The Nazis A warning from history

Rees produced the BBC series being televised on the History Channel in spring 1998 with which this heavily pictorial work is associated and, with a historian's guidance, wrote this text, which summarizes the oft-told strange and frightening history of the National Socialist German Workers' Party and its leader. The author's innovation in this project is his interviews with about 50 septuagenarian and octogenarian acolytes and victims of Hitler who have not testified on-screen before. Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans, they were, presumably, previously beyond the reach of documentary filmmakers because of the iron curtain. Getting their guard down, Rees manages to elicit some shockingly honest admissions from ex-Nazis, SS killers, and even an ordinary informant for the Gestapo--"ordinary" because the Nazis, research more and more proves, expected and got willing cooperation from German citizens. Such recollections Rees inserts into the appropriate chronological place of the gathering war and genocide, lending tragic personal details to the course in Nazism 101 that his project represents. Appropriate for any size or type of library. --Gilbert Taylor

Rees, head of the BBC's history programming division, has drawn on newly available archival material and about 50 interviews he conducted with "eyewitnesses" to present a chilling crash course on the Nazis' chaotic rule. According to the author, despite the Germans' much-vaunted reputation for efficiency, Hitler's regime was largely an improvisation, with his underlings ever striving to do the Führer's bidding. Rees traces how measures affecting countless lives, e.g., establishing ghettos for Jews, were often decided haphazardly, with Hitler instructing subordinates, who were frequently bitter rivals, to "sit down together and when you've made up [your minds about a policy], come and see me." Though most Gestapo files were destroyed before war's end, one revealing discovery from intact archives in the town of Würzburg indicates that the secret police‘far from randomly unleashing terror‘spent much of its time responding to denunciations by ordinary citizens against their neighbors. An interesting focus of this book is on perpetrators of Nazi crimes. Fritz Arlt, a ranking German official in occupied Poland, when asked whether he knew what went on in the concentration camps to which his orders consigned thousands of Poles, conceded only, "They were places where people were concentrated." The inhuman face of the Nazi enterprise is exposed here as a significantly grass-roots construction. Throughout, graphic photos highlight Nazi crimes. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved