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The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Pelican Books)

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An authoritative, revelatory new history of the Holocaust, from one of the leading scholars of his generation Our images of “industrial genocide” stem from the spring of 1944, when with a massive collaboration with the Hungarian state, Adolf Eichmann’s commandos deported most of the Jews of Hungary, some 450,000 of them. 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.

The Holocaust is viewed as a German event but it would have not have been possible without mass cooperation of many people in other European countries either Allies of Germany or invaded countries driven by antisemitism and greed. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History Book review: The untold story of Europe’s Shoah shame

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.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The book’s main strength is its comparison of different countries, their authorities and their willingness to collaborate with the Nazis or slaughter local Jews themselves. The chapter on the death marches, when inmates were moved between concentration camps, and the eventual liberation of those camps and its aftermath, is especially strong, perhaps because Professor Stone has already written a book on this specific area. The killings are generally viewed as an organized industrial killing machine with the gas chambers in Auschwitz but more killings were carried out by individual killings with Jews (men, women and children) being shot, stabbed or beaten to death. 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. So too has its success: “the genocidal logic of the Holocaust – the Nazis’ intent to destroy the Jewish people in Europe – was accomplished all too well”. Such misunderstandings mean that its “radical implications” for our own world “are passed over in silence”. Drawing on his extensive own research and a vast range of work by historians from across the last eight decades, Stone sets about showing how our mental picture of the Holocaust is dangerously wrong.That last fact has become deeply controversial in Poland, where the right-wing PiS government has prosecuted historians whose research has found widespread Polish participation in the Holocaust. This is not about Holocaust denial, which Stone sees as a “marginal phenomenon”. Instead, the danger has become endemic “Holocaust distortion”. The historical fact that “genocide is a societal endeavour” is ignored in favour of stories of heroic resistance and rescue, a cynical “beautification”. This vital history shatters many myths about the Nazi's genocide . . . Drawing on the latest scholarship in English and German, Stone's brisk, energetic book fizzes with ideas. Indeed, even if you think you know the subject, you'll probably find something here to make you think . . . surprising . . . provocative . . . an excellent book Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times In March 1942, 80 per cent of the Jewish victims were still alive. Almost a year later, 80 per cent of the six million were dead. The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked. 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.

But it was the end point of a genocidal process that had already seen millions of Jews murdered in the most brutal ways imaginable. 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. This book was not what I expected it to be i.e a chronological narrative of the Holocaust. While it discusses the history of the Holocaust, it is in often less detailed than the excellent book of Laurence Rees (The Holocaust : a New History) but highlights a number of points not covered as well in other books : Many in Eastern Europe feared that the Soviet Union would devour them. This was coupled with the belief that all Jews were Communists. The Finns fought with the Nazis against the Red Army but refused to take part in atrocities. A group of Jewish civilians being held at gunpoint by SS troops in German-occupied Poland, May 1943

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More Jews were murdered in massacres in Transnistria than were deported from the Netherlands, yet places such as Bogdanovka, Akmecetka, Domanovka and Vapniarka remain barely known in the West. The torture faced by the Eastern European victims of being rounded up and shot outside their home towns, or being driven insane by starvation in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Poland, or waiting in line to be murdered by primitive gas chambers driven by internal combustion engines at the Reinhard camps, is missing from many accounts, both those that are scholarly and popular. Nor was it just in Nazi Germany’s fascist allies where local collaboration and participation was key. Large numbers of people in occupied Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and elsewhere took part in or facilitated the killing. Stone writes that “the number of Poles who were involved in betraying Jews to the German occupiers, or robbing or killing them themselves, dwarfs the number of rescuers”. 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”.

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