Laurence Rees’s The Holocaust: A New History is puffed on its inside cover as “the first accessible and authoritative account of the Holocaust in more than three decades”. Such PR bluster does the book no favours. For there really is no shortage of important recent works, among them Saul Friedländer’s unsurpassed survey The Years of Extermination, which won the Pulitzer prize; Timothy Snyder’s bold reinterpretation Black Earth; and the late David Cesarani’s deeply researched and highly readable study Final Solution, which appeared only last year.

Yet look beyond the hype and you will find a fine book. Rees skilfully charts the development of Nazi antisemitic measures, from segregation and discrimination in the years before the second world war to ghettoisation and deportation during the war, culminating in the systematic extermination of around six million Jews. As a former head of BBC TV history programmes, Rees has produced some of the most thoughtful documentaries about Nazi Germany, and he tells this story through a mix of closeups and wide shots of the historical landscape. The latter provides crucial context, connecting anti-Jewish policy to the changing fortunes of the war and the dynamics of Nazi rule. Rees also explains how the perpetrators learned from earlier attacks on other “community aliens”, such as the disabled – the first victims of mass gassings in the Third Reich, who were murdered in “euthanasia” centres equipped with fake showers.

The author tackles some persistent myths along the way. He shows that there was plenty of defiance by the victims, contrary to postwar claims that they followed their killers “like sheep”. Some even got their hands on weapons and turned them against Germans. One example is Marek Edelman, who fought in the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising. “The first few days were our victory,” he recalled. “We were used to being the ones who ran away from the Germans. They had no expectation of Jews fighting like that.”

Rees also shows that the Nazi machinery of mass murder was far from impersonal or antiseptic, highlighting the sadistic violence of some killers, the carnage in death camps overflowing with corpses, and the unspeakable suffering of the doomed: when children were dragged away from their parents in the Łódź ghetto, one survivor remembered, “their screams reached the sky”.

At the centre stands the question of how the Holocaust happened. For Rees, there was nothing inevitable about it. While Hitler was an exceptionally vicious antisemite from the start of his political career – calling for the “uncompromising removal” of Jews as early as 1919 – he had no master plan for murder. Nazi policy followed a twisted road, with plenty of stops, starts and turns, before heading towards mass extermination. And even then, there was no single order from the top. Hitler set the direction, to be sure, but he left his underlings to devise ever more extreme measures to realise his vision. There were great variations across Europe, depending on local circumstances, leading the Nazis to implement the Holocaust “in radically different ways in different countries”.