The Holocaust

Starred review from November 27, 2023
Historian Stone (The Liberation of the Camps) argues in this powerful study that “in many ways we have failed unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust.” Surveying the wide body of research on the subject, he contends that public consciousness has wrongly been dominated by “the perception of ‘factory-like’ genocide”—a misleading idea that serves to replace the brutal, up-close murders of the Holocaust with an imaginary bureaucratic killing machine. To counter this inaccurate vision, Stone analyzes the “ideology” of the Holocaust—from its roots in European antisemitism, through the brutal Nazi race regime that was quickly adopted by collaborators in countries invaded by Germany, to its aftermath when some Jewish people who refused to emigrate from Europe were kept in “displaced persons” camps all the way through 1957, and into the following decades of mass trauma and attempts at commemoration. His astute investigation, which adeptly moves between “microhistories” and large-scale events, shows how the Holocaust was primarily made possible by the widespread adoption of racist thinking and the long-term nurturing of “genocidal fantasy” in Europe—the latter of which is still poorly reckoned with today, since the emotional frenzy of genocide is rarely brought to the fore in “sanitized” Holocaust historiography. Concluding with a dire warning that the modern nation-state is a catalyst for racist and genocidal thinking that is today often targeted at migrants, Muslims, and other maginalized groups, this is an urgent new perspective on a much-studied calamity.