Authoritative but accessible narrative on historical low

Rees spent many years meeting both survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and its apogee, the Holocaust.

The Holocaust AUTHOR: Laurence Rees PUBLISHER: Viking, Penguin RRP: $35 REVIEWER: Mary Ann Elliott

LAURENCE Rees is a former head of BBC TV History programs and has written, directed and produced several award-winning series on the Second World War.

Many of these are still often shown as television repeats.

Featuring 25 years’ worth of unpublished eyewitness testimonies, this authoritative but accessible narrative answers fundamental questions – how and why did the Holocaust happen?

Rees spent many years meeting both survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and its apogee, the Holocaust.

In this intensely readable account, Rees argues that while anti-Semitism was always the crux of Nazi thinking and propaganda, there were Nazi plans to kill millions of others as well, all in the name of Aryan and world domination.

Tragically, a series of gradual escalations cumulatively created the Holocaust.

From the origins of hate to the birth of the Nazis, consolidating their power in the early 1930s, the dreaded Nuremberg Laws, racial persecution and brutality, the extermination camps and murder to the very end, Rees charts the history of a bitter, angry man looking for someone to blame for Germany’s ills.

In a letter written in 1919, Hitler had identified “the Jew” (for thousands of years, a victim of prejudice), as the adversary responsible not only for his own personal predicament but for the whole German nation.

The rest as they say, is history; one of singular horror in the annals of the human race.

Professor Rees’ commitment to historical truth via painstaking research, interviews, personal testimonies, documents and diaries is matched by his concern that it is important, harrowing as it is, to understand how and why this crime happened.

In his words, “History tells us perhaps more than any other, just what our species can do”.

Rees has created a compelling story of history’s lowest point.