In many ways, writes historian Dan Stone, “we have failed unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust”. His remarkable book offers both a narrative overview and an analysis of the events, challenging many common assumptions and often returning to how this terrible history remains “unfinished”.
Some recent scholarly studies of the Holocaust, Stone argues, have stressed “the reactive nature of German decision-making, driven primarily by military circumstance”. He does not dispute the importance of contingent factors, such as rivalries between different Nazi factions, or how the leadership ramped up the level of persecution after the public largely failed to object to the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 and then the T-4 euthanasia programme. But he also puts a firm emphasis on “ideology, understood as a kind of phantasmagorical conspiracy theory, as the kernel of Nazi thinking and action”.
