The Holocaust’ Review: The Road to Genocide

The Holocaust’ Review: The Road to Genocide

Modern ideas like nationalism and eugenics combined with ancient prejudice—Jew-hatred—to produce an atrocity of unprecedented scale.

Survival was the exception, death the norm.” That is how the British historian Dan Stone describes the fate of the Jews in “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History.” Reading his incisive analysis of the genocidal endgame that unfolded from Nazi antisemitism in the early 20th century, one would be unsettled at any time. But doing so against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre that killed some 1,200 Israelis, in the largest mass murder of Jews since World War II, will leave the reader numbly groping for answers.

Mr. Stone, a professor of modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London, completed his volume before the Hamas attack, but his title is predictive. The Holocaust remains unfinished, he writes, because we have failed “unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust.” Despite the often-repeated directive to never forget, much of the world, he contends, has turned away from challenging the dark residue of Holocaust hatreds that still threaten democracy today. Populist parties and authoritarian leaders continue to gain ground as they echo the same malicious prejudices and unfounded racial myths propounded by Hitler and the Nazi party.

Rather than chronicle the month-by-month and country-by-country timeline of the Holocaust—for that, look to the German scholar Peter Longerich’s comprehensive history, “Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews” (2010)—Mr. Stone emphasizes the central role played by Hitler’s racial ideology in luring willing Nazi adherents, one goose step at a time, on a journey that began with “Mein Kampf” and culminated in the annihilation of six million Jews.