Donald Bloxham. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xix + 273 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-925904-5; $149.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-820872-3.

Reviewed by Craig Pepin (Champlain College)
Published on H-German (February, 2006)

Donald Bloxham's book joins a growing literature that examines the impact of the Nuremberg Trials on understanding the Holocaust. Scholars agree that in the short term, the trials distorted the Holocaust, and failed to adequately represent the nature of Jewish (and Sinti) suffering. The question that dominates this ongoing historiographical debate is different--over the long term, did the Nuremberg trials adequately serve the victims and the remembrance of the Holocaust? Hannah Arendt charged that the trial medium itself was incapable of the task of remembrance.[1] More recently, Michael Marrus has argued that the trials ultimately served the long-term goals of memory by establishing the Holocaust as a fact and making available a huge amount of evidence.[2] For Bloxham, however, the war crimes trials signally failed the task of historical memory, both in the short term, where they confused more than they clarified and did not impact public consciousness, and in the long term, where the assumptions of the trial sent scholars down a historiographical cul-de-sac from which they have only reemerged in the past 15 or 20 years. This is the most provocative finding of a book, drawn from the author's dissertation at the University of Southampton, that more generally serves as an excellent overview of the state of research on the Nuremberg trials (both the famous International Military Tribunal ending in 1946, and the "successor trials" of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal run by the Americans alone).

In the first part of the book, Bloxham describes how the prosecution decision to focus on documentary evidence both minimized Jewish witness testimony (of which there was virtually none) and the Holocaust itself, given that the Nazis took pains to destroy physical and textual evidence of the Final Solution. He notes how the need to fit the trials within an existing legal framework led to overly restrictive interpretations of the charge of crimes against humanity, and understood Jews as citizens of different nations rather than a unique category in Nazi ideology. He details how Cold War tensions led to a lessening in punishments over the course of occupation and the ultimate release of nearly all prisoners by the mid-1950s.

Much of this material is not new. What is new lies in Bloxham's approach from the British side. He convincingly demonstrates a disturbing political expediency on the part of the British authorities, who were the first to fixate on the growing Soviet threat, and also the first to back away significantly from war crimes prosecutions. The trials conducted by the British were also dramatically limited in scope, and the British preferred to send more problematic perpetrators to the American zone for trial. The strongest feature of the book is the focus on how the trials approached representatives of the Wehrmacht in the dock. That supporters of the Wehrmacht were able to ultimately separate the army from the crimes committed on and behind the Eastern Front is well known, and the myth has had great staying power despite the work of Omer Bartov and others, as demonstrated by the reaction a decade ago to the Wehrmacht exhibit organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. British responses to Wehrmacht perpetrators were shaped by many factors, including an early perception of the Soviets as a bigger danger than resurgent Germany, lack of resources to pursue trials, and a stricter definition of the scope of trials than the other three occupation powers. But British military men seemed particularly susceptible to arguments that their German counterparts were professional soldiers, who had conducted war according to accepted principles of honor, dignity, and the existing international laws. Through examination of primary sources, Bloxham details how the British resisted placing three famous Wehrmacht Field Marshals--Walter von Brauchitsch, Gerd von Rundstedt and Erich von Manstein--on trial, despite the opinion of the American prosecutors that the cases against all three were overwhelming, "as certain as the outcome of a lawsuit ever can be" (p. 42). Opposition to these trials among high-ranking British generals and politicians was linked by the military historian Basil Liddell Hart, who acted as a go-between for those parties interested in the Field Marshals' welfare. Later in 1952, Liddell Hart conveyed messages between Adenauer and Churchill's conservative government concerning von Manstein, who was convicted by British courts in 1949, but given early release on dubious grounds by Churchill himself in 1953.

The final chapter leads into the crux of what Bloxham had promised in his introduction. The focus on "criminal organizations" and the "conspiracy" charge, which the American representatives insisted on, produced distortions in several areas. By focusing on the Gestapo in particular, the role in the Holocaust of other organizations both within the SS (the Ordnungspolizei and the Waffen-SS), and without (the Wehrmacht, local collaborators, individual Gauleiter in the Eastern occupied territories) were mostly overlooked by Nuremberg trials, and subsequently by historians. On another level, stressing the conspiracy charge implied a consistent prewar plan to wage aggressive war, and overemphasized the role of leadership. This stress had two related effects, one legal and one historiographical: In the trials, it allowed lower-ranking perpetrators to emphasize the superior orders defense, to lessen culpability. In historical studies, the shading of testimony towards proving superior orders and tight control created strong evidence for the intentionalist school, obscuring the role of field operatives in undertaking their own destructive initiatives. Thus, although Bloxham admits the evidentiary basis created by the Nuremberg trials was at times beneficial, on the whole the trial medium selected evidence that best proved guilt, and contributed to persistent misperceptions concerning the character and breadth of the Holocaust. In addition, this focus strongly contributed to the Vergangenheitspolitik of the early FRG, predicated as it was on understanding Nazism as the imposition on Germany of a thin layer of criminals at the leadership level and psychological deviants running the camps.

In terms of causes, Bloxham's approach contrasts with that of Lawrence Douglas.[3] For Douglas, the dynamics of the trial itself primarily shaped the prosecutors' and judges' actions: avoiding the perception that the trial was politically motivated and unfair led them to choose certain courtroom strategies. Despite entitling one chapter "The Failure of the Trial Medium," Bloxham tends to focus more on conscious decisions made by the prosecutors and judges, and less on the structure of the trials themselves, with an accompanying degree of implied moral judgment of the Allied participants noticeably lacking in Douglas. In part this difference occurs because Douglas stops his Nuremberg story with the IMT, whereas Bloxham spends more time on the successor trials, where political judgments informed by the Cold War and other values led to more questionable and expedient decisions.

Bloxham's contributions are important, although not always easily accessible--less knowledgeable readers may find the thicket of abbreviations, and idiosyncratic organization difficult to keep track of. Nonetheless, Bloxham presents here an excellent and provocative synthesis of the impact of the Nuremberg trials on Holocaust historiography, including a previously neglected focus on the successor trials, and the British policies and actions.

Notes

[1]. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 253.

[2]. Michael R. Marrus, "The Holocaust at Nuremberg," Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): pp. 5-41.

[3]. Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

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Citation: Craig Pepin. Review of Bloxham, Donald, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11427

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