Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003. 296 pages. Language:
English.
Donald Bloxham here examines the actions and trials of German soldiers and policemen, the use of legal evidence, the refractory functions of the courtroom, and Allied political and cultural preconceptions of both 'Germanism' and of German criminality. His evidence shows conclusively that the trials were a failure: the greatest of all 'crimes against humanity' — the 'final solution of the Jewish question' — was largely written out of history in the post-war era and the trials failed to transmit the breadth of German criminality. Finally, with reference to the historiography of the Holocaust, Genocide on Trial illuminates the function of the trials in perpetuating misleading generalizations about the course of the Holocaust and the nature of Nazism.
"Donald Bloxham takes the failures of the Nuremberg trials as his starting point. He wants to understand why the British and Americans failed to pursue a more vigorous prosecution and ignored the fate of Jews. He suggests that the prosecutors fatefully and, indeed, in many instances willfully misunderstood the nature of the Nazi system. This misunderstanding carried over into public memory and historical scholarship, and not until somewhere around 1990, he implies, did historians begin to get the history right. Bloxham seeks to demonstrate his interpretation through a very close analysis of the postwar trials. He examines not only the first and most famous trial, that of Hermann Goering et al., but the many little-known subsequent ones that were also conducted under the writ of the Allied London Agreement as well as individual American and British prosecutions." (The American Historical Review)
Donald Bloxham here examines the actions and trials of German soldiers and policemen, the use of legal evidence, the refractory functions of the courtroom, and Allied political and cultural preconceptions of both 'Germanism' and of German criminality. His evidence shows conclusively that the trials were a failure: the greatest of all 'crimes against humanity' — the 'final solution of the Jewish question' — was largely written out of history in the post-war era and the trials failed to transmit the breadth of German criminality. Finally, with reference to the historiography of the Holocaust, Genocide on Trial illuminates the function of the trials in perpetuating misleading generalizations about the course of the Holocaust and the nature of Nazism.
"Donald Bloxham takes the failures of the Nuremberg trials as his starting point. He wants to understand why the British and Americans failed to pursue a more vigorous prosecution and ignored the fate of Jews. He suggests that the prosecutors fatefully and, indeed, in many instances willfully misunderstood the nature of the Nazi system. This misunderstanding carried over into public memory and historical scholarship, and not until somewhere around 1990, he implies, did historians begin to get the history right. Bloxham seeks to demonstrate his interpretation through a very close analysis of the postwar trials. He examines not only the first and most famous trial, that of Hermann Goering et al., but the many little-known subsequent ones that were also conducted under the writ of the Allied London Agreement as well as individual American and British prosecutions." (The American Historical Review)