THE HOLOCAUST

A significant new history of the Holocaust from the director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway.

Stone, a professor of modern history and author of The Liberation of the Camps, emphasizes that we must stop thinking about the Holocaust as solely a German affair. “The genocide of the Jews,” he writes, “could not have been so thorough and so brutal without almost ubiquitous collaboration across Europe and beyond.” Historians agree that the trauma of Germany’s World War I defeat led to a legion of revanchist splinter groups. The Nazis were not taken seriously until 1932, when they became Germany’s largest party, and Hitler took power peacefully in 1933. No one has yet explained his obsessive hatred of Jews, but his party—and most Germans—went along. Stone delivers a gripping account of prewar Nazi legal persecution. About half of Germany’s Jews fled before emigration was banned in October 1941, although many found refuge in neighboring countries “that were later occupied.” Mass murder began with the 1939 invasion of Poland, and Stone’s blow-by-blow account may be more distressful than previous ones because he refutes their myths. Nearly half of the victims died of starvation or disease or were shot in “face-to-face killings reminiscent of colonial massacres.” In the gas chambers, victims died in agony, but fanatics such as the SS did not do all the work. Ordinary civilians and soldiers participated with frightening enthusiasm. Years later, many decent people claimed that refusing would have provoked terrible retaliation, but that is a myth. No group or country that declined to cooperate suffered. Stone concludes that today, “fascism is not yet in power. But it is knocking on the door.” The solution, he writes, is not necessarily more Holocaust education, unless it addresses a society that takes equality and tolerance for granted.

A painfully revealing, vital history.