The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone

JVL Introduction

Mathew Reisz in the Guardian welcomes the publication of Dan Stone’s The Holocaust: An Unfinished History as “a brisk, compelling and scholarly account of the Nazi genocide and its aftermath”.

Stone challenges the ways in which these events have been absorbed into our culture arguing that “we have failed unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust”.

He stresses the “phantasmagorical conspiracy theory” on which Nazi ideology rested, and  reminds us of the sheer variety of brutalities employed, from sheer starvation to the “huge numbers of Jews [who] were shot in face-to-face killings reminiscent of colonial massacres”,  and of the willing and often enthusiastic collaborators right across Europe.

He is sceptical about the oft-proclaimed benefits of Holocaust education and commemoration, arguing that Holocaust memory is increasingly used to further nationalist agendas, to facilitate geopolitical alliances on the far right or to ‘expose’ progressive thinkers for their supposed antisemitism or anti-Israel bias.

Coinciding with the screening of Ken Burns series on The US and the Holocaust, this book could not be more timely.

This article was originally published by the Guardian on Sun 15 Jan 2023. Read the original here.