Tony Matthews is a Welsh-Australian author and historian who has dedicated almost his entire adult life to writing and researching Australian and world history. He also writes extensively on military and espionage history with a specific emphasis on both world wars. He is the author of almost forty books, including several novels.
While still at school, Tony became distressed for a considerable period when he first learned about the Holocaust. He subsequently discovered that his father, Emrys Matthews, had been one of the British troops who had liberated the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945, where thousands of starving survivors, many of them riddled with typhus, were being held after the death-marches from other camps such as Auschwitz. When Tony later discovered that significant Jewish migration from Germany and Austria could have taken place successfully in 1938 and 1939, therefore, mitigating the Holocaust to a considerable degree, he became determined to write a book clearly describing the failure of the international community to prevent, or alleviate, the Nazi genocide.