Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Sir Simon Sharma is one of the world's leading historians, a best-selling author and a renowned documentary maker.

His latest film, The Road to Auschwitz, airs on BBC 2 and IPlayer at 9pm today.

And in it, he tells the story of the Holocaust, arguing that it was a crime of complicity across Europe.

In today's episode, Simon sits down with David Musgrove

to speak more about some lesser-known aspects of the Holocaust.

One of the things that is immediately apparent in the film you've made

is that you have never visited Auschwitz.

Right.

Was that deliberate?

Yeah, I went, again, not to be light-hearted or facetious about it at all, but as I say in the film, you know, the awful, heavy presence of it has been with me a lot of my life.

But when I was actually working on doing research in Poland for a different book entirely for landscape memory, I got off the train at Krakoff and there was a poster on

the platform saying day trips to Auschwitz back in your hotel in time for tea, you know, which

was both funny and deeply not funny. And I thought at that moment, I don't want to be a tourist,

you know, really. And, you know, I was just sort of adverse or fearful, I guess.

And the people who run the Auschwitz Memorial site do an absolute extraordinary

and a wonderful job at education.

And you go there. I don't know if you've been there.

I've not been there.

Okay, well, I mean, there's just day after day, buses and buses and buses, rural

in school, a lot of school kids. So that's absolutely heroic. And I don't know if other

historians feel the same way. Normally, I heed the advice given to me by a professorial mentor, which is always use the archive of the feet, go to the physical site.

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