Book Talk: The Holocaust - An Unfinished History, by Dan Stone

The Wiener Holocaust Library was delighted to host a hybrid book talk event to celebrate the publication of Prof Dan Stone’s newest book, The Holocaust - an Unfinished History. He will be led in conversation with Prof Matthew Feldman. In-person participants will have the opportunity to purchase the book for signature.
The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But major aspects of its history have been overlooked and misunderstood. Spanning not just the Holocaust itself but also the decades since, this sweeping history deepens our understanding of what the Holocaust actually was and its ongoing repercussions across the world today.
This new book reveals that:
the widely held image of ‘industrial murder’ in concentration camps is incomplete: many were killed where they lived, by neighbours and in the most brutal of ways.
the Holocaust was a truly Europe-wide crime. The depth of collaboration across the continent - from Norway to Romania - means we must stop thinking of it as an exclusively German project.
Nazi ideology was an extreme continuation of ideas that were and remain deeply embedded across Europe, not the deviation from Western thought that we tell ourselves it is.
similarly, the revival of the radical right today is a continuation rather than an aberration, meaning it has never been more urgent to fully reckon with the trauma wrought by the Holocaust.
Drawing on decades of research, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History upends much of what we think we know about the Holocaust. Stone draws on Nazi documents, but also on diaries, post-war testimonies and fiction, urging that, in our age of increasing nationalism and xenophobia, we must understand the true history of the Holocaust.
About the Speaker:
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at RHUL. He is a historian of ideas who works primarily on twentieth-century European history. His research interests include: the history and interpretation of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, history of anthropology, history of fascism, the cultural history of the British Right and theory of history. He is the author or editor of twenty books and over eighty scholarly articles. From 2016 to 2019 he was engaged on a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for a project on the International Tracing Service. The resulting book, Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after the Holocaust and World War II, will be published by Oxford University Press. He is co-editing volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust. He chaired the academic advisory board for the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Galleries redesign, which opened in October 2021, and is a member of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s Experts Reference Group and the UK Oversight Committee for the International Tracing Service Archive.
Described in The Independent as “the leading expert on the radical right” and by ITV as the ‘UK’s leading specialist in this area’, Matthew Feldman is a consultant, writer and Emeritus Professor in the Modern History of Ideas. He has published a dozen volumes on fascism and the radical right, as well as dozens of chapters, articles and comment pieces on this and other subjects. He has also consulted widely via hundreds of media interviews and more than two dozen cases as an Expert Witness on radical right terrorism, as well as delivering keynote lectures for the G-7, Council of Europe and many other bodies. Much of his work on radical right narratives and counter-speech is undertaken via his Oxford-based company, Academic Consulting Services, alongside specialist training, reports and advisory work with a variety of public and private bodies. Professor Feldman’s third collection of essays will appear in 2023, and his history of fascism will be published with Yale University Press in 2024.
Chaired by:
Dr Christine Schmidt is the Deputy Director and Head of Research at The Wiener Holocaust Library.