Donald Bloxham

• University of Edinburgh

The Holocaust provides either one of the strongest arguments for Nazi Germany as a radically different state bent on racial utopia or an argument for continuity, given Europe's deep and recent history of violent intolerance of Jews. With alternating Nazi perceptions of Jews as a race, a non-race, and an anti-race, it is certainly plausible to under...

This chapter examines how perpetrators of breaches of international law were punished during and after the war. Although ‘Nuremberg’ is best known, it was one of thousands of trials in the post-war period. At least 96, 798 Germans and Austrians were convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other Nazi-related offences. Most were sentence...

Nuremberg as event and as process: what does ‘Nuremberg’ mean? At the simplest, literal level it refers to the prosecution, in the German city of that name, of twenty-two senior German figures and six organizations before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in 1945–6. It can also represent the tens of thousands of trials of greater and lesser...

This article is divided into three roughly chronological sections, each dealing with an important stage in the chequered history of the legalist paradigm. Despite the real innovations of the nineteenth century, people take the Nuremberg trials as starting point because the legal developments of the immediate post-war period served as the crucible f...

The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies subjects both genocide and the discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Genocide has scarred human societies since Antiquity. In the modern era, genocide has been a global phenomenon: from massacres in colonial America, Africa, and Australia to the Holocaust of European Jewry and mass...

This article describes the state of genocide studies, historicization, and causation, placing genocide into its historical context, and genocide in the world today. 'Genocide' is unfortunately ubiquitous, all too often literally in attempts at the destruction of human groups, but also rhetorically in the form of a word that is at once universally k...

The Holocaust is frequently depicted in isolation by its historians. A restricted understanding of 'uniqueness' has set the Holocaust apart from history and set up barriers to a better understanding of the racial onslaught. This book combines a detailed re-appraisal of the development of the genocide of the Jews, a full consideration of Nazi polici...

Genocide and ethnic cleansing are forms of political violence because they politicize nationality, ethnicity, race and religion. Branded as traitors or feared as security threats, minority populations have been murdered and deported in astonishing numbers during Europe's long twentieth century. Why these phenomena accelerated and peaked in its firs...

In Europe the First World War marked a lethal culmination of the imperialism of the modern nation-states and the end of the great dynastic land empires that dated from the late Middle Ages. The characteristics of the conflict itself, including not just developing strategic, tactical and geopolitical considerations, but the psychological, material a...

During recent years a series of important studies have attempted to deal synthetically with violent aspects of European history in the twentieth century. All of them refer to and replicate aspects of Eric Hobsbawm's masterpiece Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (1994), which in turn demarked that century from the ‘long nineteen...

This is a comprehensive history of political violence during Europe's incredibly violent twentieth century. Leading scholars examine the causes and dynamics of war, revolution, counterrevolution, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and state repression. They locate these manifestations of political violence within their full transnational and com...

Organizational structures have played a key role in modern state-sponsored mass murder. The author of this article criticizes and synthesizes the existing scholarship, focusing first on historiographical debates surrounding the Holocaust. He then considers the Stalinist purges, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Armenian Genocide in the light of this an...

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 foc...

The Holocaust, it is sometimes said, is unique. There are two possible meanings of the word ‘unique’ here. One is rather obvious and unarguable: the idea that all historical events are in some way unprecedented and unrepeatable in the precise combination of factors inducing and constituting them. Yet by that yardstick the Holocaust is only one uniq...

This chapter is concerned with the impact of war crimes trial on defeated polities. It focuses particularly on the aftermath of two cases of criminal warfare in the twentieth century, namely the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians in World War I and the Nazi genocides of World War II, and the war crimes trials conducted correspondingly in Istanbul an...

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.

There are powerful limits to international humanitarian law. With reference to theories of international relations and to empirically observable patterns, this article shows the inability of legal norms and structures to influence the behaviour of the world's most powerful states and their allies. There are also restrictions on the capacity of tria...

This book addresses the origins, development, and aftermath of the Armenian genocide in a reappraisal based on primary and secondary sources from all the major parties involved. Rejecting the determinism of many influential studies, and discarding polemics on all sides, it founds its interpretation of the genocide in the interaction between the Ott...

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 contribute...

A burgeoning scholarly literature is concerned with the relations between memory, justice, the law and history. The record of state-sponsored atrocity has been at the forefront of this wave of inquiry, and within that the genocide of the Jews in particular. Yet the focus on the legal reckoning with the Holocaust seems to spring from slightly differ...

Despite the massive literature on the Holocaust, our understanding of it has traditionally been influenced by rather unsophisticated early perspectives and silences. This book summarises and criticises the existing scholarship on the subject and suggests new ways by which we can approach its study. It addresses the use of victim testimony and asks...

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...

Book InformationThe Jews of the Channel Islands and the Rule of Law, 1940–1945. The Jews of the Channel Islands and the Rule of Law, 1940–1945 David Fraser Brighton Sussex Academic P. 2000 261 £39.50 By David Fraser. Sussex Academic P.. Brighton. Pp. 261. £39.50,

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...

This article surveys the development of the Nazi use of Jews for slave labour. It considers continuities and shifts in the use of labour, differences over time, between places and between German institutions that used slaves. It also assesses the differing motivations for use of slave labour, and the differing conditions in which slaves worked. Fin...

Nazi slave labour is a subject of some contemporary political importance. With marked regularity, evidence — long known about in historical circles — has appeared in the news media of the complicity of several household names in inhuman system of exploitation during the war years. As this article was written, representatives of the victims and the...

Bloxham examines the events and rhetoric surrounding the trial and premature release from custody of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Von Manstein was convicted of involvement in atrocities on the Eastern Front, yet his story aroused the sympathy of many in Britain, including influential politicians, who believed the Wehrmacht to be innocent of th...

The thesis considers the educational function of the trials of Nazis by the British and American authorities after the Second World War. As has generally been overlooked in the literature, legal proceedings were instituted not only to punish the abhorrent actions of the Third Reich, but also to provide an historical record for the edification of vi...