The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Stone - B+

                       "The ubiquity of collaboration across Europe, driven by a coincidence of wants between the Nazi's ideological driven aspiration to rid the world of Jews and the desire of many nation-states' leaders to create ethnically homogenous populations, means we need to stop thinking of the Holocaust as a solely German project." The ideology of anti-semitism had its apogee in Germany, but it was a "shared framework, a consensus" easily taken up by others. The French, Romanians and Croatians, in particular, embraced the destruction of their Jewish citizens. The majority of the murdered Jews were not killed in death camps, but face to face by gunmen, or starved or worked to death throughout the continent. For the few who survived in Europe, May 1945 did not end their troubles, as they faced pogroms in Hungary and Poland, and were in displaced persons camps for years. "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."  This excellent history, thus, is a retelling of the familiar with a broadened context and expanded view of the events of the Shoah.    

                      The Nazis,  particularly Adolf Hitler, viewed the Versailles Diktat and all of the pain and humiliation that followed as having been caused by international Jewry. Thus, anti-semitism became the root of the Nazi creed. There were attempts to dress up Nazi racial theories in scientific robes, but for the true believers, it was never more than pure hatred of the Jews and the adulation of Aryan superiority.  Immediately upon assuming power, the Nazis moved against the Jews, and in the years before the war began, they reduced the prosperous Jewish community to "abject destitution" and "removed them from the majority of the population's sense of obligation, morality, and civility."  The initial boycotts, job losses, and random violence were followed by the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of German citizenship. They were prohibited from having any sexual relationships with Aryans,  they could not act as a physician to an Aryan, they lost their rights at university, and they began to lose their businesses to Aryanization. All of these actions required the complicit consent of a broad swath of society. Kristallnacht escalated the violence with 177 synagogues burned, thousands of businesses destroyed and 3,000 sent to concentration camps. If any Jew in Germany was unsure of the intentions of the regime, The Night of Broken Glass clarified how matters stood. Tens of thousands more left Germany. By September of 1939, fully half of the country's Jewish population had left since Hitler's rise. 

                   In January 1939, Hitler said - "Today I will be a prophet again and say, if international finance Jewry in and outside Europe succeeds in plunging nations into another world war, then the end result ... will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." When Germany invaded Poland, it began the systemic murder of the country's elites and leaders. On occasion, an entire Jewish community would be slaughtered, but most Jews were rounded up and placed in heavily-policed ghettos. Poland's Jews were warehoused in the ghettos with the intent of sending them east of the Urals when the circumstances allowed. Although the ghettos were created well before the decision to murder their inhabitants, conditions were such that 500,000 Polish Jews died in the ghettos.

                Bolshevism in the USSR had to be destroyed because it was through Bolshevism that the Jews were attempting to destroy Germany. "What changed in 1941 was the overall conception of a genocidal plan rather than a more limited policy..." Nazi Germany transitioned from ghettoization to face to face killings in the western USSR, to a continental plan of extermination in a little over a year. The SS Einsatzgruppen who accompanied the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union killed 1.5 million Jews. Between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1942, Hitler gave the order to implement the Final Solution. In March 1942, 80% of the Holocaust victims were still alive. A year later, 80% were dead. The murders in the USSR were almost all assisted by locals who enthusiastically aided the Germans. Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Byelorussians, and Ukrainians were all handmaidens to the Nazis. To the west in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, and Moldova, "indigenous fascist regimes" were indiscriminately killing Jews. "For the victims of these murderous policies...the result was disastrous. By that point, the Nazi's Final Solution was in place, and Jews across Europe were marked for death. For the different Jewish populations actually to be captured, deported and murdered, however, required a high degree of collaboration across the continent...The precise path of genocide differed from place to place, but in the end the outcome was the same."

                      From Norway to Crete, individuals, organizations, and entire countries collaborated with the Nazis to help rid the continent of Jews. In the Netherlands where 75% of the Jews were killed, the civil service cooperated throughout with the occupiers. The Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944 which was followed by the deportation of almost half a million Jews to Auschwitz could not have happened without the support of the Hungarian police. Only 25% of France's Jews were deported, but the 1942 internments at the Velodrome and Drancy required extensive local help. Croatia and Slovakia were so fervently anti-semitic that they pre-empted the Germans and began murdering their Jews before the SS became involved. In Romania, Antonescu fully embraced the fascist ideology and killed thousands. "It is clearly the case that without the support of millions of non-Germans (or Austrians) across Europe, the pace of the Holocaust would have been slower and its extent less comprehensive."

                    "In late 1943 and early 1944, the killing rate at Birkenau, as the Nazis realized that placing ideology above labour made little sense now, given the parlous state of the war economy..." Several hundred thousand Jewish lives were saved when they were put into slave labour camps.  Thousands upon thousands received only a deferment as the camps were extremely brutal, inhumane operations. As the Allies closed in, hundreds of thousands died in death marches, as the Nazis attempted to hide their atrocities. For the Jews of Eastern Europe, the end of hostilities offered nothing but uncertainty in DP camps. Their homes and families were no more. They could or would not return to Poland or Hungary. One American observer sent to Europe by the president observed that the Jews were under lock and key in camps and guarded by soldiers. The only difference was that "we do not exterminate them." Although some DP's stayed in Europe, most went to either Israel or America.

                 In the immediate aftermath of the war, "the genocide of the Jews was not understood or was overlooked." The passage of time, particularly the end of the Cold War, brought a Holocaust consciousness to the fore. The key events were Eichmann's trial in 1961-2, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1963-65, the television show 'The Holocaust' in 1978, 'Schindler's List' in 1993, and the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1995.  In the twenty-first century, the Holocaust's memory has been distorted by those who twist and refute history for their own purposes. The most glaring example is Poland, where it is now a crime to suggest that the Poles betrayed its Jews. The official line in Poland now is that Poles uniformly helped their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. There are other examples of denial popping up regularly around the world. The author is the Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the University of London. The two core themes here are the diversity of the methods of killing and the breath of the collaboration throughout the continent.