A timely corrective to a shifting narrative ... erudite ... this 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"... a brisk, compelling and scholarly account of the Nazi genocide and its aftermath . But never for one moment does it let us believe that the events are now safely in the past -- Matthew Reisz ― Observer

These killings, from the Einsatzgruppen shootings of autumn 1941 to the Reinhard camps in 1942-43, make clear two things: first, the Holocaust had little to do with the Nazis’ regular concentration camp system; second, that the concept of “industrial genocide” only partly captures the horror of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked. A holocaust history for our times , passionate as well as scholarly, and written with a sharp eye to the growing threat of the radical right in the present. Stone is not afraid to question the verities that have become attached to this most catastrophic epoch of modern history, and he challenges readers to confront its scope and enormity anew -- Jane Caplan, Emeritus Professor of European History, University of OxfordIn the West, that distracts both from how the Allies ignored evidence of Nazi genocide and from how western doors were mostly closed to Jewish refugees before, during and even after the war. In post-communist eastern Europe, a narrative of “pure victimhood”, in which Soviet oppression must always be mentioned alongside (or above) the Holocaust, abuses the history of both. In Hungary and Latvia, anti-Soviet nationalist heroes are celebrated even if they collaborated with the Nazis or took part in massacres or deportations of Jews. The vast majority of the Holocaust’s victims were Eastern European Jews living in Poland and the western Soviet Union (including the Baltic States), the former Pale of Settlement.

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World b y Jonathan Freedland (John Murray, 2022) Archbishop Saliège’s pastoral letter was read out in many churches in Toulouse in August 1942. Was extermination of the Jews therefore a step too far for many who had prepared the way? Bogdanovka, which today lies in Ukraine close to the River Bug, was then part of Transnistria, the area of Soviet Ukraine between the Dniester and Bug rivers that was occupied by Romania, which invaded the USSR alongside the German Wehrmacht in June that year. A 2018 law made it “ a criminal offence to accuse Poles of being complicit in the Nazi murder of the Jews”. According to a scholar called Jan Grabowski, he and his fellow “independent historians of the Shoah continue to face today, in Poland, the full might and wrath of the state”. The report says workers arrived in "normal health" but a few months in Aldeney left them in a "starved condition"This is an outstanding book: well written, deeply felt, always perceptive and exhibiting considerable knowledge of decades of Holocaust scholarship. It will become the standard work in English on the subject for some time to come. This vital history shatters many myths about the Nazi genocide . . . . surprising . . . provocative . . . fizzes with ideas. Even if you think you know the subject, you'll probably find something here to make you think' Sunday Times The implications of all this could hardly be more sobering. Just as “Nazism was the most extreme manifestation of sentiments that were quite common, and for which Hitler acted as a kind of rainmaker or shaman”, suggests Stone, the defeat of his regime has left us with “a dark legacy, a deep psychology of fascist fascination and genocidal fantasy that people turn to instinctively in moments of crisis – we see it most clearly in the alt-right and the online world, spreading into the mainstream, of conspiracy theory”. His book offers a brisk, compelling and scholarly account of the Nazi genocide and its aftermath. But never for one moment does it let us believe that the events are now safely in the past. Many European countries, also infected by ethnic nationalism, shared the Nazis’ hatred of Jews and, during the Second World War, took the opportunity to remove them alongside other groups they deemed undesirable. But, as Stone also shows, the policy towards Jews, and towards collaboration with the Nazis in deporting them, was not always consistent. Vichy France under Pétain resisted Nazi pressure to deport Jews who were French citizens; yet Vichy had actively participated in rounding up stateless Jews. Hungary under Miklós Horthy, despite sending Jews to be slaughtered at Kamenets-Podolski in August 1941, resisted Nazi demands to surrender its Jews until the Nazi invasion in March 1944.