‘The Holocaust’ Review: The Road to Genocide
Modern ideas like nationalism and eugenics combined with ancient prejudice—Jew-hatred—to produce an atrocity of unprecedented scale.
By Diane Cole Jan. 26, 2024
‘Survival was the exception, death the norm.” That is how the British historian Dan Stone describes the fate of the Jews in “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History.” Reading his incisive analysis of the genocidal endgame that unfolded from Nazi antisemitism in the early 20th century, one would be unsettled at any time. But doing so against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre that killed some 1,200 Israelis, in the largest mass murder of Jews since World War II, will leave the reader numbly groping for answers.
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The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
Mr. Stone, a professor of modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London, completed his volume before the Hamas attack, but his title is predictive. The Holocaust remains unfinished, he writes, because we have failed “unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust.” Despite the often-repeated directive to never forget, much of the world, he contends, has turned away from challenging the dark residue of Holocaust hatreds that still threaten democracy today. Populist parties and authoritarian leaders continue to gain ground as they echo the same malicious prejudices and unfounded racial myths propounded by Hitler and the Nazi party.
Rather than chronicle the month-by-month and country-by-country timeline of the Holocaust—for that, look to the German scholar Peter Longerich’s comprehensive history, “Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews” (2010)—Mr. Stone emphasizes the central role played by Hitler’s racial ideology in luring willing Nazi adherents, one goose step at a time, on a journey that began with “Mein Kampf” and culminated in the annihilation of six million Jews.
At the core of Hitler’s belief system, Mr. Stone writes, was a “genocidal fantasy” of a “world without Jews.” It was a familiar hatred that was neither new nor confined to Germany—Christians had demonized Jews at least since the Middle Ages—and therefore a prejudice easily tapped into and amplified in service to Hitler’s goal of forging an “ethnically pure nation.”
The nationalistic notion of “pure blood” was also not new to nativist political movements and other groups in either Europe or America. For instance, since its introduction in the 1880s, the racist pseudoscience of eugenics had brought increasingly broad acceptance and intellectual currency to the idea that “bad” genes belonging to “inferior” races and “defective” individuals should be eliminated. The Nazi name for this type of program was racial hygiene.
It was the linkage of all these concepts, taken to their extreme and placed in a neo-religious, quasimystical framework of redemption and purity, that gave shape to the Nazi worldview. This mindset melded together the grandiose ideals of Aryan superiority and the malignant visions of Jews conspiring to “replace” them into a struggle dictating that only by destroying all Jews could Aryan blood prevail. From this perspective, Mr. Stone observes, World War II was nothing less than “a fight for racial life or death,” a quest to restore a defeated Germany to greatness.
This perceived need to purify German blood drove the Nazi regime to initiate, almost from the moment it gained power in March 1933, a barrage of measures to ban, bar and outlaw Jews from all spheres of German life. By 1939 a blitz of discriminatory rules had stripped the Jews of Germany of almost every civil right imaginable. Many were forcibly displaced from their homes into collective “Jew houses.” The Nazi desire for Lebensraum (additional living space) was translated into depriving Jews of their very means of being.
Those who tried to protest or resist the new order were met with physical force and the threat of incarceration in newly built Nazi concentration camps like Dachau. Meanwhile, the promise of well-paying jobs (Hitler’s rearmament program had revived the German economy) and the practice euphemistically called “Aryanization”—which forced Jews to sell their homes, businesses and possessions to non-Jews at extremely low below-market prices—made it easier for German citizens to look away from the persecution and degradation of their former neighbors.
The Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, marked the start of World War II, and the Reich’s commencement of the mass killing of Jews began soon after. Mr. Stone emphasizes that the carnage perpetrated in the first years of the war used a different means of savagery from the “factory-line extermination” of yet-to-be-created death camps like Auschwitz. In this early stage of the Holocaust, mobile killing units made up of police officers and SS commandos would advance, town by town, rounding up local Jews, sometimes thousands in number, whom they typically shot in pits that became their mass graves. Mass-shooting operations like these annihilated approximately two million Jews.
Only after 1940, as each of the major death camps at Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau became fully operational, did poison gas become the chief means of murder. Tens of thousands of other Jews succumbed to starvation, privation and disease in hundreds of ghettos and forced-labor camps.
Mr. Stone makes clear that all these killings, on so vast a scale and in so many locations, could not have been accomplished without the help of collaborators. The continued denial of such collusion by some countries persists. But Mr. Stone presents one ghastly example after another of individuals, groups and leaders from across Europe who shared Nazi prejudices and willingly aided in identifying, rounding up, arresting and deporting Jews to their deaths.
Even the liberation of the death camps in 1944 and 1945 did not bring an end to the Holocaust, Mr. Stone maintains. At the same time that Russian and American troops began arriving at the camps, Nazi officials were ordering those Jews who were still alive to embark on so-called death marches—in frigid conditions, with little clothing, food or water—in an attempt to hide (or eradicate) the remaining human evidence of the Nazis’ crimes.
For those who survived, freedom brought additional shocks. Because the Nazis had so thoroughly destroyed both the inhabitants and the physical structures of Jewish communities throughout Europe, few survivors had home or family to go back to even if they wanted to return to the lands where they had been persecuted and where they were often still unwelcome. For many, their new homes over the next few years would be displaced-person camps, some of which had previously served as former Nazi concentration or army camps. The last DP camp closed in 1957.
In the years since, there have been commemorations of the Holocaust, and some schools have added it to their curricula. But “if we want Holocaust education to prove effective,” Mr. Stone warns, “we have first to build a society that desires equality and tolerance.” Without such a reckoning, the Holocaust may never end.
Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.”
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Appeared in the January 27, 2024, print edition.