Donald Bloxham . The Final Solution: A Genocide . (Oxford Histories.) New York : Oxford University Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 410. Cloth $80.00, paper $29.95.

Abstract

In his new comparative study of the Holocaust, Donald Bloxham seeks to contextualize the Final Solution within a veritable wave of ethnically based mass killings in Europe and elsewhere that started in the late nineteenth century and continued through the twentieth. As the title of the work indicates, Bloxham argues that the genocide of Jews during World War II was essentially “a particular example of a broader phenomenon” (p. i). Thus Bloxham's book is an argument against the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust. However, while Bloxham is successful at demonstrating similarities, he does not adequately explain differences. In the first major section of this work, Bloxham argues that both the “eastern crisis” of 1875–1878, in which new states emerged out of the weakening Ottoman Empire, and the period 1912–1922, starting with the Balkan wars and ending with the Greco-Turkish War, were marked by “a very modern form of violence: ethnic cleansing,” an effort to reverse the ethnic balance of power (p. 59). According to Bloxham, this was also the essential nature of the mass killing of Jews during World War II. The second and largest section of the book provides a detailed and impressive account of the development of the Final Solution during the war. Bloxham contextualizes the Holocaust within the increasingly barbaric fighting on the Eastern Front and in relation to conflicting interests within the German leadership, as well as between Germany and its allies. In the third and last major section of the book, Bloxham points out psychological commonalities between all perpetrators of ethnic mass murder, not just European ones.