Get the Ricochet app

Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Become a member.

Tired of the toxicity of social media? Why not join Ricochet for just $5/month? Think of it as an online bar. Come in, have a drink, hang out, say whatever you want. But don’t badger, bully, or berate the other drinkers. That's our only rule.

Award-Winning UK Author and Filmmaker Laurence Rees on the Holocaust, Auschwitz, and Remembrance

Subscribe to The Learning CurveSubscribe

This week The Learning Curve podcast marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day with guest host Dr. Jay Greene of the Heritage Foundation and Laurence Rees, a former head of BBC TV History Programmes; founder, writer, and producer of the award-winning WW2History.com; and author of The Holocaust: A New History. Mr. Rees sheds light on the historical context of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, including the rise of the cultural and political conditions that led to the Holocaust. Rees discusses how the Nazis promulgated their anti-Semitic ideology and laws, and underscores the criminal realities of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp, as well as the Holocaust’s six million Jewish victims. Rees also talks about the fragility of both human life and political and cultural institutions. Mr. Rees closes the interview with a reading from his book on the Holocaust.

Guest:

Laurence Rees is a former Head of BBC TV History Programmes, and the founder, writer, and producer of the award-winning online resource, WW2History.com. He left the BBC in 2008 and was appointed a Visiting Senior Fellow in the International History Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, London University. For the last thirty years he has written books and made television documentaries about both the Second World War and the Third Reich. His work includes the BBC television series and books: Nazis: a Warning from History (1997); Auschwitz, the Nazis, and the 'Final Solution' (2005), winner of the British Book Award for history book of the; a 90-minute feature length documentary, Touched by Auschwitz; The Holocaust: A New History (2017), and Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War (2021). His many television awards include a BAFTA, two International Documentary Awards, and two Emmys. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Sheffield in 2005, and the Open University in 2011. Rees was educated at Solihull School and Oxford University.

Hosts:
Cara CandalGerard Robinson
Guest:
LRLaurence Rees