The Final Solution: A GenocideThe Holocaust is frequently depicted in isolation by its historians. Some of them believe that to place it in any kind of comparative context risks diminishing its uniqueness and even detracts from the enormity of the Nazi crime. In reality, such a restricted understanding of 'uniqueness' has pulled the Holocaust apart from history and set up barriers to a better understanding of the racial onslaught unleashed within the Third Reich and its conquered territories. Working against the grain of much earlier writing, this innovative new history combines a detailed re-appraisal of the development of the genocide of the Jews, a full consideration of Nazi policies against other population groups, and a comparative analysis of other modern genocides. The Holocaust is portrayed as the culmination of a much wider history of European genocide and ethnic cleansing, from the late nineteenth century onwards. Ultimately, Bloxham shows that an explanation for the Holocaust rooted exclusively in Nazism and antisemitism is inadequate when set against one that is both prepared to give due weight to the immediate circumstances of the Second World War in eastern Europe and to situate the Jewish genocide within the broader patterns of human behaviour in the late-modern world. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Documentary Traces | 15 |
I A European History of Violence | 33 |
II Germany and the Final Solution | 131 |
III Perpetrators and their Environment | 259 |
IV Civilization and the Holocaust | 301 |
Endnotes | 335 |
| 385 | |
| 397 | |
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administrative Anatolia anti-Semitism areas Armenians Auschwitz Balkan Belarus benefited Bolshevik Bulgaria bureaucratic Cambridge central Christian civil civilian colonial concentration camp concerned conflict cultural deportation developed east eastern Europe economic Eichmann Einsatzgruppen elites enemies established ethnic cleansing ethnic dominance ethnic Germans Europe’s European extermination field final solution first forces Foreign Office France Gauleiter Generalgouvernement genocide Germany’s groups Habsburg Hamburg Heydrich Himmler Hitler Holocaust HSSPF Hungarian Hungary ideological imperial increasingly influence internal interwar Jewish policy Jewish question Jews killing labour large numbers Lublin mass murder massacres military minorities modern Munich Muslims nationalists Nazi Germany Nazism Nuremberg official ofits ofJews ofthe organizations Ottoman Empire Oxford University Press party perpetrators Poland Polish political population racial racist radical regime region Romanian RSHA Russian Second World Security Police significant social Soviet specific territories Third Reich Ukraine Ukrainian Ulrich Herbert USSR victims violence Warthegau wartime Wehrmacht western