Stone Dan - Histories of the Holocaust

HISTORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST

DAN STONE

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Dan Stone 2010

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First published 2010

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For my wonderful Mischlinge, Libby and Greta,
for when they need to know

First of all thanks to Christopher Wheeler at Oxford University Press for encouraging me to write this book and for being such a wonderfully engaged editor. Thanks too to Matthew Cotton and Natasha Knight at OUP for their assistance.

Thanks to Ulrike Smalley and Suzanne Bardgett at the Imperial War Museum for helping me obtain permission to use Alicia Melamed Evanss striking painting for the cover of the book. I am very grateful to Alicia for granting me permission to reproduce her artwork.

For taking the time to read chapters of the book, I am extremely grateful to: Donald Bloxham, Amos Goldberg, Dirk Moses, and Barbara Rosenbaum. A special thank you to Rudolf Muhs, for checking (and greatly improving) my translations from German, and to my PhD student Becky Jinks, who patiently read through the whole manuscript and offered many helpful suggestions. Obviously, all remaining errors are my responsibility.

I would like to thank Donald Bloxham for allowing me to read The Final Solution: A Genocide (OUP, 2009) in advance of publication, and Alison Bashford, Alon Confino, Amos Goldberg, Antero Holmila, Wulf Kansteiner, Dirk Moses, Chris Probst, Wolfgang Seibel, Zo Waxman, and jrgen Zimmerer for providing me with copies of forthcoming publications.

The research for this book would have been immeasurably harder without the resources of the German Historical Institute, London, and, especially, the Wiener Library, London. I am grateful to the staff of both institutes for their assistance.

My thanks to the many friends and colleagues who discussed aspects of this book with me or whose scholarship has set a fine example: Scott Ashley, Tony Barta, Daniel Beer, Doris Bergen, Paul Betts, Cathie Carmichael, David Cesarani, Tim Cole, Alon Confino, Ann Curthoys, Ned Curthoys, John Docker, Robert Eaglestone, Saul Friedlnder, Peter Fritzsche, Christian Gerlach, Julie Gottlieb, Helen Graham, Raphael Gross, Sara Guyer, Antero Holmila, Joel Isaac, Olaf Jensen, Adam Jones, Pete Kakel, Wulf Kansteiner, Richard King, Tony Kushner, Barry Langford, Tom Lawson, Florin Lobont, Peter Longerich, Wendy Lower, Dirk Moses, Rudolf Muhs, Richard Overy, Andy Pearce, Christopher Probst, Mark Roseman, Michael Rothberg, Dirk Rupnow, Dominik Schaller, Wolfgang Seibel, Tim Snyder, Scott Straus, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Chris Szejnmann, Philippe Vervaecke, Arne Johan Vetlesen, Zo Waxman, Anton Weiss-Wendt, Eric Weitz, Hayden White, Christian Wiese, Michael Wildt, and Jrgen Zimmerer.

Finally, thanks as always to my family: my parents Avril and Graham (see if you can get past p. 7), Hilary (see if you can remember the titleclue: its a bit like the last one), and my pride and joy, Libby and Greta.

Auschwitz was no instructional institution You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance.

Ruth Klger

I n 1987, Michael Marrus published The Holocaust in History. That book, a model of scholarship, has provided a generation of students and scholars with the clearest guide to the already massive historical research on the subject of the genocide of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Over twenty years later, Marruss book remains very serviceable, and this book is conceived as something of a supplement to it. But since the end of the Cold War, the historiography of the Holocaust has grown exponentially, as archives in the former communist countries have become accessible, and lines of inquiry have developed that have opened up new ways of understanding the unfolding and nature of the genocide of the Jews. This book is meant first and foremost as a guide to the historiography of the last twenty years, although I hope readers will find that it engages critically with the literature and does more than merely point out schools of thought or areas of debate.

For the purpose of this book, the Holocaust is understood as the genocide of the Jews, as they were defined by the Nazi regime, during World War II and, importantly, as a key part of Germanys war effort. Europes Romany (Gypsy) population was also the victim of genocide under the Nazis. Many other population groups, notably Poles, Ukrainians, and Soviet prisoners of war were killed in huge numbers, and smaller groups such as Jehovahs Witnesses, Black Germans, and homosexuals suffered terribly under Nazi rule. The evidence suggests that the Slav nations of Europe were also destined, had Germany won the war, to become victims of systematic mass murder; and even the terrible brutality of the occupation in eastern Europe, especially in Poland, can be understood as genocidal according to the definition put forward by Raphael Lemkin is his major study,