Donald Bloxham

British War Crimes Trial Policy in Germany, 1945–1957: Implementation and Collapse

The scholarship on the punishment programs of the Allies in Germany after the Second World War is unbalanced. It is heavily weighted toward the origins and course of the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg. Relatively, there is only a tiny amount dealing with the Allied prosecution of Nazi criminals beyond that well-known trial. Owing to this focus, detailed research has, for the most part, been on the creation of legal means for dealing with Nazism. While we know that the Allied trial programs were limited in many ways, and that most Nazi criminals escaped completely or received lenient treatment, there has been no methodical inquiry into the relationship of those limitations to punishment policy as a whole. This article seeks to help redress the balance by illustrating how in the case of British prosecutions, punishment policy was for the longer period one of a gradual dismantling of the legal machinery. It does this by means of a more comprehensive and systematic history of British policy than has hitherto been written, examining as an interrelated whole the trial of the major war criminals, the trials of other categories of (‘‘lesser’’) criminals, the political and practical problems of prolonged accounting for mass criminality, and the processes of premature release of convicted criminals. The article will address British war crimes trial policy in Germany up to 1957, spanning the period from the first trial to the exit of the last

Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe

Introduction Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth 1. Europe in the world Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses and Klaus Weinhauer 2. War James McMillan 3. Genocide and ethnic cleansing Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses 4. Revolution and counterrevolution Martin Conway and Robert Gerwarth 5. Terrorism and the state Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Klaus Weinhauer.

The Genocidal Past in Western Germany and the Experience of Occupation, 1945-6

This article examines the re-educational aspect of the Anglo-American occupation of western Germany in 1945-6. It interrogates some of the key methods, messages and goals of the re-education programme with particular reference to the representation of Nazi genocide and the question of responsibility for it. It suggests that Allied policy contributed significantly, if often inadvertently, to fostering the two overriding postwar German responses to wartime atrocity and Nazism: the rejection of responsibility and the ‘relativization’, and even minimization, of the crimes committed.

The Armenian Genocide

In September 2005, Turkish scholars and intellectuals critical of the Turkish official historiography on the Armenian deportations and massacres of 1915 convened a conference in Istanbul to analyze and discuss the fate of the Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Among the many discussions held, one in particular was noteworthy in that it focused on those individuals who produce the Turkish official historiography. It had so transpired that immediately before the conference, the nationalist opponents to the conference had employed the Social Science Citation Index, a measure indicating one’s degree of influence in the international scholarly community, to criticize — albeit unsuccessfully — the international intellectual standing of the conference conveners. As one of the conveners, the historian Halil Berktay, discussed and criticized this tactic during the conference, he noted that he himself had conducted a similar citation check on the individuals who produced the Turkish official historiography only to find out that in opposition to the dozens and even hundreds of citations of conference conveners, there was not a single citation of the works of any of the major proponents of the official Turkish historiography such as Yusuf Halacoglu and Hikmet Ozdemir. Yet, even though these official proponents never get cited in the international scholarly community, they are extremely influential within Turkey where the Turkish official historiography still reigns triumphant.

Terrorism and Imperial Decline: The Ottoman-Armenian Case

This article places Armenian nationalist terrorism into the broader sociopolitical context of the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. It considers the agendas and methods of the nationalists and the relationship between their actions, great power intervention and state violence.

Three imperialisms and a Turkish Nationalism: international stresses, imperial disintegration and the Armenian Genocide

Bloxham attempts to place the Armenian genocide of the First World War in a broader perspective than that in which it is usually depicted. Without questioning the agency of the Young Turk perpetrators, he assesses the ways in which Great Power political and economic policies influenced the Turkish-Armenian polarization up to and during the critical point of 1915. He questions the historiographical trends that have, on the one hand, established Germany as a co-perpetrator during the First World War and, on the other, blamed the Entente powers for their longer-term failure to intervene more effectively in the interests of the Ottoman Armenians. Instead, he places each of the powers on a continuum of more diffuse, less direct, but equally significant responsibilities for the exacerbation of inter-group tensions in the Ottoman empire.

‘The Trial That Never Was’: Why there was no Second International Trial of Major War Criminals at Nuremberg

This article examines the foreign policies of Britain and the United States in the contexts of the occupation of Germany and the growing cold war to explain the abortion of a proposed second international trial of major war criminals at Nuremberg. It then illustrates and explains why, while the American legal authorities attempted to reinforce the principles established at the trial of Hermann Goring et al. by further trials of major war criminals within their zone of occupation, the British looked only to try ‘lesser’ war criminals, and to phase out their punishment programme altogether.

Europe, the Final Solution and the dynamics of intent

ABSTRACT The scale and scope of the ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ were extreme even in the horrific annals of genocide. Bloxham attempts to shed light on the pattern of mass murder in its expansion and contraction by viewing the Holocaust in a set of temporally and culturally specific contexts. It places the Holocaust into a broader European framework of violent ethnopolitics and geopolitics from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The Holocaust is depicted as an only partially discrete part of a continental process of traumatic flux, and a part, furthermore, that can itself be partially disaggregated into national and regional components. Bloxham moves from a general consideration of patterns of ethnic violence in the period to a closer causal explanation that shows the different valences of Nazi policy towards Jews in the lands directly ruled by Germany and those of Germanys allies respectively. He shows that the peculiarly extensive ambitions of the ‘final solution’ at its most expansive can only be explained when wider geopolitical and strategic contextual terms are factored in along with consideration of Nazi ideology and the internal dynamics of some of the key institutions of the perpetrator state.

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

The very title of Donald Bloxham’s new book with its use of the indefinite article will evoke criticism from those who take issue with comparing the Third Reich’s ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ to other genocides. There are good reasons to stress the Holocaust‘s unique features; yet given the recurrence of state-sponsored mass murder since 1945 and the high likelihood of its perpetuation in a new ‘age of slaughter’ triggered by racial hatred, economical interest, or ecological crisis, insisting on the singularity of the ‘final solution’ by ignoring its linkages with broader phenomena in world history amounts to a form of denial that reduces the ubiquitous demand ‘to learn from the past’ to an empty platitude. Instead of perpetuating an analytically sterile debate over the issue of uniqueness, we should ask whether Bloxham’s book helps us better understand the Holocaust, and what new insights it provides into the origins and driving forces of genocide. In addressing these questions, I will follow the book’s main argument as developed in its thematic building blocks: the pre-history of violence in European nation-states since the ‘Eastern crisis’ of the late 1870s, the unfolding of the Holocaust in the context of German racial planning and European policy-making, reflections on the perpetrators’ motivation, and a concluding section on the human condition. Readers will have to excuse that, by focusing on the book’s core narrative, my review fails to fully reflect the many facets of Bloxham’s multi-layered and deep-structured analysis as well as its linkages to the already available scholarship. Bloxham’s opening assertion that ‘[T]he history of the Holocaust is itself an international history, and international history always has a comparative Journal of Genocide Research (2011), 13(1–2), March–June 2011, 107–152

The roots of American genocide denial: Near eastern geopolitics and the interwar Armenian question

There has been a recent spurt of interest in the relationship of the USA to the Armenian genocide, as illustrated by the publication in 2003 of Peter Balakian’s bestseller The Burning Tigris and Jay Winter’s edited collection America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. This development is unsurprising given the proximity of the 90th anniversary of the Armenian case and the topicality of genocide not only for scholars but also on the international political and legal stages; the connections between responses to the Armenian genocide and the contemporary politics of the current world hegemon implicit in the two volumes in question are made explicit, for instance, in Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Beyond the concern with the American response to the actual killings and deportations of 1915, however, both works are also extensively concerned with the question of the abortive American sponsorship of an independent Armenian state in formerly Ottoman and Tsarist territory in the interwar period. This latter focus has a much longer pedigree, and is more of specific concern to Armenians than is the quasi-universal issue of response to genocide per se. The issue of Armenian independence briefly gifted by the victorious powers at the conclusion of the First World War is as much a function of the historical Armenian question as of the genocide with which the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terraki Cemiyeti; CUP), the primary perpetrators, sought to “solve” the question once and for all. In other words, though the murder of the Armenians gave urgency to and a seeming justification for the idea of independence, the independence idea itself had deeper roots going back into the second half of the nineteenth century in the question of reform and possibly autonomy for the eastern Anatolian provinces where the majority of the Ottoman Armenians dwelt. Indeed, greater care than has been exhibited in the existing scholarship needs to be taken to separate the ethical and historical questions pertaining on one hand to American (and non-American) responses to the genocide and on the other hand to the independence question, since the former is a matter primarily of Journal of Genocide Research (2006), 8(1), March, 27–49