The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Pelican Books)

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Derek Scally: Holocaust horror can yield deeper insight into dealing with other dilemmas of history ] In December 1941, at a place called Bogdanovka in modern Ukraine, the largest shooting massacre of the Holocaust took place. Remarkably, it is an event barely known about in the English-speaking world.

Stone shows that we need to get away from the idea that the Holocaust happened just at Auschwitz. He describes the killing process at Auschwitz in harrowing detail, but we also learn much about the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ – the killing of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile death squads) following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – and the atrocities committed in the camps associated with Operation Reinhard. Stone explores the little-known history of the myriad, usually small, Nazi subcamps that sprang up in the final years of the war. That Jews were used at these subcamps as labour does not in any way contradict the Nazis’ genocidal intentions: they still died in droves. In the final months of the war, Jews were shunted around, dying in huge numbers. It was murder on the move.

Stone’s new book is an engaging and accessible read that never hurries or shields the reader from its dark subject matter. It joins an extensive library of literature that intends to understand the origins, course and consequences of the Holocaust. Modern accounts of the Holocaust are positioned atop the fading of living memory into history. Laurence Rees’s 2017 book centred the voices of the survivors, drawing from interviews he collected through his work on BBC documentaries. Yet, Stone writes, “The interest in survivor testimony in recent years... has obscured the fact that survival was the exception, death was the norm.” Histories of the Holocaust have to find the voices that were lost. Although the Holocaust was obviously initiated by Germans, it was very much “a continent-wide crime” and found willing and often enthusiastic collaborators right across Europe. Such people, according to Stone, were motivated by “greed, nationalist aspirations and ideological affinity with Nazism”, but he also points to “the disturbing fact… that many perpetrators appear to have taken part because they enjoyed doing so”. Stone argues that the centrality of German responsibility has allowed other nations to obscure their role in the Shoah, to paint those who fought for national independence as solely valiant patriots. A holocaust history for our times , passionate as well as scholarly, and written with a sharp eye to the growing threat of the radical right in the present. Stone is not afraid to question the verities that have become attached to this most catastrophic epoch of modern history, and he challenges readers to confront its scope and enormity anew -- Jane Caplan, Emeritus Professor of European History, University of Oxford Such ideas still offer “a style, a vocabulary and a simple set of answers” to which many turn in times of crisis, and Stone is right to warn that these issues “are more pressing now than at any time since historians began to write about the Holocaust”. This vital and provocative book shows how much work we must do. The struggle, Levi warned, “is a war without end”.

This is an incredible in your face book that puts the holocaust in perspective, broadens your view, offers a critical narrative of 12 years of genocide and links it to current troublesome events. Archbishop Saliège’s pastoral letter was read out in many churches in Toulouse in August 1942. Was extermination of the Jews therefore a step too far for many who had prepared the way?Spain: Parliamentary ceremony in Madrid to mark the 18th birthday of Crown Princess Leonor of Spain. It was the single largest massacre of the Holocaust, larger even than the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Kyiv at Babyn Yar, yet it remains mostly unknown, as well as at odds with our mental picture of a German genocide committed in “industrial” death camps. As Dan Stone writes in this powerful new history, we have “in some ways either forgotten, if not ignored altogether, what the Holocaust was and how devastating its effects were”.

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. Slovakia incarcerated 52,000 Jews even before the German occupation. Croatia ran “the only non-Nazi extermination centre active” during the Shoah. Italy, conventionally believed to be benevolent, deported 7,495 Jews between 1943 and 1945. Only 610 returned. Relays many carefully chosen and deeply haunting stories... an engaging and accessible read that never hurries or shields the reader from its dark subject matter... outstanding -- Angus Reilly ― TelegraphThese “death marches”, about which I write at length in the book, saw about a third of the 714,000 concentration camp inmates that were alive in January 1945 murdered by the end of the war in May. But camps such as Belsen were not, strictly speaking, “Holocaust camps” until the last months of the war. 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. In the English-speaking world, we still tend to associate the Holocaust with death camps; the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen by the US Army and Belsen by the British led to a confusion that lasted decades.

For those fortunate to survive, the chaotic conclusion of the war in 1945 meant a daunting task of recovery. Stone, the author of a previous book on the end of the Holocaust, details how for many of the survivors the end of the war entailed a desperate scramble to find relatives, restrictions on travel and confinement for years in displaced persons’ camps that were excoriated by critics as little better than the concentration camps. The optimistic connotations of “Liberation” could seem cruel to the many unable to rebuild their lives. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.Today the heirs of the Red Army, in a remarkable inversion and cynical exploitation of the anti-fascist victory over the Third Reich, are bombarding Ukraine in the name of liberating that country from Nazism. In one of the many carefully chosen and deeply haunting stories relayed in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Dan Stone records how a father, when the noise made by his nine-year-old boy threatens to have their family expelled by the man hiding them, strangles his son. “I am forever accursed as the murderer of my son,” he explains, “but I spared him much more suffering. At least I didn’t let him die at the hands of the murderers.” That Romanian occupation, Stone writes, was “far removed from what, in the English-speaking world, we think of as the Holocaust”. After the Romanians captured Odessa in October 1941, nearly 25,000 of the city’s Jews were shot in one day. In the countryside, tens of thousands of local and deported Jews died of hunger and exposure after being forced to live in pigsties without shelter, food or clothing. Bogdanovka was only one of many massacres. 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.