From an award-winning historian comes a fresh analysis of the rise of Nazi extremism, how such thinking gained popularity, and why it is vital to fight burgeoning extremist movements today

How could the SS have committed the crimes they did? How were the killers who shot Jews at close quarters able to perpetrate this horror? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly--and often enthusiastically--oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews?

In The Nazi Mind, bestselling historian Laurence Rees seeks answers to some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crimes in the history of the world.

From the fringe politics of the 1920s to the electoral triumph and mass mobilization of the 1930s, and from the Holocaust through to the regime's eventual demise, Rees charts the rise and fall of Nazi mentalities--including the conditions that allowed such a violent ideology to flourish and the sophisticated propaganda effort that sustained it.

Using previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system, and in-depth insights based on the latest research of psychologists, The Nazi Mind brings fresh understanding to one of the most appalling regimes in history.

This is by far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development.―Antony Beevor, bestselling author of Stalingrad

Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, he combines their never-before-seen eyewitness testimony with the latest academic research to create a uniquely accessible and authoritative account of the Holocaust.

In The Holocaust, Rees offers an examination of the decision-making process of the Nazi state, and in the process reveals the series of escalations that cumulatively created the horror. He argues that while hatred of the Jews was always at the epicenter of Nazi thinking, what happened cannot be fully understood without considering the murder of the Jews alongside plans to kill large numbers of non-Jews, including the disabled, Sinti, and Roma, plus millions of Soviet civilians.

Through a chronological, intensely readable narrative, featuring enthralling eyewitness testimony and the latest academic research, this is a compelling new account of the worst crime in history.

This scrupulous and honest (Washington Post) history of the most notorious concentration camp of the Holocaust preserves the authentic voices of survivors and perpetrators

The largest mass murder in human history took place in World War II at Auschwitz. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail-from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred.

Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Hitler and Himmler to make Auschwitz the primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews-their Final Solution. He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were the result of a terrible immoral pragmatism. The story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Laurence Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account of how two terrible dictators led their countries in the most destructive and inhumane war in history.―Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis

Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed.

Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious magnetism of their leadership.

The question is as searing as it is fundamental to the continuing debate over Japanese culpability in World War II and the period leading up to it: How could Japanese soldiers have committed such acts of violence against Allied prisoners of war and Chinese civilians? During the First World War, the Japanese fought on the side of the Allies and treated German POWs with respect and civility. In the years that followed, under Emperor Hirohito, conformity was the norm and the Japanese psyche became one of selfless devotion to country and emperor; soon Japanese soldiers were to engage in mass murder, rape, and even cannibalization of their enemies. Horror in the East examines how this drastic change came about. On the basis of never-before-published interviews with both the victimizers and the victimized, and drawing on never-before-revealed or long-ignored archival records, Rees discloses the full horror of the war in the Pacific, probing the supposed Japanese belief in their own racial superiority, analyzing a military that believed suicide to be more honorable than surrender, and providing what the Guardian calls a powerful, harrowing account of appalling inhumanity...impeccably researched.

At the age of twenty-four, in 1913, Adolf Hitler was eking out a living as a painter of pictures for tourists in Munich. Nothing marked him in any way as exceptional, but he did possess certain distinguishing characteristics: a capacity to hate, an inability to accept criticism, and a massive overconfidence in his own abilities. He was a socially and emotionally inadequate individual without direction, from whence came a sense of personal mission that would transform these weaknesses and liabilities into strengths--certainties that would provide him not only with a sense of identity, but of purpose in a communal enterprise. This is the focus of Laurence Rees's social, psychological, and historical investigation into a personality that would end up articulating the hopes and dreams of millions of Germans.

(With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations)

Sobre Hitler se ha investigado casi todo: desde sus oscuros or genes familiares hasta los ltimos d as de su vida en el b nker. No obstante, a n sigue siendo un enigma el porqu un hombre tan mediocre logr arrastrar a millones de personas a una cat strofe de tan nefastas dimensiones. Para responder este enigma, Laurence Rees revis todo el material cinematogr fico filmado en vida de Hitler, y realiz entrevistas a testigos, v ctimas o c mplices de los actos del l der. Todos estos testimonios se publican en estas p ginas que arrojan nueva luz sobre el oscuro carisma que llev al poder a uno de los personajes m s siniestros de la historia del mundo.

Esta es una obra maestra de uno de nuestros mejores historiadores.

Este libro sobre Hitler y Stalin -la culminación de treinta años de trabajo-- examina a los dos líderes durante la segunda guerra mundial, cuando Alemania y la Unión Soviética libraron la mayor y más sangrienta guerra de la historia, y nos muestra que, aunque la creación del Holocausto por parte de Hitler sigue siendo un crimen incomparable, vistos con perspectiva ambos tenían en común que estaban preparados para crear un sufrimiento inimaginable para construir las utopías que querían.

Utilizando testimonios inéditos y sorprendentes de soldados del Ejército Rojo y de la Wehrmacht, de civiles que sufrieron durante el conflicto y de personas que conocieron personalmente a ambos hombres, Laurence Rees -probablemente el historiador que ha conocido a más alemanes y rusos que trabajaron directamente para Hitler y Stalin-- pone en tela de juicio ideas erróneas que durante mucho tiempo se han mantenido sobre dos de las figuras más importantes de la historia. Esta es una obra maestra de uno de nuestros mejores historiadores.

When do you think the Second World War ended?

If the end of the war was supposed to have brought 'freedom' to countries that suffered under Nazi occupation, then for millions it did not really end until the fall of Communism. In the summer of 1945 many of the countries in Eastern Europe simply swapped the rule of one tyrant, Adolf Hitler, for that of another: Joseph Stalin. Why this happened has remained one of the most troubling questions of the entire conflict, and is at the heart of Laurence Rees' dramatic book.

In World War II: Behind Closed Doors, Rees provides an intimate 'behind the scenes' history of the West's dealings with Joseph Stalin - an account which uses material only available since the opening of archives in the East as well as new testimony from witnesses from the period. An enthralling mix of high politics and the often heart-rending personal experiences of those on the ground, it will make you rethink what you believe about World War II.

Hace sesenta años el mundo se horrorizó con el descubrimiento de la realidad de Auschwitz, el escenario de la mayor matanza de la historia humana: un millón cien mil seres humanos asesinados, incluidos más de doscientos mil niños. Pero, más allá de las imágenes y de los testimonios de las víctimas, la realidad de lo que Auschwitz fue y significó ha seguido escapando a nuestra percepción.

Laurence Rees, que lleva quince años investigando el nazismo, no sólo ha utilizado la documentación aparecida en estos últimos años, sino que se ha valido de más de un centenar de entrevistas a supervivientes del campo y a sus verdugos nazis, que por primera vez hablan de sus experiencias, ahora que no arriesgan nada por dejar testimonio de lo que han vivido. Éste es el primer relato completo de la historia de Auschwitz, que se convirtió en un inmenso taller que trabajaba para la guerra, a la vez que en una fábrica de muerte, donde se acabó arrojando a los niños vivos a las hogueras, al no dar abasto las cámaras de gas. Un lugar singular, con funcionarios corruptos, con médicos sanguinarios como Mengele y hasta con un burdel para estimular a los prisioneros muy trabajadores. Pero tal vez lo más terrible resulte saber que cerca del ochenta y cinco por 100 de los miembros de la SS que trabajaron en el campo y sobrevivieron a la guerra han quedado impunes, que ni se arrepienten ni creen necesario excusarse con la obediencia a las órdenes recibidas y que ello no parece escandalizar hoy a sus conciudadanos. Este libro pretende despertar nuestras conciencias para que entre todos impidamos que vuelva a haber otro Auschwitz.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Sixty years ago, the world was horrified by the discovery of the reality of Auschwitz, the site of the largest massacre in human history: one million one hundred thousand human beings killed, including more than two hundred thousand children. But beyond the images and the testimonies of the victims, the reality of what Auschwitz was and what it meant has continued to escape our perception.

Laurence Rees, who has been researching Nazism for fifteen years, has not only used the documentation that has appeared in recent years, but he has also relied on more than a hundred interviews with camp survivors and their Nazi executioners, who for the first time speak of their experiences, now that they risk nothing by leaving a testimony of what they have lived through. This is the first complete account of the history of Auschwitz, which became an immense workshop working for the war, as well as a death factory, where children were eventually thrown alive into the bonfires, as the gas chambers could not keep up. A unique place, with corrupt officials, bloodthirsty doctors like Mengele, and even a brothel to stimulate very hardworking prisoners. But perhaps the most terrible thing is to know that about eighty-five percent of the SS members who worked in the camp and survived the war have remained unpunished, who neither regret nor believe it necessary to excuse themselves with obedience to the orders received, and this does not seem to scandalize their fellow citizens today. This book aims to awaken our consciences so that together we can prevent another Auschwitz from happening again.

Published in conjunction with the History Channel and the BBC, this prizewinning volume, now back in print, contains previously unpublished material and photographs documenting the reality of life under Nazi rule and the evolution of the ruthless slaughter of millions of people in Germany.

In this handsome edition, BBC producer and renowned historian Laurence Rees has collected the testimonies of more than fifty eyewitnesses, many of whom were committed Nazis, free to tell their stories only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rees offers us the compelling voices of soldiers and civilians rarely heard from--including a remorseless Lithuanian soldier who shot five hundred people and then went out to lunch, and the anguished older sister of a ten-year-old developmentally disabled boy selected for immunization injection (a fatal dose of morphine) at a children's hospital. These materials cast a harsh new light on the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Laurence Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account of how two terrible dictators led their countries in the most destructive and inhumane war in history.―Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis

Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed.

Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious magnetism of their leadership.

In this revelatory chronicle of World War II, Laurence Rees documents the dramatic and secret deals that helped make the war possible and prompted some of the most crucial decisions made during the conflict.

Drawing on material available only since the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as amazing new testimony from nearly a hundred separate witnesses from the period--Rees reexamines the key choices made by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the war, and presents, in a compelling and fresh way, the reasons why the people of Poland, the Baltic states, and other European countries simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for another. Surprising, incisive, and endlessly intriguing, World War II Behind Closed Doors will change the way we think about the Second World War.