The Holocaust and a continent’s complicity

IF it takes a village to raise a child, the same principle can hold good in the opposite direction. In one of the most chilling books to have been published this year, the point is well made that it took a continent to collaborate in the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi-driven Holocaust and wipe out a race.
At a time when Holocaust denial begins to gain an egregious foothold, and when European leaders feel safe blaming the Holocaust on an exclusively German barbarism, Dan Stone’s ‘Holocaust: An Unfinished History’ , argues persuasively that such is far from the full story.
The kernel of this disturbing book is that the Holocaust was facilitated by a shameful collaboration across Europe. Sometimes this was by way of leaders looking the other way, but all too often there were complicit regimes that readily co-operated in sending millions of Jews to their deaths. And although much has been written and serialised about the Holocaust, many aspects of its history have been overlooked, not least the apparent compliance of European governments in either ignoring, or in some cases actually supporting, the awful genocide.
A professor of modern history in London, Dan Stone sometimes makes the classic mistake of all academics by assuming that the reader is as familiar with the subject matter as he is himself. ‘Holocaust: An Unfinished History’ is no light holiday reading, but nor is it too academic for the general reader. The author draws on official documents for his sources, but he also has access to a wealth of diaries, letters, correspondence, post-war testimonies and first-hand accounts that underscore the ineffable suffering of the victims and the cold savagery of the perpetrators.
The author recalls the account given by a German soldier, posted to the Lithuanian city of Kaunas in June of 1941. The city had just been captured by the Nazis, and several dozen Jewish men were brought into the open square, one by one. There, a local man – later to be known as the death dealer – waited, crowbar in hand. Each man was beaten to death in turn. After each death, the crowd, which included women and children, clapped and cheered.
In Oslo, as was repeated in many other European capitals, Norwegian police willingly rounded up the Jewish population and sent them to be gassed in Auschwitz. Stone tells of the horrific fate of the Jews of Moldova. Incarcerated in pigsties, many of them froze to death, or went mad with hunger, eating twigs, leaves and human excrement.
The book’s main strength is its comparison of different countries, their rulers, and their willingness to collaborate with the Nazis, or to slaughter local Jews themselves. Its central thread is the virulent anti-Semitism that lay just beneath the surface in so many countries, and which needed little incitement to bring to the surface.
There are many who ask today how it all could have been allowed to happen, and Dan Stone provides a telling account of how, over less than ten years, the Nazi regime was able to reduce the Jews from a prosperous community to abject destitution, step by step.
And what seemed at the start as innocuous laws – in 1935, Jews were prevented from flying the German national flag over their homes, and Jewish doctors were prevented from treating ‘Aryan’ patients – soon turned into the marks of ‘otherness’ which would mean death for millions.
By the time the law was passed to require all Jews to take the name Israel, for men, and Sarah, for women, to prevent Jews from hiding their identity (as the Nazis believed) behind German names, the exclusion of Jews was complete, and the ground was laid for what was to follow.