Research Catalog

Title

Genocide on trial : war crimes trials and the formation of Holocaust history and memory / Donald Bloxham.

Author

Bloxham, Donald

Publication

Oxford [England] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2001.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xix, 273 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

"This study shows how Britain and the United States went about inscribing the history of Nazi Germany and the effect their trial and occupation policies had on both long and short term 'memory' in Germany and Britain. Donald Bloxham 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."--Jacket.

Uniform Title

University press scholarship online.

Alternative Title

War crimes trials and the formation of Holocaust history and memory

Subjects

• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
• Since 1939
• Jewish Holocaust > (1939-1945)
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) > Historiography
• History
• Europe > History > 1945-
• Genocide
• War crime trials > Germany
• Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-261) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Part 1. The legal prism. Shaping the trials: the politics of trial policy, 1945-1949 -- Race-specific crimes in punishment and re-education policy: the 'Jewish factor' -- pt. 2. Post-war representations and perceptions. The limits of the legal imagination: plumbing the depths of Nazi criminality -- The failure of the trial medium: charting the breadth of Nazi criminality -- pt. 3. The trials and posterity. A Nuremberg historiography of the Holocaust?

ISBN

• 0198208723
• 0199259046 (pbk.)

OCLC

• 47677194
• SCSB-9938349

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library