Laurence Rees Audiobooks

The Holocaust and The Nazi Mind, weighty listening from a BAFTA-winning documentary maker

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Who is Laurence Rees?

Laurence Rees, born in 1957, is an English historian with a double authority few can match: he is both a BAFTA-winning maker of historical documentaries and a British Book Award-winning author. Formerly Head of BBC TV History Programmes, he has devoted his career to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the atrocities they committed in the twentieth century.

That combination of screen and page matters. The history of Nazism attracts more than its share of sensationalism, and Rees’s reputation rests on the opposite approach: patient, scrupulous work that explains without ever excusing, and is made for a broad audience without being thinned out for one.

Laurence Rees in audiobooks

We carry The Holocaust and The Nazi Mind, two works from the subject Rees has spent his career examining. Be in no doubt: this is weighty listening, and it asks something of you. But few subjects reward serious treatment more, and Rees’s documentary background shows in how the history is built – structured for a general audience, never talking down to it, never reaching for cheap effect. For UK listeners who want to understand the darkest chapter of the twentieth century through a historian of standing rather than through sensation, these are the right books, and audio’s slower pace suits their gravity.