| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Donald Bloxham. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. xix, 273. $52.00.
The shortcomings of the Nuremberg trials have long been apparent. The Allied prosecutors, led by the Americans, were intent on proving criminal conspiracy. As a result, they sometimes exaggerated the activities of the leading Nazi defendants and largely ignored the critical role of mid-level functionaries. With a few notable exceptions, the prosecutors deliberately avoided hearing testimony from victims. The zeal for prosecution quickly waned as the Cold War developed and American and British officials sought to integrate the western occupation zones, subsequently the Federal Republic of Germany, into a liberal capitalist international order. Perhaps most significantly, the persecution of the Jews played no particular role at the trials. Nuremberg pioneered the concept of "crimes against humanity," but the Allies prosecuted the leaders of the Third Reich mainly for crimes of aggression, not for what would subsequently be called "genocide." It would take some decades before the Holocaust would come to be understood as the epitome of Nazi atrocities.	1
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.	. . .

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