Donald Bloxham has written an ambitious book that forces a dramatic shift in our perceptions of the Holocaust. It is an attempt to refocus attention on the broader European context of ethnic cleansing by weaving the episodes of violence in Europe between 1875 and 1945 into a pattern, with the ultimate aim of rooting the Holocaust less narrowly in Nazi anti-Semitism. While acknowledging the current academic effort to equate colonialism and Nazism, and noting the crucial role of modernization, his analysis ultimately focuses on the impact of the disintegration of the multinational empires of central and eastern Europe in the World War I era.

For Bloxham, the breakdown of the multinational and religiously diverse empires that had ensured stability in central and eastern Europe resulted in a weakening of the established ethnic-religious hierarchies within these empires and produced “racial” anxieties and a threatened sense of nationalism. The four decades before the outbreak of World War I were vital in establishing a series of norms and precedents: not only the colonial violence directed against Africans, but more crucially an exclusionist nationalism within the multinational empires of Europe that hinted at ethnic destruction. The impact of modernization and the breakdown of traditional societies also led to the rise of a racialist-populist mentality. The emergence of previously marginal or discriminated minorities touched off a crisis of identity that forced a redefinition of basic notions of community, social relationships, and patterns of control. This resulted not merely in suspicions of disloyalty directed against various minorities, but in a conviction that the “problem” had to be solved. In the case of the Ottoman Empire this internal process intersected with an external crisis, the constant threat posed by Russian expansion. The resentment toward a foreign power that aimed not merely to snatch territory but also to promote the interests of a dispossessed minority (Armenian Christians) inflamed and radicalized a generation of Ottoman leaders. Eventually, this fear of disintegration, heightened by war-time anxieties, formed the context within which the murder of Armenians took place. Bloxham quite rightly notes the way in which war both legitimized violence and provided the pretext for a murderous solution to the “problem.”

Although the outburst of violence against the Armenians is well known, Bloxham also stresses the importance of lesser known events on the development of this racialist-populist mentality. The extensive transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey after the war, done with the tacit approval of the western victors, as well as the large-scale murders of Jews during the Russian Civil War, which outsiders were powerless to influence, provided important precedents of ethnic cleansing. In addition, the wartime experience of hunger and death occasioned by the British blockade provided Hitler justification for his policy of territorial expansion. Moreover, the collapse of empires following the war created both possibilities and risks. Borders in the ethnic tangle of east-central Europe were seen as artificial, as the crumbling of empires produced a sense of fluidity and possibility. Territorial expansion became a means to construct a new sense of identity and bind ethnic communities, but it also produced anxieties and threats, since others with differing views on how to organize this area, particularly those seen as working as agents of previously marginal minorities, emerged to exploit this flux. In his core ideas, Hitler combined all these elements: the wartime blockade pointed to the need for territorial expansion; imposing German control over east-central Europe required ethnic cleansing and the unmixing of peoples; similar recent actions provided a demographic precedent; immediate action was imperative given the existential threat posed by the “Jewish-Bolshevism” that spawned and sought to capitalize on this chaos.

Bloxham thus situates Nazism and the Holocaust within this larger context (and sees it as a European, and not exclusively German, phenomenon). Hitler's ideas were a hybrid of two European trends: colonialism and the threatened nationalism/heightened racial anxieties so common in central Europe following World War I. Nazi racial stigmatization of Jews fit within the traditional conception of Jews as both different and a threat. It also played on the suspicion that the chaos itself was the work of Jews, who allegedly benefited the most from it. Still, Bloxham emphasizes, although the principal victims, Jews were not the only ones. Hitler's conception of Lebensraum was also dual-sided: both a colonial attempt to secure resources and impose order on an unruly area (which in practice meant demographic reordering), as well as a protection of European civilization from the destructive political, cultural, and racial values allegedly emanating from Jews. Thus, although Hitler often compared his vision of a German east with that of earlier American actions, his imperial project emerged in a specific time and place, shaped primarily by the outcome of World War I.

The prerequisite for Hitler's empire was war and military success, which paved the way for new power constellations and radical measures. Conquest itself created both opportunities and problems; for empire builders it provided the chance to enact sweeping demographic plans that, along with the inevitable problems they encountered, led to a steady radicalization of policy. The spatial setting was also important, since the military conquests created a paradox: not only were more Jews brought under German control, but they lived in precisely those areas Hitler meant to cleanse ethnically in order to build his empire. The solution to this problem emerged from competition between various party and SS agencies and their eager young administrators. Policy was shaped by action, and action meant violence. Bloxham's emphasis on the evolutionary development of the Final Solution, along with the influence of local and mid-level officials on the origins and implementation of policy, puts him in the mainstream of recent historiography on the Holocaust. Just as importantly, he notes the impact of war on the radicalization of policy: a German empire originally intended to be constructed after a successful war descended into the most frightful short-term exploitation in the struggle against adversaries with greater resources. In the Soviet Union, racist notions, fears of “Jewish-Bolshevism,” and far-reaching colonial designs combined to produce a war of stunning ruthlessness.

In his most controversial argument, Bloxham sees a distinction among German policy makers between the Final Solution of the “Jewish problem” in German and European areas, suggesting even that the Nazis were not necessarily determined to kill all Jews. While not denying Hitler's ultimate desire that Europe be rid of Jews, he stresses that for Nazi leaders the former goal (eliminating all Jews in areas intended for German settlement) was far more important than the latter goal. Bloxham thus connects the Nazi racial project with the imperialist context, comparing it to the settler-colonialism of the Americas and Australia, where the logic, if not explicit intent, had been the removal and destruction of the native population. The mass murder of the Jews was simply the most radical part of a larger process of population transfer, the precedent for which had been established in the post-World War I period. As envisioned in such schemes as the “Hunger Plan” and GeneralPlan Ost, the end result would have been the ethnic homogenization of a vast swathe of territory, its incorporation into a German empire, and the deaths of millions of Slavs. This distinction between German and European spheres of interest allows Bloxham to assert the European dimension of the Final Solution, not merely in the scope of the killing but also in the two-way relationship between the Nazis and their allies and collaborators. Not only were there limits to the Final Solution in areas outside direct German control, but their looming defeat also had an impact on the killing process.

In addressing the question of why perpetrators willingly killed, Bloxham references contemporary genocides, but struggles in his comparison with the Nazi example. He cites familiar explanations such as bureaucratic compliance and competition, anticipatory obedience, the threat of violence to compel complicity, peer pressure, and the uncertainty, anxieties, and brutality unleashed by war. Perhaps his most effective insight concerned the notion of “zones of exception,” within which men felt themselves freed from usual legal norms. As such, and since they were carrying out officially sanctioned policy, their actions seemingly induced little moral agony, with the perpetrators viewing themselves as mere instruments of state policy, an attitude that helps to explain why so many easily readjusted to a postwar, civilian environment.

This is a dense, thoughtful book that challenges the reader on virtually every page. It points to the complexity of the Nazi racial project, situates it within the larger historical context, and raises thought-provoking questions, of which the most pressing concerns how different episodes of mass killing can be understood within a common framework. Any attempt to put the Holocaust in a wider European context invites controversy. Bloxham, though, challenges not so much the uniqueness of the Holocaust, as the tendency to put it outside history. Only by understanding the comparative context, he argues, can we gain a fuller insight into Nazi racial policies that culminated in the Final Solution. Certainly, the complex phenomenon that was Nazism cannot be placed within a colonial framework and regarded as just another example of European violence, but extracting it from its historical context risks converting the Holocaust from a concrete historical event into a myth.