Dan Stone - The Holocaust: An Unfinished History

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of numerous academic articles and books, including Histories of the Holocaust and The Liberation of the Camps.

1. CHAPTER 1 :
   Before the Holocaust
2. CHAPTER 2 :
   Attack on the Jews, 19338
3. CHAPTER 3 :
   Before the Final Solution
4. CHAPTER 4 :
   War of Annihilation
5. CHAPTER 5 :
   A Continent-wide Crime
6. CHAPTER 6 :
   Camps and the Mobile Holocaust
7. CHAPTER 7 :
   Great Is the Wrath: Liberation and Its Aftermath
8. CHAPTER 8 :
   Holocaust Memory

Image from Der Giftpilz , showing a wall poster advertising a talk by Julius Streicher.

Cartoon in the Daily Express , 17 October 1938.

An American soldier stands over the bodies of inmates of Flossenbrg shot in a forest near Neunburg vorm Wald, 29 April 1945.

Europe, 1942.

Romanian deportations to Transnistria, 19412.

Romanian participation in massacres, 19412.

The death marches, JanuaryMay 1945.

Death marches to Bergen - Belsen , December 1944 to April 1945.

Major DP camps in Germany and Austria.

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There are no clean or unclean people, at least, not in principle. There are no chosen nations. However, there are those who know of a dividing line between what is and what is not permitted, and others who not only do not know it, but who do not want to know it either.

Abel Jacob Herzberg

The program of action against the Jews included disenfranchisement, stigmatization, denial of civil rights, subjecting their persons and property to violence, deportation, enslavement, enforced labour, starvation, murder, and mass extermination. The extent to which the conspirators succeeded in their purpose can only be estimated, but the annihilation was substantially complete in many localities of Europe. Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in the parts of Europe under Nazi domination, it is conservatively estimated that 5,700,000 have disappeared, most of them deliberately put to death by the Nazi conspirators. Only remnants of the Jewish population of Europe remain.

From the indictment, International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 7 June 1946

In the diary that she kept in Bergen-Belsen, the young Jewish Yugoslav Hanna Lvy-Hass writes at one point of a boy whose body has been infested by fleas and who is rejected by his family:

[He] couldnt kill the vermin that had settled on his body because he couldnt see them; theyve burrowed deep into his skin and swarmed through his eyebrows. His chest is completely blackened by these fleas and their nests. We have never seen such a thing; we never imagined such a thing could occur Everyone avoids him. His brothers and sister dread his presence, his fleas, his howling The other night, he dragged his useless body from one bed to the other begging people to make room for him. Everyone pushed him away in disgust Painful story. His case is not unique.

This merging of animal and human, this deeply traumatic destruction of the self and the revulsion it causes amongst others who fear the same thing happening to them, is an extraordinary description. In it we glimpse the nightmarish consequences of Nazi persecution.

In one of his stories written in the d ghetto, Isaiah Spiegel describes a rabbi who, at the morning prayers, appears to go mad after being mocked by German soldiers in the street:

For a moment, Reb Bunem was paralysed, overcome by shame and nausea. The blood rushed from his heart into his hands, which began to tremble. His eyes flashed an uncanny green flame. With a surge of preternatural strength, he suddenly turned to the praying Jews and started ripping the prayer books from their hands. The frightened Jews moved off to the side while Reb Bunem continued tearing the Psalm books from their grasp and casting imprecations on their heads. He shouted with the voice of one possessed, while in the darkness of the synagogue his beet-red face glowed with divine wrath:

Jews!!! Stop reciting Psalms!!! God is on the side of our enemy! God is with the Germans! I beseech you, recite no more Psalms! Our world is shrouded in darkness!

A rabbi desecrates the holy books and pleads with his congregants to abandon their prayers.

There are still major parts of the history of the Holocaust that have not been understood in the prevailing narrative. In the region of Romanian-occupied Ukraine which the Romanians called Transnistria, Jews were herded into pigsties, where they froze to death and suffered inescapable epidemics. They were not paid for the work they did, although payment was promised. They were robbed and often tricked into handing over valuables or clothing in exchange for food that was never provided. In Acmecetca, Driven by hunger, most of the Jews were naked in a matter of weeks, covering their hips with rags or paper. The prefect, Modest Isopescu, who preferred this camp over all other camps in the Golta jude [county], inspected it a few times, each time amusing himself with the fate of the prisoners; he took pictures of the deportees grazing in the grass on their hands and knees. In Peciora, Extreme hunger quickly reduced the prisoners to eating plant roots, twigs, leaves, human excrement, and even dead bodies. Romanian and Ukrainian guards raped Jewish young women, who in turn killed themselves. Such conditions fostered mental illness and suicide.

These vignettes take us a long way from the notion of industrial murder that still prevails in the public consciousness. Even in the Nazi death camps, the perception of factory-like genocide is misleading: as we will see, even at Auschwitz the murder process was brutal and far from efficient.

The Holocaust turned the victims world upside down, not just destroying their homes and families, leaving most of the small minority of survivors unable to return to the lands of their birth, but in terms of values. Both during and after the war years, the Nazi assault on the Jews left them, in many cases, unable to lead lives guided by morality or established norms, as the above examples show. Those trapped in Nazi ghettos and camps found themselves not on another planet but certainly in the anus mundi, in which literal and metaphorical filth governed existence.

Arendts radical claim reminds us that we have in some ways either forgotten, or ignored altogether, what the Holocaust was and how devastating its effects were. The depth of the trauma caused by the Holocaust means we must move beyond a mechanistic interpretation of industrial genocide. The ubiquity of collaboration across Europe, driven by a coincidence of wants between the Nazis ideologically driven aspiration to rid the world of Jews and the desires of many nation-states leaders to create ethnically homogeneous populations, means we need to stop thinking of the Holocaust as solely a German project. It was, however, driven and largely perpetrated by Germans (including Austrians), thus we must focus on ideology, understood as a kind of phantasmagorical conspiracy theory, as the kernel of Nazi thinking and action. And finally we need to understand the ways in which the after-effects of the Holocaust shaped the postwar years and continue to be felt today.