The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked.

That Romanian occupation, Stone writes, was “far removed from what, in the English-speaking world, we think of as the Holocaust”. After the Romanians captured Odessa in October 1941, nearly 25,000 of the city’s Jews were shot in one day. In the countryside, tens of thousands of local and deported Jews died of hunger and exposure after being forced to live in pigsties without shelter, food or clothing. Bogdanovka was only one of many massacres. The book’s main strength is its comparison of different countries, their authorities and their willingness to collaborate with the Nazis or slaughter local Jews themselves. The chapter on the death marches, when inmates were moved between concentration camps, and the eventual liberation of those camps and its aftermath, is especially strong, perhaps because Professor Stone has already written a book on this specific area. In one of the many carefully chosen and deeply haunting stories relayed in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Dan Stone records how a father, when the noise made by his nine-year-old boy threatens to have their family expelled by the man hiding them, strangles his son. “I am forever accursed as the murderer of my son,” he explains, “but I spared him much more suffering. At least I didn’t let him die at the hands of the murderers.”

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Yet at Bogdanovka, a place whose name has almost no resonance in the English-speaking world, as many as 54,000 people, mostly Ukrainian Jews, were shot by Ukrainian auxiliaries under the control of Romanian gendarmes and the local prefect, Modest Isopescu. In December 1941, more than 50,000 Jewish people were being detained in camps by the occupying Romanian army at Bogdanovka in southwestern Ukraine. Conditions were overcrowded and unsanitary, and after some cases of typhus broke out, the Romanian authorities decided to “liquidate” the camps in collaboration with German auxiliaries and Ukrainian militias and civilans. Auschwitz-Birkenau was, in fact, an aberration in the history of the Holocaust, in the sense that most of the Jews killed were dead by the end of 1942, before the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau were operating fully.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. In March 1942, 80 per cent of the Jewish victims were still alive. Almost a year later, 80 per cent of the six million were dead. On 26 November 1942, 532 Jews were rounded up in Oslo by Norwegian plainclothes policemen. They were taken in taxis to the local harbour, placed on the SS Donau, which took them to Germany, from where they were taken by “freight train” to Auschwitz. Almost all were gassed on arrival. The report says workers arrived in "normal health" but a few months in Aldeney left them in a "starved condition"He says, the report makes the explicit conclusion that the crimes on Alderney were “systematically brutal and callous” and that there was a “long-standing policy of maintaining inhumane conditions, under nourishment, ill-treatment and over work” and that the key cause of death was “starvation assisted by the physical ill-treatment and over-work”. Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman

Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ These killings, from the Einsatzgruppen shootings of autumn 1941 to the Reinhard camps in 1942-43, make clear two things: first, the Holocaust had little to do with the Nazis’ regular concentration camp system; second, that the concept of “industrial genocide” only partly captures the horror of the Holocaust. The Bulgarians oversaw the delivery of 11,343 Jews from Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia to the Gestapo in Vienna, who then transported them to Treblinka. Romania’s Ion Antonescu was an enthusiast for racial purity and dumped tens of thousands of Jews in Transnistria to fend for themselves.The discussion of post war anti semitism and the liberation of camps is very useful as is the discussion of displaced persons at the end of the war. The link to modern right wing resurgence and modern contexts is also useful. There are maps but no photos or illustrations and whilst media representations of the holocaust are mentioned there is no attempt to give a flavour of their work. Was this money saving or an attempt to emphasise the academic written work? I think photos may have been a useful tool in explaining his thinking if intelligent approaches to captioning were used. These “death marches”, about which I write at length in the book, saw about a third of the 714,000 concentration camp inmates that were alive in January 1945 murdered by the end of the war in May. But camps such as Belsen were not, strictly speaking, “Holocaust camps” until the last months of the war. Yet the case of Romania reminds us that regimes allied to Nazi Germany also participated, in that case with minimal German involvement, and for similar reasons: to rid Romania of the “threat” supposedly posed to the “Romanian race” by the Jews.