From a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, Auschwitz became the site of the largest massacre in history. Having found witnesses to those events and studied documentary material from recently opened archives, Lawrence Rees refutes a number of misconceptions regarding Auschwitz and the Holocaust, and gives a comprehensive picture of what happened in the camp complex, where more than a million people were brutally exterminated. A story of unimaginable cruelty, a story of courage, survival and salvation, an unbiased analysis of the many factors that combined to lead to a tragedy of such monstrous proportions occurring in the heart of Europe.