Until now, there has been no major British-made TV series on the Holocaust. There have, of course, been individual programmes. No one who saw the relevant episodes of The World at War or The Nazis: A Warning from History could easily switch to another channel. But Auschwitz, which begins on Tuesday, is a six-part series that examines both the infamous camp and the implementation of the “Final Solution”. Hardly another excuse to trawl through the Second World War film archive, it is a major contribution to documentary making.

Perhaps the closest we have come to a series on the Holocaust was Shoa (1985), the nine-and-a-half hour film by the Frenchman Claude Lanzmann. It relied on verbal recollection for its impact. Auschwitz, written and produced by Laurence Rees, is different and — from a historian’s point of view — far more definitive. It makes use of documents that were impounded by the Soviet Army and locked away in Moscow. Only now, in the aftermath of the Cold War, has this archive been made available to researchers in the West. Thus Auschwitz is the first documentary to include the blueprints for the gas chambers and the plans for the layout of the camp.

Of course, even without this level of detail, most of us already have a mental picture of Auschwitz-Birkenau: the grim block houses, the watchtower, the railway line on which the cattle trucks clicked and clanked into the human abattoir. Films such as Schindler’s List have successfully brought home the Holocaust’s barbarism to those who would never read a book on the subject. The omission, as Rees told me, is a “lack of historical understanding of the mentality of the perpetrators”.

Shooting large numbers of rounded-up Jews was poor for army morale. Concern for soldiers’ mental welfare was one of the factors behind finding a cleaner, more efficient, less personal means of enacting the Final Solution. When exterminating Jews with the pest control agent Zyklon B was perfected at Auschwitz, the camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss, concluded: “I must admit that this gassing had a calming effect on me. I was always horrified of executions by firing squads.”

The series also interviews a camp guard — one of the few prepared to talk on camera — about his time there. He speaks about the facilities available to the guards: the SS athletics club, the cinema, the good food and the excellent brandy. For the SS, there were revels to be had in the place of death. There was even a brothel. It was a more agreeable posting than the Eastern Front. With these distractions, many shut their eyes to their own complicity.

For us, there will be a natural temptation to turn away from this new series and do something more agreeable, like taking the dog for a walk. But I urge you to watch Auschwitz, not as an act of penance but because it is a documentary of outstanding class, containing much you will not know and frequent insights into the human condition. There will be time to walk the dog when it is over.

• Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution, Tuesday, BBC Two, 9pm

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