Shapiro Scholar Dan Stone presents on misconceptions about the Holocaust

2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence Dan Stone (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) gave a public lecture entitled, “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History” on April 8, 2024. In the lecture organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Stone spoke about new themes in historical research on the Holocaust and their wider significance on our understanding of the genocide of Jews during the Second World War.

Stone opened his lecture with first-hand accounts from Hannah Lévy Hass’s diary from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Isaiah Spiegel’s account of a rabbi in the Łodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto, teenagers who escaped the Minsk ghetto in September 1943, and an account from a Soviet trial of a collaborator. These four vignettes, Professor Stone argued, are representative of four trends in Holocaust scholarship that he discusses in his book: violence beyond industrial genocide, renewed geographical interest in Eastern Europe, the binaries between Jews and Germans, and how collaborators contributed to making the Holocaust as deadly as it was.

Calling himself a historian of ideas, Stone highlighted the nature of historical scholarship that makes people ask questions about the past that are shaped by the present. Historiography on the Holocaust has mushroomed, he argued, particularly as historians respond to the worlds around them. Therefore, the vocabulary from the Holocaust shapes the contemporary world in fascinating ways. There remains significant cultural interest in the Holocaust as well, he asserted, pointing to the popularity of “airport fiction” about the Holocaust that are typically titled “[Blank] of Auschwitz,” which are not serious engagements with the history of the Holocaust. While there is a difference between scholarly and cultural interest in the Holocaust, Stone said, it is important for Holocaust scholars to address recurring misconceptions of the Holocaust.

When thinking about the Holocaust, Stone pointed out, most people think about concentration camps. Tracing what led to this conflation, Stone pointed out that liberation of the camps in Germany happened because of the death marches – the retreat of concentration camp inmates and their SS guards from the advancing Allies from the East. The death marches facilitated the movement of hundreds of thousands of Jews – Jews who had always been engaged in forced labor during the Third Reich. Additionally, camp populations ballooned with the arrival of prisoners from the Eastern occupied territories.

In scholarship and cultural productions of the Holocaust there has been a binary between Germans and Jews, Stone argued. This binary obscures more than it clarifies. Firstly, some victims were both Jewish and German. Secondly, the majority of murdered Jews were from eastern Europe, but because more than half of German Jews escaped, there is a survivor bias, which leads to an overrepresentation of the experiences of Jews from Western Europe. However, it is also true that the narratives of survivors dominate the historical record, challenging the historical fact that the Nazis did not intend for any survivors.

The third issue that Dan Stone addressed in his lecture was collaboration. Eastern Europe and fascist memory have a complicated history, he described. At the end of the Cold War, Holocaust researchers had access to a plethora of sources in Eastern Europe that were previously inaccessible. Within the former Soviet Union, an internal commission began to look at the roles of former Soviet countries, which uncovered the extent of local collaboration. Stone argued that the Holocaust would not have been as deadly if it were not for local people helping the Nazis and the SS with identifying Jews and facilitating mass deportations and murders. Attending to the full extent of collaboration, Stone argued, shifts the narrative away from the prevalent one where local people collaborated only materially – benefiting from the theft of Jewish possessions. Exploring these wider dynamics of collaboration gives us more to examine in countries like Romania that had other authoritarian regimes after the Holocaust. Ion Antonescu, in fact, facilitated the murder 300,000 Jews. Romania will be the focus of Stone’s next book.

Lastly, Stone addressed the problems with “liberation” and with the idea that the Holocaust “ended” in 1945. Viewing liberation as a liberatory experience not only neglects the trauma that continued into the postwar years, but also erases the fact that all along, there was an incipient genocidal fantasy that Stone illuminated in his remarks. Neither the concept of “liberation” nor the belief that the Holocaust “ended” in 1945 reveal the breadth of what the Nazis did.

The lecture was followed by a lengthy and lively discussion with the audience. Professor Stone responded to questions about Romani and Sinti, disabled, and queer victims. While his book on which the lecture is based focuses on the Nazi genocide of Jews, he argued that the genocide against Romani, disabled, and queer victims also reflect the Nazi ideology. Responding to a question about diversity in the field, Stone gestured to the current echoes of feminist debates about the role of women’s histories from 30 years ago in the debates surrounding the place of queer histories of the Holocaust today. Stone also touched on the contemporary significance of studying genocide today, particularly in response to the legacies playing out in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, international legal experiences, and the architecture of postwar human rights.