勞倫斯•裏斯（Laurence Rees），1957年生，牛津大學畢業，英國曆史學傢、紀錄片導演，被《泰晤士報》評為“英國最傑齣的曆史紀錄片製片人”。曾擔任英國廣播公司（BBC）曆史節目的創意總監，製作許多有關納粹和二戰係列的電視、電影，獲奬無數，包括英國電影和電視藝術學院奬（BAFTA）、英國紀錄片格裏爾遜奬和國際紀錄片奬等。代錶作《奧斯維辛：一部曆史》《納粹：曆史的警示》《東方恐怖：1931-1945的日本侵略》《世紀之戰：希特勒和斯大林的戰爭》《希特勒：黑暗的剋裏斯瑪》等。

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail—from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred.

Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews—their "Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a "practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz