With so many books available about the Shoah, Michael M. Rosen asks, “what more can there possibly be to say?” In reviewing Dan Stone’s The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Rosen concludes that there is indeed much more. One topic that remains under-researched in Stone’s estimation is the sheer extent of the effort involved in carrying out the mass murder of European Jews:
The entire Nazi war machine, police and Wehrmacht included, [after 1938] began to dedicate itself to the mission of eradicating global Jewry. . . . Yet the Nazi extermination effort expanded far beyond the lands and armed forces controlled exclusively by Germany.
The Holocaust, Stone contends, “looks more like a series of interlocking local genocides carried out under the auspices of a grand project.” Certain countries that held “nationalist aspirations to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states,” such as Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, and the Baltic states, eagerly participated in the killing, partly because of long-standing anti-Semitism and partly out of a pragmatic need to ally with Germany. Others, such as Norway and the Netherlands, succumbed to political groups that seized power with explicitly Nazi ideologies and even more avidly herded their Jews to the camps.
But any such resistance was only partial, and, with very few exceptions, every country in Europe participated in rounding up its Jewish population in one manner or another. “Genocide is a societal endeavor,” Stone argues.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/michael-rosen/holocaust-unfinished-history/