An atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust can't be blamed solely on one person or even one country.

The Holocaust was a continent-wide crime.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music Episode 420, A Continent Wide Crime.

I've discussed the Holocaust a few times now in the course of this podcast, and one of the topics I've touched on was the question of how many Germans knew about the Holocaust as it was happening.

I pointed out that the mere logistics of moving so many people around

meant at the very minimum hundreds of thousands of railroad workers would have been aware.

Then there are the police and government workers and various eyewitnesses to the round-ups and deportations.

The total number of Germans who had at least some inkling of what was going on

surely ran into the millions.

But just as we shouldn't focus only on the SS or the Nazi leadership

and ignore the quiet complicity, at least, of millions of ordinary

Germans, neither should we focus exclusively on Germans and ignore the complicity of other people

in occupied Europe. In this regard, I am indebted to Dan Stone, director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway,

University of London, whose book The Holocaust and Unfinished Story has been valuable to me in

organizing my thoughts on this topic. Stone argues that the Holocaust should not be seen as one huge project entirely conceived and executed by the Germans,

but rather as a series of interlocking genocides across Europe,

encouraged and overseen by Berlin, yes, but each one managed locally.

Even within a nation, the war against the Jews could vary from location to location.

Romania, for example, had laws limiting the civil rights of Jews years before Germany enacted any,

and its government voluntarily cooperated

with the Germans in the deportation of its Jewish citizens, and yet, in some regions of Romania,

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