The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Pelican Books)

Product Information

During that year, large numbers of non-German volunteers became identifiers of Jews, guards in labour and extermination camps and perpetrators in the killing fields. At the end of 1941 at Bogdanovka, 54,000 Jews were done to death by Romanian gendarmes, Ukrainian auxiliaries and local ethnic-German militia. They delighted in the murder of innocents. The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialised and portrayed in fiction. But major parts of the Holocaust have still not been understood. In this lecture, drawing on his new book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Dan Stone will emphasise: the need to understand the significance of Nazism's genocidal ideology; that the commonly heard concept of "industrial genocide" gives only an incomplete representation of what happened; the fact that the genocide of the Jews required continent-wide collaboration; and the depth of the trauma engendered by the Holocaust.

The classified report written by British intelligence officer Major Theodore Pantcheff and reveals what he found through a series of interviews on Alderney at the end war. It is a sobering read. Yet the case of Romania reminds us that regimes allied to Nazi Germany also participated, in that case with minimal German involvement, and for similar reasons: to rid Romania of the “threat” supposedly posed to the “Romanian race” by the Jews.

Jews were at those camps in the spring of 1945 because they had been marched there following the evacuation of camps further east to prevent the inmates falling into the hands of the Red Army. One might wonder why we need another book on the Holocaust. As Dan Stone points out, ‘the historiography of the Holocaust has been unimaginably large’. But this historiography is still responding to new developments and research. Stone’s new book is as up-to-date an overview as you are likely to find. At the same time, he presents a strong argument that the Holocaust should be understood as the result of ideological beliefs – beliefs shaped by a fascist identification of modernity’s ‘rootlessness’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a symptom of Jewish ‘domination’. The Nazi ideology wanted to get Jews out of Germany through segregation, later on out of Europe beyond the Urals or to Madagascar and finally by killing them. The vast majority of the Holocaust’s victims were Eastern European Jews living in Poland and the western Soviet Union (including the Baltic States), the former Pale of Settlement.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Sponsored

Veidlinger explores why more than 100,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and how such a horrific event was effectively forgotten. In the way local populations turned on their Jewish neighbours and participated in mass killing, he finds seeds of the later Holocaust. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The secret Pantcheff report is now public because Russia was given a copy by Britain and it has been uncovered. Some argue Britain classed it as confidential because few wished to dwell on the issue of mass killings and burials on the island. But documents have a way of becoming public and with it history is itself being rewritten. Marc writes (main picture): I specifically focused on the South Africa captain Siya Kolisi, far left, as he sung the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, as he sings with so much passion and emotion. The most infamous of those signs hangs over the gate at Auschwitz, where the Nazis murdered a million Jews, nearly half of them from Hungary. But Stone argues that even the place most intrinsically linked with the Holocaust has been “sanitised” in a way.