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Interview with Laurence Rees

By Gene Santoro | World War II| World War II Conversations  | 0 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

What does all this add up to?
The complexity of the truth. There’s no moral certainty here. I don’t think Churchill and Roosevelt were bad people. My God, I would have collapsed in 20 seconds under any of the pressures they faced! Moreover, what could they have done? Try to take Poland at a loss of two or three million men? But what’s important is this: World War II is becoming a mythic story of good vs. evil. Of course we should remember D-Day and liberating Auschwitz and all the glorious things. But we mustn’t understand it just in those terms. We mustn’t cherry-pick history for what makes us feel morally superior.

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World War II Behind Closed Doors airs on PBS on May 6, May 13, and May 20 at 9 p.m. Rees’s book of the same name was published by Pantheon in April 2009.

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