Their Darkest Hour

A remarkably powerful collection * Daily Telegraph *
Powerful and unsettling * Sunday Times *
A lasting contribution to our understanding of the Second World War and a powerful insight into the behaviour of human beings in crisis * Independent *
Fascinating but disturbing * Daily Mail *
Chilling collection of eye-witness testimonies ... bringing nuance to our understanding of the horrific experience of war * Financial Times *
Enthralling and often chilling * Wales on Sunday *
An incredible, well-written, must-read book * Glasgow Evening Times *
Laurence Rees has done more for good history on television in this country than anyone else. Over several series, he has examined the most terrible aspects of the Second World War with a passionate longing to understand, while rejecting facile moral judgment ...Their Darkest Hour comes from a selection of his interviews with both perpetrators and victims ...The cumulative effects of Rees's observations, to say nothing of the stories themselves, become deeply disturbing * Daily Telegraph *
Rees has made an important contribution to our understanding of the Second World War. His great urge to comprehend the mentalities of those who took part in the conflict is fired by a passionate curiosity, and his wide body of work is distinguished by a fierce intellectual honesty
Rees is one of the few people - perhaps the only one - who has met and interviewed at length not only hundreds of people who suffered from the barbarities of World War Two right across the globe but also, crucially, many of the perpetrators ... All this has given Rees a comparative, cross-cultural perspective on the horrors of the war that no academic could match