Laurence Rees built this BBC series from interviews with people who lived through the Third Reich as perpetrators, bystanders, and victims, many speaking on camera for the first time about what they did and why. Six episodes trace the movement from Hitler's early failures in Munich through the machinery of the SS, the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the administration of the Holocaust, using archival footage alongside those testimonies rather than dramatic reenactment. Former camp guards, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens describe the small decisions and social pressures that let a functioning modern state carry out mass murder, and the series keeps returning to that mechanism instead of treating the Nazis as a historical aberration. Interviews with figures close to the regime's inner workings sit alongside survivor accounts, and the narration stays plain, letting the specifics of policy and personal choice carry the weight. The result reads less like a chronicle of a defeated ideology than a case study in how ordinary people become complicit.