The Nazi ideology wanted to get Jews out of Germany through segregation, later on out of Europe beyond the Urals or to Madagascar and finally by killing them. The numbers are staggering but about 1.5 million Jews were shot in the autumn of 1941 and spring of 1942. The Nazis’ wiping out of whole communities in Eastern Europe means that we still do not even know the names of about one million victims.

The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialised and portrayed in fiction. But major parts of the Holocaust have still not been understood. In this lecture, drawing on his new book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Dan Stone will emphasise: the need to understand the significance of Nazism's genocidal ideology; that the commonly heard concept of "industrial genocide" gives only an incomplete representation of what happened; the fact that the genocide of the Jews required continent-wide collaboration; and the depth of the trauma engendered by the Holocaust. People have been thinking about this for some time and wondering why the original Pantcheff report is classified until 2045". But it was the end point of a genocidal process that had already seen millions of Jews murdered in the most brutal ways imaginable. This is an incredible in your face book that puts the holocaust in perspective, broadens your view, offers a critical narrative of 12 years of genocide and links it to current troublesome events.Without the support of countries such as France, Slovakia, Greece, Hungary and Romania, the Holocaust would not have happened in the way it did. The Germans, we read, relied heavily on local assistance in deporting the 56,000 Jews of Salonika. Stone exposes myths: while Bulgaria might like to remember how it refused to hand over its Jews to the Nazis, the truth is it was Bulgarian policemen and other administrators who oversaw the rounding up and deportation of Macedonian Jews to Treblinka death camp. Croatia, we learn, ran its own extermination camp at Jasenovac. Romania deported many Jews on its own initiative to Transnistria in the autumn of 1941, dumping them there in makeshift camps and leaving them to fend for themselves – in pigsties, for instance – and to die in their tens of thousands. Just as important as truly understanding the horror of Auschwitz, Stone argues, is understanding what “an exception” it was. Millions were rounded up and shot in the most degrading and brutal circumstances, their corpses tipped into mass graves and burned. In recent decades, historians have exposed this “Holocaust by bullets”, the period of the war on the Eastern Front when Nazi “Einsatzgruppen” shot more than a million and a half Jews in autumn 1941 and spring 1942. That last fact has become deeply controversial in Poland, where the right-wing PiS government has prosecuted historians whose research has found widespread Polish participation in the Holocaust. This is not about Holocaust denial, which Stone sees as a “marginal phenomenon”. Instead, the danger has become endemic “Holocaust distortion”. The historical fact that “genocide is a societal endeavour” is ignored in favour of stories of heroic resistance and rescue, a cynical “beautification”. Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ Veidlinger explores why more than 100,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and how such a horrific event was effectively forgotten. In the way local populations turned on their Jewish neighbours and participated in mass killing, he finds seeds of the later Holocaust.

In Bulgaria, King Boris, mythologised as “a saviour of the Jews”, refused entreaties to stop the deportation of Jews from Bulgarian-occupied areas of Greece. In addition, this work serves as a call to action for modern politics, as we have never been so close to implementing a Nazi-like regime as we are today, as we can see in the numerous threats to our local Jewish communities. As written by Kurt Rosenberg, in August 1933, "Day by day the assault on human rights and the assault on human dignities continues..." It's scary to think that he could be talking about the numerous hate crimes that appear on our evening news (or details as small as the shirts worn by violent protestors on 01/06/2021). He says, the report makes the explicit conclusion that the crimes on Alderney were “systematically brutal and callous” and that there was a “long-standing policy of maintaining inhumane conditions, under nourishment, ill-treatment and over work” and that the key cause of death was “starvation assisted by the physical ill-treatment and over-work”.They died in huge numbers. Antonescu did this willingly and not under Nazi instruction. Unlike Poland, Romania was not occupied by Hitler’s forces. Antonescu murdered Jews because he wanted to — not at Hitler’s behest. Badly written, but nevertheless offering a useful overview of the holocaust. There must be some – presumably the author's students – who really appreciate reading e.g.: "We see [the 'collective intoxication' of Nazism] in the incel culture of the manosphere …" 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”.