Raul Hilberg

 

Raul Hilberg (June 2 1926 - August 4 2007 in Williston, Vermont) was one of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians. His three-volume, 1,273-page The Destruction of the European Jews is regarded as the seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 26 2005.

A non-smoker, Hilberg died following a recurrence of lung cancer on August 4 2007, aged 81. ^[1][2]

Life and Career

Born in Vienna into a Polish-Romanian Jewish family, Hilberg fled Austria, aged 13, with his family on April 1, 1939, a year after the Anschluss, for France, where they embarked on a ship to Cuba . His father had been arrested by the Nazis, but was released because of his service record as a combatant in World War I. After a four month stay in Cuba his family arrived in the United States on the day the Second World War broke out, September 1, 1939.^[3]. The Hilbergs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College. He had intended to make a career in Chemistry, but found it did not suit him, and left his studies to work in a factory. He was then called up for the draft. He served first in the 45th Infantry Division (United States) in World War II, but, given his native fluency and academic interests, was soon attached to the War Documentation Department charged with examining archives throughout Europe. It was his discovery of part of Hitler's crated private library in Munich, which he stumbled across while quartered in the Braunes Haus, that prompted his research into the Holocaust, a term for the genocidal destruction of the Jews which Hilberg personally disliked^[4], though in later years he himself used it^[5]. On returning to civilian life, he chose to study Political Science and took his B.A, at Brooklyn College (1948), where he was deeply impressed by the importance of elites and bureaucracies while following Hans Rosenberg's lectures on the Prussian Civil Service. At one particular point in Rosenberg's course, Hilberg was taken aback by a remark his teacher dropped.

'The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain.'

The young Hilberg was prompted to interrupt the lecture and ask why the recent murder of 6 million Jews didn’t figure. Rosenberg replied that it was a complicated matter, but that the lectures only dealt with history down to 1930. ‘History doesn’t reach down into the present age,’ Rosenberg added. Hilberg was amazed by the terrible oddness of a German Jewish emigrant, highly educated and by no means a fool, passing over the genocide of European Jews in order to expatiate on Napoleon and Spain. The episode served to strengthen his curiosity in a subject that, to gather from this example, risked suffering the pained disattentions of studious neglect.^[6].

He then went on to complete both his MA (1950) and Ph.D (1955) at Columbia University^[7] where he entered the graduate Public Law and Government program. In the meantime, in 1951, he obtained a temporary apppointment to work on the War Documentation Project under the direction of Fritz Epstein.

Hilberg was undecided under whom he should carry out his doctoral research. Since he had also followed a course on International Law, he was also attracted to the lectures of Salo Baron, the most important authority on Jewish historiography at the time, with particular expertise in the field of laws pertaining to the Jewish people. In Hilberg's own words, to attend Baron's lectures was to enjoy the rare opportunity of observing 'a walking library, a monument of incredible erudition' active before his student class. Baron asked Hilberg whether he was interested in working under him on the annihilation of Europe's Jewish population. Hilberg demurred on the grounds that his interests lay in the perpetrators, and thus he could not begin with the Jews who were their victims, but rather with what was done to them.^[8]. He thus decided to write the greater part of his Ph.D. under the supervision of Franz Neumann, the author of an influential wartime analysis of the German totalitarian state. Neumann was initially reluctant to take Hilberg on as his doctoral student. He had already read Hilberg's Master's thesis, and found, as a deeply patriotic German, and a Jew, that certain themes sketched there were unbearably painful. In particular he had asked that the section of Jewish cooperation be removed^[9], to no avail. Neumann nonetheless relented, warning his student however that such a dissertation might well prove to be his academic funeral. Undeterred by the prospect, Hilberg pressed on regardless of consequences.^[10]. Neumann himself contacted Telford Taylor directly to facilitate Hilberg's access to the appropriate archives. After Neumann's death in a traffic accident in 1954, Hilberg completed his doctoral requirement under the supervision of a Quaker, Professor Fox. He obtained his first academic appointment at the University of Vermont (Burlington, VT), in 1955, and took up residence there in January 1956. He had two children, David and Deborah by his first wife Christine Hemenway. After his divorce, in 1980 he married Gwendolyn, née Montgomery.

Most of his teaching career, until 1991, when he was appointed emeritus professor, was spent at the University of Vermont, where he was a member of the Department of Political Science and later a member of the "President's Holocaust Commission". For his seminal and profound services to the historiography of the Holocaust, Hilberg was honoured with Germany's Order of Merit, the highest recognition that can be paid to a non-German.^[11].

The publication of his magnum opus

Hilberg is best known for his magisterial study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews. His final doctoral supervisor, Professor Fox, a kindly and courteous man, worried that the original study was far too long. Hilberg therefore suggested submitting a mere quarter of the research he had written up and the proposal was approved, and his doctorate honoured with the opportunity to be published by Columbia University Press in a run of 850 copies. However, Hilberg was firm in desiring that the whole work be published, not just a fragment. To obtain this, two opinions in favour of full publication were required. The work was duly submitted to another two academic authorities in the field, but both judgments turned out to be negative: one rejected Hilberg's work as an anti-German, the other as an anti-Jewish, polemic^[12]

Hilberg, unwilling to compromise, submitted the complete manuscript to several major publishing houses over the following six years, without luck. Princeton University Press turned down the manuscript, after rapidly vetting it in a mere two weeks. After successive rejections from five prominent publishing houses, it finally went to press in 1961 under a minor imprint, the Chicago publishing house, Quadrangle Books. By good fortune, a wealthy patron, Frank Petschek, a German-Czech whose family coal business had suffered from the Nazi Aryanization programme^[13] laid out $15,000, a substantial sum at the time, to cover the costs of a print run of 5,500 volumes,^[14] of which some 1,300 copies were set aside for distribution to libraries ^[15].

Resistance to Hilberg's work, the difficulties he encountered in finding a US editor, and subsequent delays with the German edition, owe much to the Cold War atmosphere of the times. As one expert in the field, Norman Finkelstein, whose controversial scholarship Hilberg generously defended virtually to the day he died, recently remarked:

It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn't tire of remembering the crimes of the West German "revanchists." ^[16]

The German rights to the book were acquired by the German publishing firm Droemer Knaur in 1963. Droemer Knaur however, after dithering over it for two years, decided against publication, on account of the work's documentation of certain episodes of cooperation^[17] >by Jewish authorities with the Holocaust, which the editors said would only play into the hands of the antisemitic right in Germany. Hilberg dismissed this fear as 'nonsense'^[18]. Some two decades were to pass before it finally came out in a German edition in 1982, under the imprint of a small Berlinese left-wing publishing firm.^[19]. Hilberg, a lifelong Republican voter^[20], was somewhat bemused by the prospect of being published under such an imprint and asked its director, Ulf Wolter, what on earth his own massive treatise on the Holocaust had in common with Socialism and Women's rights, the firm's staple themes. Wolter replied succinctly: 'Injustice!',^[21]

The Destruction of the European Jews. Style and Structure

The Destruction of the European Jews provided, in Hannah Arendt's words, 'the first clear description of (the) incredibly complicated machinery of destruction' set up under Nazism.^[22]. For Hilberg there was deep irony in the judgement since Arendt's opinion of his manuscript, that it dealt with things one no longer spoke about, had influenced the rejection slip he received from Princeton University Press after he had submitted it, and thus had effectively denied him the prestigious auspices of a mainstream academic publishing house.

With a terse lucidity that ranged, with unsparing meticulousness, over the huge archives of Nazism, Hilberg delineated the history of the mechanisms, political, legal, administrative and organizational, whereby the Holocaust was perpetrated, as it was seen through German eyes, often by the anonymous clerks whose unquestioning dedication to their duties was central to the efficacy of the industrial project of genocide. To that end, Hilberg intentionally ignored laying emphasis on the suffering of Jews, the victims, or their life in the concentration camps. The Nazis had programmed something that was unprecedented in history - the decimation of all peoples whose existence was deemed incompatible with the world-historical destiny of a pure master race - and to accomplish this project, they had to develop techniques, muster resources, make bureaucratic decisions, organize fields and camps of extermination and recruit cadres capable of executing the Final Solution. It was enough to chase down each intricate strand of complex communications over how to conduct the operation efficiently through the enormous archival papertrail to show how this took place. Thus his discourse probed, with surgical precision, the bureaucratic means for implementing genocide, in order to let the implicit horror of the process speak for itself^[23]. In this he differed radically from those who had focused heavily on final responsibilities, as for example was the case of his predecessor Gerald Reitlinger's groundbreaking history of the subject.^[24]. Because of this layered departmentalized structure of the bureaucracy overseeing the intricate policies of classifying, mustering and deporting victims, individual functionaries saw their roles as distinct from the actual 'perpetration' of the Holocaust.^[25]. However, in the same interview, Hilberg made it clear that such functionaries were quite aware of their involvement in what was a process of destruction ^[26].Hilberg's minute documentation thus constructed a functional analysis of the machinery of genocide, while leaving in the air the larger questions of the deep historical hinterland of anti-semitism, and possible structural elements in Germany's historical-social tradition which might have conduced to the unparalleled industrialization of the European Jewish Catastrophe by that country. Yehuda Bauer, a life-long adversary and friend of Hilberg, who often clashed polemically with the man he considered 'without fault' over what Bauer saw as the latter's failure to deal with the complex dilemmas of Jews caught up in this machinery, recalls often prodding Hilberg on his exclusive focus on the how of the Holocaust rather than the why. Hilberg would reply,-

'both to me and to others - that he did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little. ^[27]

Hilberg's empirical, descriptive approach to the Holocaust in turn aroused considerable controversy, not least because of its details concerning the cooperation of Jewish councils in the actual procedures of evacuation to the camps.

Critical Reception

At the time, most historians of the phenomenon subscribed to what would today be called the extreme intentionalist position, where sometime early in his career, Hitler developed a master plan for the genocide of the Jewish people and that everything that happened was the unfolding of the plan. This clashed with the lesson Hilberg had absorbed under Neumann, whose Behemoth:The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942) described the Nazi regime as a virtually stateless political order characterised by chronic bureaucratic infighting and turf disputes. The task Hilberg set himself was to analyse the way the overall policies of genocide were engineered within the otherwise conflictual politics of Nazi factions. It helped that the Americans classifying the huge amount of Nazi documents used, precisely, the categories his future mentor Neumann had employed in his Behemoth study.^[28]

Hilberg came to be considered as the foremost representative of what a later generation has called the functionalist school of Holocaust historiography, of which Christopher Browning is prominent member. It has often been observed that his magnum opus begins with an intentionalist thesis but that Hilberg then proceeds to write his book like a functionalist. At the time, this approach raised eyebrows but only later attracted controversy.^{[verification needed]} A further move towards a functionalist interpretation occurred in the revised 1985 edition where Hitler is a remote figure hardly involved in the machinery of destruction. The terms "functionalist" and "intentionalist" were coined in 1981 by Timothy Mason but the origins of the debate go back to 1969–1970 with the publication of Martin Broszat's The Hitler State in 1969, and Karl Schleunes's The Twisted Road to Auschwitz in 1970. Since most of the early functionalist historians were West German, it was often enough for intentionalist historians, especially for those outside Germany, to note that men such as Broszat and Hans Mommsen had spent their adolescence in the Hitler Youth and then to say that their work was an apologia for National Socialism. Since Hilberg was an Austrian Jew who had fled to the United States to escape the Nazis, he obviously had no Nazi sympathies, which helps to explain the vehemence of the attacks by intentionalist historians that greeted the revised edition of The Destruction of the European Jews in 1985.

Hilberg's understanding of the relationship between the leadership of the Third Reich and the implementers of the Genocide evolved from an interpretation based on orders to the RSHA originating with Adolf Hitler and proclaimed by Hermann Göring, to a thesis consistent with Christopher Browning's The Origins of the Final Solution, an account in which initiatives were undertaken by mid-level officials in response to general orders from senior ones. Such initiatives were broadened by mandates from senior officials and propagated by increasingly informal channels. The experience gained in fulfilling the initiatives fed an understanding in the bureaucracy that radical goals were attainable, progressively reducing the need for direction. As Hilberg put it in a late interview:

“

As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed. At first there were laws. Then there were decrees implementing laws. Then a law was made saying, "There shall be no laws." Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes. Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers. Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral. Finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do.[29]

”

In earlier editions of Destruction, in fact, Hilberg discussed an "order" given by Hitler to have Jews killed, while more recent editions do not refer to a direct command. Hilberg later commented that he "made this change in the interest of precision about the evidence[...]." Notwithstanding Hilberg's focus on bureaucratic momentum as an indispensable force behind the Holocaust, he maintained that the large-scale extermination of Jews was one of Hitler's primary aims: "The primary notion in Germany is that Hitler did it. As it happens, this is also my notion, but I'm not wedded to it" (qtd. in Guttenplan, p. 303).

This stands against the thesis advanced by Daniel Goldhagen (also a functionalist) that the ferocity of German anti-Semitism is sufficient as an explanation for the Holocaust; Hilberg noted that anti-Semitism was more virulent in Eastern Europe than in the Third Reich.

Hilberg was damning of Goldhagen's scholarship, which he called poor ("his scholarly standard is at the level of 1946") and he was even more critical of the lack of primary source or secondary literature competence at Harvard by those who oversaw the research for Goldhagen's book ("This is the only reason why Goldhagen could obtain a PhD in political science at Harvard. There was nobody on the faculty who could have checked his work."), a remark that has been echoed by Yehuda Bauer. Conversely, he was supportive of Norman Finkelstein's recent thesis on the Holocaust industry, with whose "breakthrough" he "totally agree[d]". [3]

What is most contentious about Hilberg's work, the controversial implications of which influenced the decision by Israeli authorities to deny him access to the Yad Vashem's archives^[30]was his assessment that elements of Jewish society, such as the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), were complicit in the Genocide. ^[31] and that this was partly rooted in longer-standing attitudes of European Jews, rather than attempts at survival or exploitation. In his own words:

"I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws and contracts [...] Ultimately I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit. It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance." ^[32]

The result of his approach, and the sharp criticism it aroused in certain quarters, was that, as he records in the same book:

'It has taken me some time to absorb what I should always have known, that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought.' ^[33]

References

See also

• Phases of the Holocaust

Bibliography

• Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial (Norton, 2002, c2001).
• Hilberg, Raul. The destruction of the European Jews (Yale Univ. Press, 2003, c1961).
• Hilberg, Raul. The Holocaust today (Syracuse Univ. Press, 1988).
• Hilberg, Raul. Sources of Holocaust research: An analysis (I.R. Dee, Chicago, 2001).
• Hilberg, Raul. The politics of memory: The journey of a Holocaust historian (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1996).
• Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish catastrophe, 1933-1945 (Aaron Asher Books, NY, 1992).
• Hilberg, Raul. "The Fate of the Jews in the Cities." Reprinted in Betty Rogers Rubenstein (ed.), et al. What kind of God? : Essays in honor of Richard L. Rubenstein (University Press of America, 1995).
• Hilberg, Raul. "The destruction of the European Jews: precedents." Printed in Bartov, Omer. Holocaust: Origins, implementation, aftermath (Routledge, London, 2000).
• Hilberg, Raul (ed.). Documents of destruction: Germany and Jewry, 1933-1945 (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1971).
• Hilberg, Raul (ed.), et al. The Warsaw diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom (Stein and Day, NY, 1979).
• Pacy, James S. and Wertheimer, Alan P. (ed.). Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in honor of Raul Hilberg (Westview Press, Boulder, 1995).
• Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Hilberg, Raul"

External links

• Raul Hilberg overview, by Facing History and Ourselves
• A book review of Raul Hilberg's biography, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, by Berel Lang
• Raul Hilberg interview on Finkelstein and Goldhagen
• Raul Hilberg - "On the Goldhagen Thesis", presented by Yad Vashem (יד ושם)
• "It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There" - World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure (Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim speak in support of Norman Finkelstein's scholarship and "The Holocaust Industry" specifically.)

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