history
Also underestimated by the West was the level of opposition to Hitler, both among the German public and among his own military top brass and civil servants. Public discontent is, of course, always hard to gauge in a police state. Even harder to judge was the veracity of the inflated rumours of German military muscle that were fed to the West by Hitler’s opponents in his own Abwehr (military intelligence service) in the hope of alarming the West into taking tougher action against him.
Most unfortunate of all, in retrospect, was the reluctance of the Western powers to decapitate the Nazi regime by simply assassinating Hitler or encouraging his internal opponents to do so. Although there was the risk of making him a martyr, the information presented here suggests that the regime would have crumbled without the Führer. In particular, the Oster Plot, aimed at replacing
Hitler with a British-style constitutional monarchy, supported by Winston Churchill when on the backbenches, failed largely because of Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich.
This book argues convincingly, like so many others, that the right juncture for a Western military ultimatum was over Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Allied military strength, and especially air power, far exceeded Hitler’s. Less familiar is the suggestion here that Western guarantees to Po l a n d a y e a r l a t e r we r e e q u a l l y m i s g u i d e d .
The Poles, far from being innocent victims, had earlier intrigued with Hitler over the partitioning of Czechoslovakia. However, they refused to negotiate with him over the status of the majority German city of Danzig, given to them at Versailles, or of the Polish Corridor, which divided the bulk of Germany from the province of East Prussia. The evidence cited here suggests that Hitler had little appetite for a major European war but may have been provoked into his invasion of Poland by a combination of Western threats and Polish intransigence.
Hitler’s main long-term objective was to smash the Soviet Union, an aim with which many Western appeasers sympathised. Even the treaty with his fellow dictator Stalin is presented in this book as a clever subterfuge, designed to lull the latter into a false sense of security. How this might have played out without Western intervention, and how long Hitler would have survived discontent at home and in occupied central and eastern Europe, are questions that remain unanswerable. What is evident from this remarkably thorough and well-researched study is that false intelligence presents many pitfalls, as we see all too clearly in our own era of dodgy dossiers.
mary fulbrook
Many Faces of Genocide
The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
By Dan Stone (Pelican 464pp £22)
People glancing at this book might ask whether we need another general his- tor y of the Holocaust. There are already well-established syntheses and original over views, including Saul Friedländer’s path-breaking two-volume histor y of the persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews, in which he called for an ‘integrated history’ giving voice to vic- tims. What does Dan Stone’s latest have to add to the existing literature?
The Holocaust is, as the subtitle of this book indicates, an almost overwhelming topic to tackle and one on which it is impossible to say the final word. Even the concept itself is problematic. While some historians interpret the term widely, to encompass the persecution and murder of a range of groups – including Sinti and Roma, and the mentally and physically disabled – others, such as Dan Stone and his late colleague David Cesarani, prefer a narrower definition relating specifically to the Jews. While some see the Holocaust as one case in a longer histor y of genocide or situate it in a wider framework of colonialism, others see the mass murder of Jews as sui generis. Even the ver y term is disputed. Some prefer the Hebrew word Shoah (‘catastrophe’), the title of Claude Lanzmann’s masterly film of 1985, to ‘Holocaust ’ (‘totally burnt ’), popularised by the 1978 American television miniseries of that name. Other historians, such as Richard J Evans, insist on using the Nazis’ own phrase, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.
Beyond the conceptual debates, there are issues of scope and explanatory framework. Many older histories focused quite narrowly on German policies and perpetrators, but the last thirty years have seen a huge expansion of research on both victim experiences and also perpetration and collaboration across Europe. This is particularly the case for eastern Europe, where sources became more accessible following the collapse of communism, though access remains constrained by political considerations in some cases (see, for instance, recent controversies over complicity in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia) and has been further compromised by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The expansion of empirical knowledge has not led, however, to mutually agreed explanations. In particular, the role of anti-Semitism remains central to debates. Was ideologically driven hatred of Jews – Friedländer’s ‘redemptive’ antiSemitism, Nazi determination to ‘annihilate’ not only Jews but also the ‘Jewish spirit ’ (emphasised by scholars such as Dan Michman) – the primary motivating force? Or is the mass killing of Jews only explicable in terms of wartime factors, such as the scarcity of food, the perceived need for labour, strategic considerations, peer-group pressure, brutalisation in warfare, local greed, social envy and the desire for sheer sur vival? Similarly, the roles of Hitler, Himmler and German policymakers have been explored not just in terms of political structures at the highest level in the Reich (as in the heated debates between ‘intentionalists’ and ‘functionalists’ in the 1980s), but also in terms of
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