historian Laurence Rees has spent decades wrestling with such questions in the course of filming hundreds of interviews with people tested to the extreme during World War II. He has come face-to-face with rapists, mass murderers, even cannibals, but he has also met courageous individuals who are an inspiration to us all.

In Their Darkest Hour he presents 35 of his most electrifying encounters.

'A remarkably powerful collection' Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph

'An incredible, well-written, must-read book' Glasgow Evening Times

'A lasting contribution to our understanding of the Second World War and a powerful insight into the behaviour of human beings in crisis' Independent
  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448116287
  • Imprint: Ebury Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

About the author

Laurence Rees

Laurence Rees is the author of The Holocaust: A New History, a Sunday Times bestseller that was described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the finest single volume on the Holocaust ever written’, by the Times as an ‘exemplary account of how the greatest crime in modern history came about’ and by the Mail on Sunday as ‘groundbreaking.’


A former Head of BBC TV History programmes, he has written nine books focusing on the Nazis and the Second World War. Many of them, including The Nazis: A Warning from History, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, World War II: Behind Closed Doors and The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, were also documentary TV series, which he wrote and produced.


Educated at Oxford University, for several years he was a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield and the Open University.


His many awards include a British Book award, a BAFTA, a George Foster Peabody award, a Broadcasting Press Guild award, a Grierson award, a Broadcast award, two International Documentary awards and two Emmys.

LR

Also by Laurence Rees

The Nazi Mind
Hitler and Stalin
The Holocaust
The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler
Selling Politics
World War Two: Behind Closed Doors
The Nazis
See all

Praise for Their Darkest Hour

Rees has made an important contribution to our understanding of the Second World War. His great urge to comprehend the mentalities of those who took part in the conflict is fired by a passionate curiosity, and his wide body of work is distinguished by a fierce intellectual honesty

Antony Beevor, author of STALINGRAD

Rees is one of the few people - perhaps the only one - who has met and interviewed at length not only hundreds of people who suffered from the barbarities of World War Two right across the globe but also, crucially, many of the perpetrators ... All this has given Rees a comparative, cross-cultural perspective on the horrors of the war that no academic could match

Daniel Snowman, author of HISTORIANS and THE HITLER EMIGRES

Laurence Rees has devoted much of his life to trying to understand how the atrocities of the Second World War were possible. Nobody else has penetrated as far into the motivation and psyche of such a varied group of people from the war. We should be grateful to him for his work - and we should all read this book

Andrew Roberts, author of A HISTORY OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES SINCE 1900

Fascinating but disturbing

Daily Mail

Powerful and unsettling

Sunday Times

Laurence Rees has done more for good history on television in this country than anyone else. Over several series, he has examined the most terrible aspects of the Second World War with a passionate longing to understand, while rejecting facile moral judgment ...Their Darkest Hour comes from a selection of his interviews with both perpetrators and victims ...The cumulative effects of Rees's observations, to say nothing of the stories themselves, become deeply disturbing

Anthony Beevor, Daily Telegraph

Chilling collection of eye-witness testimonies ... bringing nuance to our understanding of the horrific experience of war

Financial Times

Enthralling and often chilling

Wales on Sunday

A remarkably powerful collection

Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph

An incredible, well-written, must-read book

Glasgow Evening Times

A lasting contribution to our understanding of the Second World War and a powerful insight into the behaviour of human beings in crisis

Independent

A horrifying, spellbinding work

BBC History magazine

The absence of high-profile participants and broad range of source material gives this emotive, elegantly written work an indelible authenticity that will be difficult to erase.

Glasgow Herald
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