Their Darkest Hour: People Tested to the Extreme in WWII

Laurence Rees has travelled the world meeting people who faced extreme events during World War II. This book is a compilation of short chapters about each one of these cases.

As such it is of course somewhat lacking in depth, but on most of the cases covered there are separate full volumes which have been published which the reader could access if inclined after Rees's work.

Rees's writing still is, as always, fluent and highly readable. The devastating first-hand testimony he reports is a lasting contribution to our understanding of the now increasingly distant war and a powerful insight into the behaviour, good and bad, of human beings in crisis.

Perhaps the saddest case of all is that of Alex Kurzem, the little jewish boy adopted as a mascot by the SS, and subsequently shunned by many of his own people after the war.

Background to terror (7/7 people found this helpful)

Lawrence Rees has produced two excellent books on Nazism and the Holocaust and it is interesting to read these accounts of interviews which he conducted during his researches. The people involved in these cataclysmic events are fast declining in numbers and it is important that their personal accounts are preserved and published.

What is good about this book is the very wide range of categories of people interviewed, from resistance fighters, to concentration camp workers, from Americans fighting the Japanese, to Russians surviving service in penal batallions.

The book is easy to read as most of the chapters are very short. Lawrence Rees write a certain amount of connecting passages, and sometimes these seem a little trite, containing homilies about mans inhumanity to man etc, but on the whole he adds interesting background material.

In one sense this book gives its readers access to the historian's source material, and it is interesting from this perspective. I suspect on the whole it it better to read the final product of his researches in the other two books but this is an interesting book for those who have read those and want more, or for those who are not used to reading history and need a less demanding way in.

Rees at his best (7/7 people found this helpful)

I have been a fan of Rees' work for some time, and I picked up this book with a great deal of anticipation. It is immediately obvious that this book has allowed Rees for the first time to talk about his personal insights into the people who commited terrible acts in the war. This new dimension really fascinated me, and I hope Rees contines to evolve his writing style.

Disappointing (8/17 people found this helpful)

This book is disappointing. It is a ragbag of stories without any real thread to them. It feels like a work that has been prepared in a rush to capitalise on the author's recent success. It is typified by being padded out by photographs (from previous works) and a timeline. If you have readh his previous works, I would steer clear.

Their Darkest Hour: People Tested to the Extreme in WWII

Laurence Rees

Reader Reviews:

terribly sad, but so readable (0/0 people found this helpful)

Background to terror (7/7 people found this helpful)

Rees at his best (7/7 people found this helpful)

Disappointing (8/17 people found this helpful)

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