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

Excellent

Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

A key to understanding man's inhumanity to man

Ian Thomson, The Guardian

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

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

This magnificent book is exciting and disturbing at the same time

Rafael Nuez Florencio, El Mundo, Spain

I believe 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