The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Lecture
April 8, 2024 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Doheny Memorial Library, Room 240
(Join us in person or on Zoom)
A public lecture by Dan Stone (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London)
2023-2024 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence
Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation
In this distinguished lecture, Dan Stone will discuss his recent book in which he addresses several misconceptions that remain prevalent concerning the history of the Holocaust. These include: the fact that the Holocaust concerns “Germans” and “Jews”; the role played by resistance to Nazi rule; and the equation of the Holocaust with the Nazis’ concentration camp system. Instead, Stone stresses the continent-wide focus of the Holocaust, both where the victims are concerned and with respect to the vast scale of collaboration of all sorts, from state-led, as in Romania, to individual acts of theft and venality, across Europe; and the fact that the murder of the Jews had very little to do with concentration camps until the final stages of the war.
In tackling these topics, Stone will consider the significance of Nazi ideology and how it should be conceived; the different roles played by non-German actors; and the fact that the Holocaust did not simply “end” in 1945. Indeed, the fact that the history of the Holocaust is unfinished is clearer today than ever.
This lecture will be followed by a lunch hosted by USC Shoah Foundation. Advanced RSVP for the lunch (via the registration form above) is required. Space is limited.
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including, most recently: Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023) and The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023 / Mariner, 2024).
He has also co-edited, with Mark Roseman, volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust (forthcoming 2025). He recently completed a book about psychoanalysis and Holocaust survival and is now working on a history of the Holocaust in Romania.
Read more about him here.
Lecture image: The image on the British edition book cover of “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History” is by the artist François Reisz. It shows women performing slave labor and comes from the 1946 book, “Témoignages sur Auschwitz,” published by the Amicale des Déportés d’Auschwitz in Paris.