The Final Solution: A Genocide

Abstract

This is a challenging book with far-reaching implications for our understanding of the Holocaust and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Based upon a careful and judicious reading of the most important literature on the Holocaust, Donald Bloxham seeks to situate the mass-murder of European Jewry between 1941 and 1945 within the broader history of European genocide from 1875 to 1945. In doing so, he takes issue with Steven Katz, and those who insist that the Jewish Holocaust was a unique event in human history, and argues instead that the full meaning of the final solution can only be understood if placed in the larger context of genocide that characterised much of European history from the Congress of Berlin through to the end of the Second World War. The crux of Bloxham's argument is that, with the disintegration and eventual collapse of the three great multi-national empires that dominated the map of central and eastern Europe—the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires—and the emergence of new states based upon the principle of ethnic domination, the status of all religious and ethnic minorities, particularly in the shatterzones where the three empires abutted against each other, became increasingly problematic. Those minorities that were suspected either of having loyalties to other territorial states outside the state in which they lived, or of harbouring hopes of becoming part of a state in which their ethnic group was dominant, were particularly vulnerable. For such minorities, the only answer was expulsion and repatriation to states in which the ethnic groups to which they belonged were dominant. Generally this was to be accomplished through population transfer, but in those cases where population transfer was not feasible the answer was often genocide.