Auschwitz

The BBC is to start screening a new six part series on Tuesday nights looking at Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland that saw more than one million people murdered on its site.

Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution' on BBC2 9pm is written and produced by Laurence Rees and uses new research seeks to offer a unique perspective on the camp.

From the origins of Auschwitz as a place to hold Polish political prisoners through to its use as a way to murder people, the series takes a look at all aspects of what happened.

Interviews with 100 camp survivors as well as those who took part in the killings are mixed with drama reconstructions of some of the key moments in the camp's history. Computer generated images based on the camp's original blueprints aims to also show how its actually operated.

"The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror," says Laurence Rees. "But the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it. Our series is not only about the shocking, almost unimaginable pain of those who died, or survived, Auschwitz. It's about how the Nazis came to do what they did."