Instead of presenting Holocaust history as a tidy affair wrapped in a bow with neat moral messages, Stone proposes that we examine its unfinishedness, its unknowability, and its very incompleteness. That is, he asks that rather than tell ourselves feel-good stories about having vanquished evil in the past, we sit in discomfort with the moral and historical chasm that the murder of six million beings opened in the fabric of history.
But what does it mean to say that the Holocaust is incomplete? It’s a question any reader might justifiably ask. After all, Allied forces put a stop to the murder of Europe’s Jews nearly 80 years ago. Leading Nazis were tried in the war’s aftermath, and Holocaust perpetrators have continued to face legal reckoning up to the present day. Nazis have not been in power anywhere in decades. In what way is this history incomplete?
It is a deliberately provocative title, which Stone uses to point to several specific areas of Holocaust history that are poorly comprehended, unknowable, or even misremembered. “There are still major parts of the history of the Holocaust,” he writes, “that have not been understood in the prevailing narrative.”
Part of the Holocaust’s unknowability stems from its origins. Stone points in particular to the role of ideology in spurring the mass murder. We know well, naturally, that Adolf Hitler and other leading National Socialists were rabid antisemites. Hitler’s infamous autobiography, Mein Kampf, is an antisemite’s manifesto, and Nazi propaganda was replete with antisemitic stereotype. But Stone insists that there is something unknowable or even mystical in the role that antisemitism played in Nazi thought. It was not merely “a logical outgrowth of Nazi eugenics,” he contends. Rather, “it grew from a mystical notion of ‘thinking with the blood,’” what the great Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer termed redemptive antisemitism: the notion that the “Aryan” race’s salvation lay in the extermination of Jewish people. The significance, to Stone, is that such hatreds do not have logical origins, nor can they be combated with reason. For our own world, increasingly characterized by misinformation, “fake news,” and conspiratorial thinking, it is a troubling conclusion.