Non­fic­tion

The Final Solu­tion: A Genocide

Don­ald Bloxham
  • Review
By – September 26, 2011

Despite the efforts of Holo­caust deniers, the mur­der of six mil­lion Jews and five mil­lion oth­ers” remains an estab­lished fact of 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry. What is at issue in Holo­caust research is the rel­a­tive weight of ide­ol­o­gy, per­son­al­i­ty, and bureau­cra­cy, among oth­er fac­tors, in assess­ing the caus­es for Ger­many, the most advanced and cul­tured Euro­pean nation, to per­pe­trate geno­cide. There is also the mat­ter in which schol­ars have pur­sued the ques­tion of unique­ness.” In the ear­ly years of Holo­caust schol­ar­ship a num­ber of his­to­ri­ans, such as Steven Katz, viewed the Nazi geno­cide as unprece­dent­ed in the annals of his­to­ry. Nev­er before, went the argu­ment, has an entire peo­ple been marked for death as was the case dur­ing the Holo­caust. The sub­ject of the unique­ness of the Holo­caust is among the many con­tro­ver­sial issues addressed by Don­ald Bloxham’s provoca­tive and essen­tial study of the Nazi genocide. 

Blox­ham, pro­fes­sor of mod­ern his­to­ry at Edin­burgh Uni­ver­si­ty, is the author of a num­ber of impor­tant books on the his­to­ry of geno­cide. In the vol­ume under review, Blox­ham notes that there is a dis­tinc­tion between the objec­tives of Nazi Ger­many in regard to the mur­der of Euro­pean Jew­ry and the man­ner in which Holo­caust schol­ar­ship has record­ed them. For exam­ple, Himm­ler, the so-called archi­tect of the Holo­caust, sought to remove Jews from Ger­many and its occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries in the East and, as the war pro­gressed, turned to the mass mur­der of Jews as an expe­di­ent because of demo­graph­ic and logis­tic con­cerns. Blox­ham chal­lenges the con­tention that Nazi Germany’s objec­tive, had they won the war, was to tar­get Jews through­out the world for anni­hi­la­tion. Blox­ham argues that had the Sovi­et Union been quick­ly defeat­ed as Hitler antic­i­pat­ed, the imme­di­ate killing of Jews would not have occurred.” Rather, the destruc­tion of the Jews would have been real­ized due to slow attri­tion as intend­ed in the unre­al­ized Mada­gas­car, Lublin, and Siber­ian plans. Else­where Blox­ham argues that depend­ing on the absolute or con­di­tion­al nature of vic­to­ry, British Jew­ry and Jews liv­ing in neu­tral coun­tries may have also escaped exter­mi­na­tion (let alone in the Unit­ed States).

Illus­tra­tive of the book’s title, The Final Solu­tion: A Geno­cide, Blox­ham turns to the issue of the unique­ness of the Holo­caust, where he argues that the Nazi geno­cide of the Jews was one of many per­pe­trat­ed by Euro­peans long before the Nazis appeared on the polit­i­cal land­scape. He places the mur­der of Euro­pean Jew­ry with­in the con­text of the man­ner in which Euro­pean colo­nial empires treat­ed their native pop­u­la­tions (also includ­ing the Armen­ian geno­cide). The Third Reich viewed Poland and the rest of East­ern Europe in the same man­ner as the Euro­pean impe­ri­al­ist nations viewed their empires in Africa and Asia — with indif­fer­ence to the sur­vival of these sub­jects of exploita­tion. Blox­ham accus­es those schol­ars who write of the unique­ness of the Holo­caust of his­tor­i­cal neglect because most oth­er geno­cides have been of insuf­fi­cient inter­est to West­ern intel­lec­tu­als for them to pon­der their meta­phys­i­cal dimen­sions in the way the Holo­caust has been pondered.”

It is not that Blox­ham dimin­ish­es the mag­ni­tude of the Holo­caust but, as he writes: Let me be clear: some­thing of the dimen­sions of the final solu­tion should prompt huge and sus­tained philo­soph­i­cal self-reflec­tion, but it is the sur­prise’ that reg­is­ters in so much of the schol­ar­ship that is telling, since Europe had not only wit­nessed oth­er geno­cides, it had inflict­ed them on its colo­nial periph­eries well before the con­ti­nent erupt­ed at its own core in the twen­ti­eth century.…

He con­cludes that the study of the Holo­caust should be no dif­fer­ent than the study of any giv­en geno­cide in terms of under­stand­ing the bal­ance between gen­er­al and spe­cif­ic fea­tures. Blox­ham notes that his vol­ume seeks to retain the his­tor­i­cal speci­fici­ty of the Holo­caust, a process that occurred on one con­ti­nent at one time and with the ulti­mate sanc­tion of Hitler, while insist­ing that that respect for its pecu­liar fea­tures is not at odds with an approach sit­u­at­ing the Shoah in rela­tion­ship to oth­er genocides.

Final­ly, Blox­ham argues that although anti-Semi­tism and Nazi racial ide­ol­o­gy are impor­tant fac­tors in under­stand­ing the caus­es of the Holo­caust, these con­sid­er­a­tions alone are insuf­fi­cient to explain the geno­cide. Rather, states the author, due weight should be giv­en to the imme­di­ate con­tin­gent cir­cum­stances that led to mass mur­der, and efforts made to sit­u­ate them into the broad­er pat­terns of human behav­ior in the late-mod­ern world.”

Jack Fis­chel is pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of his­to­ry at Millersville Uni­ver­si­ty, Millersville, PA and author of The Holo­caust (Green­wood Press) and His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of the Holo­caust (Row­man and Littlefield).

Discussion Questions