This is the accompanying book to the BAFTA-wining BBC television series. It exposes the popular myths surrounding the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
In this book, Laurence Rees takes a fresh look at how the Nazis came to power, how they ruled and Hitler's role within the party. It describes the horrors perpetrated on the Eastern Front, including the occupation and division of Poland, the growth of anti-semitism to its culmination in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz, and the final months of the war when the Nazis came to reap the consequences of the suffering they had sown. It challenges the popularly accepted perception of Nazi power which focuses on Hitler as the source of the regime's evil. Above all, it considers how a cultured nation such as Germany could be responsible for such acts of inhumanity.
Included here are the testimonies of more than 50 eye-witnesses, many of whom were committed Nazis and are only now free to tell their story as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. Their experiences confirm that there was massive collaboration with the Nazi regime, both at home and on the war fronts, and that the terrible atrocities in the east were the work not just of elite killing squads but also of ordinary German soldiers and of local civilian populations. The thought-provoking conclusions in Laurence Rees's history of the Nazis may not be what we would like to believe.
