Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg wrote the book that founded the academic study of the Holocaust. The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961 after seventeen years of work, was the first attempt to document the entire process from the perpetrator side, drawing on the captured German records that the Allies had brought out of the Reich at the end of the war. Every later historian of the catastrophe has worked in the structure Hilberg built.

He was born in Vienna in 1926. The family escaped to the United States in 1939 by way of France and Cuba. Hilberg served in the United States Army in 1944 and 1945 and was assigned, on the basis of his German, to a war documentation team in Munich and at the Berchtesgaden complex. He spent his evenings reading the captured Nazi files in the Bavarian alpine ski lodge that had been Hitler’s. Reading those files at twenty changed the rest of his life. He returned to Brooklyn College, took a doctorate at Columbia under Franz Neumann, and turned his dissertation into the book.

The Destruction of the European Jews argued that the Holocaust was not the product of a single decision or a single ideology. It was a bureaucratic process, executed across many ministries and agencies, that proceeded by stages: definition of who was a Jew, expropriation of property, concentration in ghettos, deportation, killing, and the disposal of the property and the bodies. Each stage required the active cooperation of state and private institutions. The railways, the banks, the courts, the postal service, the city governments, the German civil service. Hilberg called it a destruction process. The phrase was deliberate. He wanted to make clear that the catastrophe was the work of an entire administrative state, not just of an SS death squad.

The book was rejected by Yad Vashem, by Princeton University Press and by Columbia University Press before it was finally published by Quadrangle Books, a small Chicago house, in 1961. The Yad Vashem rejection was the most painful and was based in part on the historian Joseph Kermish’s complaint that Hilberg had relied too heavily on German sources and not enough on Jewish ones, and that his treatment of Jewish responses, in particular his treatment of the Judenrat, was too harsh. The argument never went away. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963, drew heavily on Hilberg’s manuscript and shared his assessment of the Judenrat. Arendt was attacked for it. Hilberg, less famous, was attacked less publicly.

The book has gone through three editions, the most recent in 2003 in three volumes totalling around fourteen hundred pages. It is the basic reference work in the field. The structural argument has held up for sixty years even as later scholars have added detail and qualification. The treatment of the Jewish councils has continued to draw criticism, and Yehuda Bauer in particular has argued that Hilberg gave too little weight to the constraints under which the councils operated. The argument continues.

Hilberg taught at the University of Vermont from 1956 until his retirement in 1991. He worked closely with Claude Lanzmann on Shoah and appears in the film as the on-screen historian. He served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from its founding in 1980. He died in Williston, Vermont, on 4 August 2007 at the age of eighty one.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards