Stone is the director of the Royal Holloway’s Holocaust
Research Institute in London. He is the
author of over 20 books, including Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after
World War II and The Liberation of the Camps. The Holocaust: An Unfinished
History (2023), Concentration Camps: A Short History (2017), and Histories of
the Holocaust (2010).
Stone’s book has a subtitle called 'The Unfinished History,'
which probably alludes to the number of books on or about the Holocaust, which
is approaching 40,000. But as the Marxist writer David North says:
“Here we encounter a terrible problem: For all that has been
said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. A
vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has indeed been collected. We
possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised and executed their
“Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews. And yet the issues
that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its historical origins,
political causes and, finally, its place in the history of the twentieth century—have,
with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly. This is, really, an
intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust,
“Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain
an answer.”[1]
It must be said that Stone gives a good go at answering
North’s question. Stone’s book provides a "brisk, compelling and
scholarly" account that seeks to supplement the vast historiography
already in place. Stone argues against the historiography that the Holocaust
was exclusively a German project, highlighting the extensive collaboration and independent
murders from other European nations like Romania and France.
While accepting the idea that the Holocaust was an “industrial
genocide” taking place at the main concentration camps, Stone supplements
this analysis with other shocking facts that millions were killed elsewhere and
by different methods, too. The “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for
1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942. In late
1944, as the Russian army advanced westwards towards Germany, the Nazis
evacuated the camps. They forced the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates
onto “death marches”, sometimes over vast distances in the winter. This claimed
another 250,000 victims, often shot by SS guards when they collapsed and could
no longer walk.
Ideology
Stone’s examination of Nazi ideology is to be welcomed. He
argues that for too long, Nazi ideology has been downplayed. Stone is critical
of the post-war tendency to deny any political coherence to the Nazis’ ideas. He
believes that Nazi ideology represented a radicalisation of ruling class ideas
of nationalism, imperialism and race.
He says that the Nazis didn’t have a developed programme for
genocide worked out in advance. But he says we need to take seriously their
ideological motivation, which always harboured a genocidal potential capable of
being unleashed under certain circumstances.
While Stone does not accept the right-wing theory that the
Holocaust is such a terrible event that it defies a rational explanation, he pays
little attention to the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive
the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. In other words, Stone
tends to downplay Marxist historians' attempt to use historical science and
political theory to understand the Holocaust.
Although Stone uses a large number of historians to examine
Nazi ideology, he mostly ignores any Marxist-based historiography. A simple
reading of the writings of Leon Trotsky or Abraham Leon, to name just two
Marxists, would give a historian a far deeper insight into the rise of fascism
and of Nazi Ideology.[2]
Stone’s use of Ernst Bloch is problematic to say the least. Bloch
was not a classical Marxist. Bloch (1885–1977) occupies a complex position in
Marxist thought. He is best known for his attempt to retrieve utopian hope as
an element of Marxist theory—most famously in The Principle of Hope—insisting
that human longing and anticipatory consciousness matter for politics. From the
standpoint of classical Marxism and the continuity of the Fourth International,
Bloch’s contribution must be assessed dialectically: what in his work advances
the materialist understanding of history, and what tendencies lead away from
the independent revolutionary politics of the working class?
Bloch insisted that utopian impulses—aspirations,
anticipations, images of a better world—are not mere illusions but social
phenomena rooted in objective contradictions. He sought to recuperate the
emotional and imaginative dimensions of social life that orthodox economic or
“vulgar” readings of Marxism can marginalise. This emphasis corresponds to
Marxism’s insistence that human consciousness is shaped by social being; yet
classical Marxism places primary explanatory weight on the development of the
productive forces and class relations as the motive forces of history. Bloch’s
insistence on hope supplements but must not displace the materialist analysis
of how objective conditions—production, class struggle, political
institutions—generate revolutionary possibilities. To say that Bloch was “unusually”
the only Marxist to take fascism seriously is not only wrong but is a political
lie.
Another writer missing from Stone’s work is Konrad Heiden.[3]
Heiden's biography of Hitler is worth reading. Heiden’s insight into Hitler’s anti-Semitism
is worth an extensive examination.
According to Heiden, “Hitler hated the whole great sphere of
human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into
product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in
this process of production. All his life, the workers were for him a picture of
horror, a dismal, gruesome mass … everything which he later said from the
speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies.
Heiden explains Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In
Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from
his encounters with the labour movement. It was among the workers that Hitler
first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that
many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light
dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. …
The labour movement did not repel him because Jews led it[4]The
Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement. Heiden concluded, “It
was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled
Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ”Stone has profited intellectually from a careful
study of Heiden’s biography of Hitler.
Given that Stone has conducted extensive historiographical
work, he has written 20 books on or about the Holocaust; his conclusions on how
to fight modern-day genocide and the rise of fascism are troubling, to say the
least. He writes, “The fact is that Holocaust education goes out of the window
if people feel their life chances are narrowing; nothing in the end can stop
people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.”
This is extraordinarily fatalistic. The goal is not merely
to “know” the Holocaust as an isolated tragedy, but to understand its roots in
class, imperialism and political defeat—and to transform that understanding
into organised political action to build the international socialist movement
that can prevent future barbarism. From a Marxist standpoint, Stone’s empirical
and historiographical contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Marxism
begins with the materialist method: social phenomena, including ideologies and
mass crimes, are rooted in concrete material relations—class structures,
property relations, state formation and the competitive dynamics of
imperialism. The destruction of mass working-class political organisations left
the proletariat unable to interpose itself as an independent social force; this
political vacuum was decisive.
[1]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[2]wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Struggle_Against_Fascism_in_Germany
[3]wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Heiden
[4]
Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944)
