The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
Dan Stone, Pelican , £22.00

THE infamous Arbeit Macht Frei welcome emblazoned over the gates of Auschwitz, along with the deadly mushroom cloud carapace over Hiroshima, is arguably one of two formative images conditioning modern consciousness. 

Dan Stone believes we must “move beyond a mechanistic interpretation of industrial genocide” to understand the Holocaust. Rather than a highly efficiently organised and activated transporting, gassing and incinerating of millions of Jews, not to mention Muslim Roma, mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, trade unionists, communists, Soviet POWs and other “asocials”, almost half of the victims of the Holocaust died of starvation in ghettos or were shot in face-to-face killing actions.

Moreover, while we generally consider the Holocaust to have been first and foremost a German project, without “the almost ubiquitous collaboration across Europe and beyond” the ghastly programme could not have been nearly so extensive.