The Holocaust is the subject of numerous debates, numerous commemorations and numerous representations. But major aspects of its history have been neglected and misunderstood. Covering not only the Holocaust itself but also the decades that followed, this expansive history deepens our understanding of what the Holocaust really was and its ongoing repercussions across the world today.
This new book reveals that:
The widely held image of “industrial murder” in concentration camps is incomplete: many were killed where they lived, by neighbors and in the most brutal manner possible.
The Holocaust was a real crime on a European scale. The scale of the collaboration across the continent – from Norway to Romania – forces us to stop seeing this as an exclusively German project.
Nazi ideology was an extreme continuation of ideas that were and remain deeply rooted throughout Europe, not the departure from Western thought as we tell ourselves.
similarly, the revival of the radical right today is a continuation rather than an aberration, meaning that it has never been more urgent to fully reckon with the trauma caused by the Holocaust.
Drawing on decades of research, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History upends much of what we think we know about the Holocaust. Stone draws on Nazi documents, but also post-war diaries, testimonies and fiction, insisting that in our age of growing nationalism and xenophobia, we must understand the true story of the Holocaust.
About the speaker:
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at RHUL. He is a historian of ideas who works mainly on 20th century European history. His research interests include: the history and interpretation of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, the history of anthropology, the history of fascism, the cultural history of the British right, and the theory of history. He is the author or editor of twenty books and more than eighty scientific articles. From 2016 to 2019, he received a three-year major research grant from the Leverhulme Trust for a project on the International Tracing Service. The resulting book, Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after the Holocaust and World War II, will be published by Oxford University Press. He co-edited volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust. He chaired the academic advisory board for the overhaul of the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust galleries, which opened in October 2021, and is a member of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust expert reference group and of the British International Tracing Service Archives Monitoring Committee.
Described in The Independent as "the leading expert on the radical right" and by ITV as "Britain's leading specialist in the field", Matthew Feldman is a consultant, writer and professor emeritus of the modern history of ideas. He has published a dozen volumes on fascism and the radical right, as well as dozens of chapters, articles, and commentaries on this and other topics. He has also conducted extensive consultations via hundreds of media interviews and more than two dozen cases as an expert witness on radical right terrorism, as well as keynote conferences for the G-7, the Council of Europe and many other organizations. Much of his work on radical right narratives and counter-narratives is carried out through his Oxford-based company, Academic Consulting Services, alongside specialist training, reporting and consultancy work with various public and private bodies . Professor Feldman's third collection of essays will appear in 2023, and his history of fascism will be published by Yale University Press in 2024.
Chaired by:
Dr. Christine Schmidt is Deputy Director and Head of Research at the Vienna Holocaust Library.
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