Donald Bloxham,The Final Solution: A Genocide(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The views presented here are my own; they do not represent the opinions of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. On the latter, see Timothy Snyder, ‘The coming age of slaughter: will global warming unleash genocide?’, The New Republic, 28 October 2010, pp 20–21. Mark Levene, ‘Nation-states, empires, and the problems of historicizing genocide: a response to Wolfgang Reinhard and Anthony Pagden’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 9, No 1, 2007, p 132. See e.g. Joanna Michlic, Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jews from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Mark Mazower, ‘God's grief’, Times Literary Supplement, Vol 17, 2010, pp 7–8. Levene, ‘Nation-states’, p 128. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Bloxham, Final Solution, pp 139–143, 314; Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), part II; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol 1 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), pp 73–112. Bloxham, Final Solution, p 108. Peter Holquist, ‘The origins of “crimes against humanity”’, unpublished paper (2010); Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: American and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp 1–85. A. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, colony, genocide’, in A.D. Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p 21, citing Raphael Lemkin, ‘Hitler case-outline’: ‘The case against the Jews and the Gypsies was not based upon colonisatery [sic] but upon racial considerations … The race theory served the purpose of consolidating internally the German people… by comparing them with those who were called and classified as vermin of the earth—the Jews and the Gypsies’. Moses does not analyze this quotation, which contradicts his own argument. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998); Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp 23–37, 97–101; Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp 81–82; Omer Bartov, The Jew in Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp 47–49. A postwar British documentary was introduced on ITN with the following false statement: ‘Eleven million people died in Nazi Germany's death camps; six million were Jews’. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (eds and trans.), From a Ruined Garden, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998); David G. Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1988). Bloxham, Genocide; Douglas, Judgment, pp 11–94; Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945–46 (Boston: Bedford Press, 1997); Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961); Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), pp 9–40. Devin O. Pendas, ‘Transitional justice and just transitions’, European Studies Forum, Vol 38, 2008, pp 57–64; Pendas, ‘Seeking justice, finding law’, Journal of Modern History, Vol 81, 2009, pp 347–368; Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, trans. Ora Cummings and David Herman (New York: Schocken, 2004). Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p 66. New English editions of The Destruction of the European Jews were published in 1985 and 2003; German, French, Italian, Romanian, and Dutch translations appeared in 1982, 1988, 1995, 1997, and 2008, respectively. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–45 (New York: Pelican, 1975); Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1980); Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz, trans. Philip O'Connor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution (Lincoln, NA: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1998); Longerich, Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, II: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). Christopher R. Browning, ‘From “ethnic cleansing” to genocide to the “final solution”’: the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy, 1939–1941, in Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp 1–25, 26–57, respectively; Browning, The Path to Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Götz Aly, Final Solution, trans. Belinda Cooper and Alison Brown (New York: Arnold, 1999). Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Amir Weiner (ed.), Landscaping the Human Garden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Steven B. Bowman, ‘Greece’, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp 265–270; Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, ‘Elimination of the Jewish national home in Palestine’, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol 35, 2007, pp 111–141. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); Shmuel Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 1941–1944 (Jerusalem, 1986, in Hebrew); Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien, 1941-1944 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds), The Shoah in Ukraine (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); Omer Bartov, ‘Interethnic relations in the Holocaust as seen through postwar testimonies’, in Doris Bergen (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, VII (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), pp 101–124; Bartov, Erased (Princeton: Princeton University Press,, 2007); Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe as the site of genocide’, Journal of Modern History, Vol 80, No 3, 2008, pp 557–593. Leo Kuper, Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Alexander Laban Hinton (ed.), Annihilating Difference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’; Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy, trans. Cynthia Schoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse than War (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). Kuper, Genocide, pp 17–18. Kuper, Genocide, p 17. Kuper, Genocide, p 20. Kuper, Genocide, pp 23–24. Kuper, Genocide, pp 24–30. Kuper, Genocide, pp 30–31. Kuper, Genocide, pp 31–32. Kuper, Genocide, pp 32–36. Kuper, Genocide, pp 84–85. Kuper, Genocide, p 48. Kuper, Genocide, pp 86–87. Kuper, Genocide, p 88. Kuper, Genocide, pp 91–93. Kuper, Genocide, pp 94–95. Omer Bartov, ‘Communal genocide’, in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (eds), Shatterzone of Empires: Identity and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). See also Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival (New York: Norton, 2009); Browning, Collected Memories (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Bloxham provides something of a disclaimer on the back cover, where he points out that ‘emblems can lack precision: the rail extension through the tower was only completed in spring 1944, long after the vast majority of Holocaust victims had met their deaths’. E.g. Nazi German destruction of Jews is examined in the context of expulsions and extreme violence in Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and as part of a wider analysis of religion and violence in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghann Books, 2001). Sexual violence in the Holocaust and German-occupied Europe is contextualized within the history of sexuality in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); other contextualizing efforts and challenges are evident in Paul Betts and Christian Wiese (eds), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Continuum, 2010), the latter with a glowing endorsement from Donald Bloxham. The Herzog and Betts and Wiese volumes probably appeared too late to be considered by Bloxham; the Bartov/Mack volume and, more surprisingly, Naimark do not appear in the bibliography or notes. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); for an explicit discussion of key issues, see Weinberg, ‘The Holocaust and World War II: a dilemma in teaching’, in Donald G. Schilling (ed.), Lessons and Legacies II: Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp 26–40. Bloxham cites the 1995 volume of essays on a minor point (ch. 5, note 1) but does not acknowledge Weinberg's integration of the Holocaust and World War II. Influential works include Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Sybil Milton, ‘The Holocaust: The Gypsies’, in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology of Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp 133–168; and Milton, ‘The context of the Holocaust’, German Studies Review, Vol 13, No 2, 1990, pp 269–283. Friedlander's book appears in one note, only as a source of general information (ch. 5, note 5). See, among other works, Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), included by Bloxham only in two footnotes related to World War I: one listing ‘Western-centric’ works (ch. 2, note 3) and another referring to the impact of the war on staffing Freikorps and later Nazi institutions (ch. 4, note 52); Dan Stone (ed.), Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), see Stone's contribution, ‘The Holocaust and its historiography’, esp. pp 387–391, ‘Holocaust and/as genocide’ and ‘Conclusions’; and Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, ‘The study of mass murder and genocide’, in Gellately and Kiernan (eds), The Specter of Genocide. Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp 3–26. See, among other works, Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage, 1993); Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p 1296; see also Christopher Browning, ‘Spanning a career: three editions of Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews’, in Doris L. Bergen (ed.), Lessons and Legacies VIII: From Generation to Generation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), pp 191–202. See, for starters, Zvi Gitelman (ed.), Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Gross, Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006); John-Paul Himka, Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories (Saskatoon, SK: Heritage, 2009); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Omer Bartov, ‘Interethnic relations in the Holocaust as seen through postwar testimonies: Buczacz, East Galicia, 1941–1944’, in Bergen, Lessons and Legacies VIII, pp 101–124; Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, ‘Deadly communities: local political milieus and the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol 44, No 3, 2011, pp 259–283; Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Holly Case, ‘Territorial revision and the Holocaust: Hungary and Slovakia during World War II’, in Bergen, Lessons and Legacies XIII, pp 222–244; Diana Dumitru, ‘The attitude of the non-Jewish population of Bessarabia and Transnistria to the Jews during the Holocaust’, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol 37, No 1, 2009; Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, The Carpathian Diaspora: The Jews of Subcarpathian Rus' and Mukachevo, 1848–1948, trans. Joel A. Linsider (New York: Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, 2007). Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bloxham, Genocide, The World Wars, and the Unweaving of Europe (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008). For recent, outstanding scholarship of relevance on this point, see Max Bergholz, ‘Mass killing in a Bosnian community during World War II and the postwar culture of silence’, (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2010). On hatred as a product of violence, see also Doris L. Bergen, ‘Nazi antisemitism’, in Albert Lindemann and Richard S. Levy (eds), Antisemitism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch 12. Semion Lyandres, The Bolsheviks' ‘German Gold’ Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1995). Sara Ginaite-Rubinson, Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community in Kaunas, 1941-1944 (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press and the Holocaust Centre of Toronto, 2005). See, most notably, Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontier of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007). An earlier article by Bryant appears in one of Bloxham's notes (ch 5, note 18). On the indeterminacy of ethnic/national/racial/religious categories in other contexts and their implications, see Doris L. Bergen, ‘The Nazi concept of Volksdeutsche and the exacerbation of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 29, 1994, pp 569–582; Kate Brown, ‘The final solution turns East: how Soviet internationalism aided and abetted Nazi racial genocide’, in Bergen, Lessons and Legacies VIII, pp 83–99; and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Elie Wiesel, at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, turned to Bill Clinton and said, ‘Mr. President, I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since what I have seen. We must do something to prevent the bloodshed. Something, anything must be done’. ‘Elie Wiesel's Remarks at the dedication ceremonies for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 22 April 22 1993’: http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/faq/languages/en/06/01/ceremony/?content=wiesel; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. ch 3, ‘Comparisons with other genocides’. Also notable for its comparative premise is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). One manifestation of the complex and dynamic relationship between Holocaust studies and genocide studies is the massive ‘Remembering for the Future’ conference held at Oxford University in 1998, on the theme of ‘The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide’. See the resulting publication: John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell (eds), Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in An Age of Genocide, 3 vols. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Donald Bloxham has a chapter, ‘Jewish slave labour and its relationship to the “Final Solution”’, in Vol 1, pp 163–186. Saul Friedländer, ‘Prologue’, in Jonathan Petropoulos, Lynn Rapaport, and John K. Roth (eds), Lessons and Legacies IX: Memory, History, and Responsibility: Reassessments of the Holocaust, Implications for the Future (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p 3. I thank Dan Stone, Tom Lawson, Mark Roseman and Dirk Moses for their comments on a draft of this response. Mazower, ‘God's grief’. Emphases added. Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). See especially conclusion and chs 3–4 of Genocide on Trial; additionally, Bloxham, ‘Jewish witnesses in war crimes trials of the postwar era’, in David Bankier and Dan Michman (eds), Holocaust Historiography in Context (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), pp 539–544. Bloxham, The Final Solution, p 14; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: Harper Collins, 1997, 2007); for assessments, Paul Betts and Christian Wiese (eds), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Continuum, 2010). See Goldhagens' review of the Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews in The Washington Post, 13 May 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051101768.html Monika Richarz, ‘Luftaufnahme—Die Schwierigkeiten der Heimatforscher mit der jüdischen Geschichte’, Babylon, Vol 8, 1991, pp 27–33. I thank Stefanie Schüler-Springorum for this reference. I am not talking about focusing solely on Jewish victims here: on some of the politics of victim selection, see my ‘Britain's Holocaust memorial days: reshaping the past in the service of the present’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol 21, No 1, 2003, pp 41–62. Editors' introduction to Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp 1–15, here p 5. Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp 2, 236, 258. A. Dirk Moses, ‘Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the racial century: genocide of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 36, No 4, 2002, pp 7–36. Moses, ‘Conceptual blockages’; A. Dirk Moses, ‘The United Nations, humanitarianism and human rights: war crimes/genocide trials for Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh, 1971–1974’, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (ed), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: A Critical History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp 258–280; idem, ‘Paranoia and partisanship: genocide studies, Holocaust historiography and the “apocalyptic conjuncture”’, Historical Journal, Vol 54, No 2, 2011, pp 615–645. On the Armenian case, Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. chs 5–6; on Yugoslavia, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp 245–255. On the tensions between commemoration and preventionism in British public life, and some suggested synergies, see Bloxham, ‘Britain's Holocaust memorial days’. David Moshman, ‘Conceptual constraints on thinking about genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 3, No 3, 2001, pp 431–450. For the politics of comparison and the Armenian case, Donald Bloxham, ‘The organization of genocide: perpetration in comparative perspective’, in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szjenmann (eds), Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective (London: Palgrave, 2008), pp 185–200. He was influenced both by his family's experience in Europe and by his time in Nigeria immediately prior to the Biafran conflict. See Robert Melson, ‘My journey in the study of genocide’, in Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs (eds), Pioneers of Genocide Studies: Confronting Mass Death in the Century of Genocide (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2002). Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgment, 1919–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977). Richard J. Evans, ‘Who remembers the Poles?’, London Review of Books, 4 November 2010. My emphasis. Dan Stone, ‘Beyond the “Auschwitz syndrome”: Holocaust historiography after the Cold War’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 44, No 5, 2010, pp 454–468, here p 466. On some of the ideological connotations of uniqueness regarding the West's violent relations to the rest of the world, see also Moses, ‘Conceptual blockages’.