The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

The defining event of 20th-century Europe – the extermination of millions of Jews – has been commemorated, institutionalised and embedded in our collective consciousness. But in this nuanced and perceptive new history, Dan Stone contends that the true dimension of the horror wrought by the Nazis is inadvertently brushed aside in our current culture of commemoration. This is due in part to practical or conceptual challenges, such as the continent-wide scale of the crime and the multiplicity of sources in many languages; and in part to an unwillingness to confront the reality that the Holocaust could not have happened without the assistance of numerous non-Nazi states and agents. This work is structured around four themes – trauma, collaboration, genocidal fantasy and post-war consequences.