The Holocaust An unfinished history

Historian Stone (The Liberation of the Camps) argues in this powerful study that "in many ways we have failed unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust." Surveying the wide body of research on the subject, he contends that public consciousness has wrongly been dominated by "the perception of 'factory-like' genocide"--a misleading idea that serves to replace the brutal, up-close murders of the Holocaust with an imaginary bureaucratic killing machine. To counter this inaccurate vision, Stone analyzes the "ideology" of the Holocaust--from its roots in European antisemitism, through the brutal Nazi race regime that was quickly adopted by collaborators in countries invaded by Germany, to its aftermath when some Jewish people who refused to emigrate from Europe were kept in "displaced persons" camps all the way through 1957, and into the following decades of mass trauma and attempts at commemoration. His astute investigation, which adeptly moves between "microhistories" and large-scale events, shows how the Holocaust was primarily made possible by the widespread adoption of racist thinking and the long-term nurturing of "genocidal fantasy" in Europe--the latter of which is still poorly reckoned with today, since the emotional frenzy of genocide is rarely brought to the fore in "sanitized" Holocaust historiography. Concluding with a dire warning that the modern nation-state is a catalyst for racist and genocidal thinking that is today often targeted at migrants, Muslims, and other maginalized groups, this is an urgent new perspective on a much-studied calamity. (Jan.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.