Laurence Rees is a former Head of BBC TV History Programmes.

For the last twenty-five years he written books and made documentaries about the Second World War and the Third Reich. His work includes 'Nazis: a Warning from History' (1997); 'War of the Century' (1999); 'Horror in the East' (2001); 'Auschwitz, the Nazis and the 'Final Solution'' (2005); 'World War Two: Behind Closed Doors' (2008) and 'The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (2012)'. His ninety-minute feature length documentary, 'Touched by Auschwitz', transmitted on BBC2 in 2015.

His latest book, 'the Holocaust: A New History', was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and described as "the finest single volume account of the Holocaust" by The Daily Telegraph.