Description

Brought to you by Penguin

The defining event of twentiethcentury Europe the extermination of millions of Jews has been commemorated institutionalised and embedded in our collective consciousness But in this nuanced and perceptive new history Dan Stone Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute contends that the true dimension of the horror wrought by the Nazis is inadvertently brushed aside in our current culture of commemoration

This is due in part to practical or conceptual challenges such as the continentwide scale of the crime and the multiplicity of sources in many languages and in part to an unwillingness to confront the reality that the Holocaust could not have happened without the assistance of numerous nonNazi states and agents

Structured around four themes trauma collaboration genocidal fantasy and postwar consequences The Holocaust demonstrates the genocidal logic of much European thinking in the wake of WWI explores how the Holocausts effects unfolded even after the liberation of the camps in 1945 and stresses the ways in which Europeans continue even now to draw on a reservoir of fascist vocabulary and imagery in times of crisis

It is a deeply researched and indispensable examination of a trauma that still reverberates today

Dan Stone 2022 P Penguin Audio 2022