The new academic year began with another ‘Dialogues in Holocaust Education’ online session. We were hugely pleased to be joined by Professor Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London who spoke about his pathbreaking new book ‘The Holocaust: An Unfinished History’. During the hour-long session, Dan challenged us to question our assumptions about the Holocaust and, in doing so, posed questions about how we teach the subject.
In this blog we briefly outline the three misconceptions that Professor Stone examines in ‘The Holocaust: An Unfinished History’.
1. The Holocaust is about more than Germans and Jews.
The first misconception that Dan identified asks us to consider whether we present our students with a skewed picture of the victims of the Holocaust: does out teaching focus too much on German Jews? The facts tell us that German Jews make up no more than 5% of total victims of the Holocaust and that more Jews from the city of Warsaw were murdered in the Holocaust than in the whole of western Europe. The majority of victims come from eastern Europe and they were poor, traditional Jews living in small villages in Eastern Europe. They were people who, on the whole didn’t look like us, about who we know very little and are perhaps harder to relate to those people than assimilated Jews such as the Frank family. We should, of course, ask our students to think about German Jews but we should also have them consider who else was killed.
With regard to perpetrators there was continent wide collaboration. The main example is Romanian collaboration, which may not feature on many of our schemes of learning. Dan related how, in the initial stages of the Holocaust under Ion Antonescu, Romanian forces were responsible for killing more Jews than any regime other than Nazi Germany. Indeed, the single largest massacre of the Holocaust (larger than Babi Yar, and larger than those that took place during Operation Harvest Festival) took place around the village of Bogdanovka on the banks of the Bug River in what is today Ukraine (for more see Murder Story of Odessa Jews in Bogdanovka (yadvashem.org) ) in Dec-Jan 1941-42. Forty eight thousand Jews were shot by mostly Ukrainian militia and Volksdeutsch, under Romanian authority.
2. Concentration camps are not synonymous with the Holocaust
The second misconception that Dan challenged us to consider was the idea that we possibly focus too much on concentration camps as a central part of the Holocaust. Dan explained that the concentration camp system proper, that is to say the camps under the authority of the Nazi Concentration Camp Inspectorate (IKL), was not established to kill Jews but to hold ‘enemies’ such as political prisoners and asocials. Auschwitz and Majdanek both combined the functions of concentration camp and extermination camp and slave labour camp. The death camps proper: the Operation Reinhard camps, Chelmno and so on were outside Inspectorate of Concentration Camps and were not concentration camps in this sense. Dan argued that the common perception of the concentration camp system being ‘Holocaust camps’ confusion comes from the end of war when Jews were sent on death marches and ended up in camps in Germany where they were found.
3. Importance of Death Marches and sub-camps for understanding the Holocaust Lastly, Dan argued that the often-neglected Death Marches and the sub-camp system should hold a more central place in our schemes of learning. It is perhaps easy to understand why these features of the Holocaust are not commonly taught: they don’t easily fit the narrative of categorisation, ghettoisation, deportation and murder… The Death Marches and existence of the sub-camps represent a further complication of the narrative that we should perhaps seek to work into our schemes of learning. There were about 1,000 sub camps run by the SS and attached to main camps: places with names such as Christianstadt, Eintrachthütte and Blechhammer that will be unfamiliar to most. The chaotic state of the German war economy in the late stages of the war and the desperate need for labour meant that Nazi ideology was put on ice for a bit so that young fit Jews could be taken from camps to be used as slave labourers. Similarly, the Death Marches are not easy to incorporate into the traditional narrative of the Holocaust that will be familiar to us. At the time that Himmler issued the order that camp inmates shouldn’t fall alive into hands of allies there were about 714,000 registered prisoners in the IKL system. About a third died en route between January – April/May 1945 in completely senseless killing. They are massacred in every small village in central and eastern Europe as the Gardelegen Massacre evidences. The Death marches have been understood by some as final stage of Holocaust…and perhaps that doesn’t make much sense because if the Nazis wanted to kill everybody they had the means at their disposal…but they didn’t. How to incorporate this into a narrative is a tough question. Whilst the Death Marches certainly deserves a place in our schemes of learning the reality of them as explained by Dan further complicates the narrative that we have to ask our students to comprehend.
To learn more about Professor Dan Stone’s ‘The Holocaust: An Unfinished History’ please take a look at a recording of the online session here:
