Laurence Rees

The recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s History Makers International Summit, Laurence Rees has had a storied career as an author and documentary filmmaker that spans more than two decades…and there’s still much more to come. "My wife said when I got the award, ‘Doesn’t it technically mean that you’re dead?’" he quips. "I was a bit knocked out by it to tell you the truth. I feel like I’ve hardly started. We’re just at the end of the beginning."

Having joined the BBC as a researcher straight out of university, Rees spent all his working life at the British pubcaster until just a short while ago. "I loved history and I did history as part of my degree at Oxford," he explains of getting his start in the business. "I never wanted to be an academic though, I always wanted to work in television. I always wanted to make television documentaries. When I joined the BBC, as soon as I could I started specializing in history documentaries. From there, as a result of that, I managed to get the editorship at Timewatch in 1992. I did that, but I was also lucky because I was able to carry on with my own programs alongside both Timewatch and executive producing other history series. I managed to do a portfolio of stuff really, as well as writing the books. I was very fortunate that I was able to carry on physically making programs and writing books as well as overseeing other people."

Formerly the creative director of history programs for the BBC, Rees is perhaps best known for the BAFTA- and Banff World Television Festival Award-winning Nazis: A Warning from History and Auschwitz: The Nazis and The Final Solution, which won the History Book of the Year Award in 2006. In fact, he has written seven history books thus far, including Selling Politics, a theory of communication based on the work of Josef Goebbels, and Their Darkest Hour, a critically acclaimed collection of essays about people tested to the extreme in WWII. His latest book, published in 2008 by BBC Books, is World War II: Behind Closed Doors—Stalin, the Nazis and the West.

Rees recently signed a book deal with Random House for 2011 and 2013, which has taken him out of his duties for the BBC and onto a new chapter in his life. "In a way, the lifetime achievement award was right," he says. "In a sense that it’s the BBC lifetime that’s for sure over for me."

Rees is now in the works on a new web venture, taking his knowledge and enthusiasm for history and housing it in a multimedia environment. "I’ve done TV and books up to now, but it’s really exciting that there’s a new thing to learn: the web." Though he remains mum on the details, he did shed a bit of light on what his new project will entail. "If you look at it on the basis that as an individual program-maker I specialized in WWII for 20 years, it wouldn’t take Einstein to work out what the multimedia site might be about. It’s not going to be about the Mayans."

But where does his fascination with WWII and Nazi subject matter stem from? "You’d need a psychiatrist to explain that," he jokes. "I think it’s because my parents were in the war and it was the only way growing up that I could understand the world I lived in, this divided Germany, why these Americans were in Europe still, why there was a Cold War, everything. The only way you could make sense of life back then, in the ’60s and ’70s, was because of the war. And also, what I’m really interested in is people and human reaction to things. How people behave in situations of extreme stress. If you’re interested in that psychological aspect of life, the Second World War is a fantastic laboratory to examine."

As he closes a chapter that he’s been writing for many years now, Rees is both reflective and gracious in looking at the opportunities he’s been given. "I’m so unbelievably grateful to the BBC. I feel like I should have paid them really! The opportunities and the chances to travel around the world to meet people and interview them and talk to them about a subject that has obsessed and fascinated me, if I’d been rich, I would have paid to do it. What I found leaving it, though, is that there’s some many different horizons now that I can look at."