Raul Hilberg
Encyclopedia
Raul Hilberg was an Austrian
-born American political scientist
and historian
. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus
, The Destruction of the European Jews
, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi
Final Solution
.
family in Vienna
, Austria
.
Hilberg was very much a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting. Though his parents attended synagogue
on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellant. He did however attend a Zionist
school in Vienna, which had inculcated in him the necessity of defending oneself, rather than surrendering to, the rising menace of Nazism. Following the March 1938 Anschluss
, the family were evicted at gunpoint from their home and his father was arrested by the Nazis, but was released because of his service record as a combatant in World War I
. One year later, on April 1, 1939, at age 13, Hilberg fled Austria with his family; after reaching France, they embarked on a ship bound for Cuba
. Following a four-month stay in Cuba, his family arrived in the United States on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War
broke out in Europe. During the ensuing war in Europe, Hilberg's family was to lose 26 members in the Holocaust.
The Hilbergs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where Raul attended Abraham Lincoln High School
and Brooklyn College
. He intended to make a career in chemistry
, but found that it did not suit him, and left his studies to work in a factory. Having reached draft age, he was then called up for military service. As early as 1942, Hilberg, after reading scattered reports of the Nazi genocide, went so far as to ring Stephen Wise and ask him what he planned to do with regard to 'the complete annihilation of European Jewry'. According to Hilberg, Wise hung up.
Hilberg 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, though in later years he himself used it.
, earning his B.A. at Brooklyn College
in 1948. He was deeply impressed by the importance of elite
s and bureaucracies
while attending Hans Rosenberg
's lectures on the Prussia
n civil service
. At one particular point in Rosenberg's course, Hilberg was taken aback by a remark his teacher dropped:
The young Hilberg interrupted the lecture to ask why the recent murder of 6 million Jews did not figure in Rosenberg's assessment. Rosenberg replied that it was a complicated matter, but that the lectures only dealt with history down to 1930, adding, "History doesn’t reach down into the present age." Hilberg was amazed by this highly educated, German-Jewish emigrant passing over the genocide
of European Jews in order to expound on Napoleon
and the occupation of Spain
. The episode served to strengthen his interest in the subject.
Hilberg went on to complete first an M.A. (1950), and then a Ph.D (1955), at Columbia University
, where he entered the graduate program in Public Law and Government. Meanwhile, in 1951, he obtained a temporary appointment 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. Having attended a course on International Law
, he was also attracted to the lectures of Salo Baron, the leading authority on Jewish historiography
at the time, with particular expertise in the field of laws pertaining to the Jewish people. According to Hilberg, to attend Baron's lectures was to enjoy the rare opportunity of observing "a walking library, a monument of incredible erudition", active before his classroom of students. 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 interest lay in the perpetrators, and thus he would not begin with the Jews who were their victims, but rather with what was done to them.
Hilberg 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 both a deeply patriotic German and a Jew, that certain themes sketched there were unbearably painful. In particular he had asked that the section on Jewish cooperation be removed, to no avail. Neumann nonetheless relented, warning his student, however, that such a dissertation was professionally imprudent and might well prove to be his academic funeral. Undeterred by the prospect, Hilberg pressed on without regard for the possible consequences. Neumann himself contacted Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor
directly, to facilitate Hilberg's access to the appropriate archives. After Neumann's untimely death in a traffic accident in 1954, Hilberg completed his doctoral requirement under the supervision of a Quaker
, Professor Fox. His dissertation won him the university's prestigious Clark F. Ansley Award in 1955, which carried with it the right to have his thesis published by his alma mater
. He taught the first college-level course in the United States dedicated to the Holocaust, when the subject was finally introduced into his university's curriculum in 1974.
Hilberg obtained his first academic position at the University of Vermont
in Burlington
, in 1955, and took up residence there in January 1956. Most of his teaching career was spent at the university, where he was a member of the Department of Political Science
. He was appointed emeritus professor upon his retirement in 1991. In 2006, the university established the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professorship of Holocaust Studies.
Hilberg was appointed to the President's Commission on the Holocaust by Jimmy Carter
in 1979. He later served for many years on its successor, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which is the governing body for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
. Following his passing, the Museum established the Raul Hilberg Fellowship, intended to support the development of new generations of Holocaust scholars. For his seminal and profound services to the historiography of the Holocaust, he was honored with Germany's Order of Merit
, the highest recognition that can be paid to a non-German. In 2002, he was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
for Die Quellen des Holocaust (Sources of the Holocaust). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 2005.
Although Jewish, Hilberg was not religious, and considered himself an atheist
. In his autobiographical reflections he stated, "The fact is that I have had no God." In a 2001 interview that addressed the issue of Holocaust denial
, he said, "I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a [historical] record." After his second wife's autonomous decision, 12 years into their marriage, to convert from Episcopalianism
to Judaism
, in 1993, Hilberg began quietly to attend services at Ohavi Zedek, a Conservative synagogue in Burlington. What he most esteemed, and identified with in his own tradition, was the ideal of the Jew as 'pariah'. As he put it in a 1965 essay, "Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols... The Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding."
Hilberg was the only scholar interviewed for Claude Lanzmann
's Shoah
, and according to Guy Austin was "a key influence on Lanzmann" in depicting the logistics of the genocide. A strong supporter of Norman Finkelstein
during the latter's controversial tenure battle and of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry
, Hilberg also made a posthumous appearance in the 2009 film, American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
.
Though a non-smoker, Hilberg died following a recurrence of lung cancer
on August 4, 2007, aged 81, in Williston, Vermont
.
in a print run of 850 copies. However, Hilberg was firm in desiring that the whole work be published, not just the doctoral version. To obtain this, two opinions in favor of full publication were required. The work was duly submitted to two additional academic authorities in the field, but both judgments were negative, viewing Hilberg's work as polemic
al: one rejected it as anti-German, the other as anti-Jewish.
turned down the manuscript, after quickly vetting it in a mere two weeks. After successive rejections from five prominent publishers, it finally went to press in 1961 under a minor imprint, the Chicago-based publisher, Quadrangle Books
. By good fortune, a wealthy patron, Frank Petschek, a German-Czech Jew whose family coal business had suffered from the Nazi Aryanization
program, laid out $15,000, a substantial sum at the time, to cover the costs of a print run of 5,500 volumes, of which some 1,300 copies were set aside for distribution to libraries.
Resistance to Hilberg's work, the difficulties he encountered in finding a U.S. editor, and subsequent delays with the German edition, owed much to the Cold War
atmosphere of the times. As Norman Finkelstein
once observed,
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, due to the work's documentation of certain episodes of cooperation by Jewish authorities with the executors of the Holocaust — material which the editors said would only play into the hands of the antisemitic right wing in Germany. Hilberg dismissed this fear as "nonsense". Some two decades were to pass before it finally came out in a German edition in 1982, under the imprint of a Berlin publishing house. Hilberg, a lifelong Republican
voter, seemed to be somewhat bemused by the prospect of being published under such an imprint, and asked its director, Ulf Wolter, what on earth his massive treatise on the Holocaust had in common with some of the firm's staple themes, Socialism
and Women's rights
. Wolter replied succinctly: "Injustice!" In a letter of July 14, 1982 Hilberg had written to Mr. Wolter/Olle & Wolter, "Everything you said to me during this brief visit has impressed me very much and has given me a good feeling about our joint venture. I am glad that you are my publisher in Germany." He spoke about a "second edition" of his work, "solid enough for the next century".
's words, 'the first clear description of (the) incredibly complicated machinery of destruction' set up under Nazism. For Hilberg there was deep irony in the judgment since Arendt, asked to give an opinion of his manuscript in 1959, had advised against publication, arguing that it dealt with things one no longer spoke about. Her judgement influenced the rejection slip he received from Princeton University Press following its submission, thus effectively denying 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 refrained from laying emphasis on the suffering of Jews, the victims, or their lives in the concentration camps. The Nazi program entailed the destrution 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 communication over how to conduct the operation efficiently through the enormous archival papertrail to show how this took place. Thus his discourse probed the bureaucratic means for implementing genocide, in order to let the implicit horror of the process speak for itself. In this he differed radically from those who had focused heavily on final responsibilities, as for example in the case of predecessor Gerald Reitlinger
's groundbreaking history of the subject. 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. Hilberg made it clear, however, that such functionaries were quite aware of their involvement in what was a process of destruction. Hilberg's minute documentation thus constructed a functional analysis of the machinery of genocide, while leaving unaddressed any questions of historical antisemitism, 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 lifelong 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. According to Bauer, Hilberg "did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little." or, as Hilberg himself says interviewed in Lanzmann's film, "I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers."
Hilberg's empirical, descriptive approach to the Holocaust, though it exercised a not fully acknowledged but pervasive influence on the far better-known work of Hannah Arendt
, Eichmann in Jerusalem
, 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.
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 for 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.
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
, whose own life was changed by reading Hilberg's book, is a prominent member. This is an ongoing debate, around approximately the following basic points: Intentionalists see "the Holocaust as Hitler's determined and premeditated plan, which he implemented as the opportunity arose", while functionalists see "the Final Solution as an evolution that occurred when other plans proved untenable". Intentionalists argue that the initiative for the Holocaust came from above, while functionalists contend it came from lower ranks within the bureaucracy.
It has often been observed that Hilberg's magnum opus
begins with an intentionalist thesis but gradually shifts towards a functionalist position. At the time, this approach raised a few eyebrows, but only later did it actually attract pointed academic discussion. A further move towards a functionalist interpretation occurred in the revised 1985 edition, in which Hitler is portrayed as 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:
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 contradicts 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 itself.
Hilberg vehemently criticized Goldhagen's scholarship, which he called poor ("his scholarly standard is at the level of 1946") and he was even harsher concerning the lack of primary source or secondary literature competence at Harvard by those who oversaw the research for Goldhagen's book Hilberg said, "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." This remark has been echoed by Yehuda Bauer. Conversely, Hilberg was supportive of Norman Finkelstein
's book The Holocaust Industry, which he endorsed "with specific regard" to Finkelstein's work showing that the money claimed to be owed by Swiss banks to Holocaust survivors was greatly exaggerated.
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, was his assessment that elements of Jewish society, such as the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), were complicit in the genocide. and that this was partly rooted in longer-standing attitudes of European Jews, rather than attempts at survival or exploitation. In his own words:
The result of his approach, and the sharp criticism it aroused in certain quarters, was such, as he records in the same book, that:
Austrians
Austrians are a nation and ethnic group, consisting of the population of the Republic of Austria and its historical predecessor states who share a common Austrian culture and Austrian descent....
-born American political scientist
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
and historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
, The Destruction of the European Jews
The Destruction of the European Jews
The Destruction of the European Jews is a book published in 1961 by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R...
, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
.
Biography
Hilberg was born to a Polish-Romanian JewishJews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
family in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
.
Hilberg was very much a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting. Though his parents attended synagogue
Synagogue
A synagogue is a Jewish house of prayer. This use of the Greek term synagogue originates in the Septuagint where it sometimes translates the Hebrew word for assembly, kahal...
on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellant. He did however attend a Zionist
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
school in Vienna, which had inculcated in him the necessity of defending oneself, rather than surrendering to, the rising menace of Nazism. Following the March 1938 Anschluss
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
, the family were evicted at gunpoint from their home and his father was arrested by the Nazis, but was released because of his service record as a combatant in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. One year later, on April 1, 1939, at age 13, Hilberg fled Austria with his family; after reaching France, they embarked on a ship bound for Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
. Following a four-month stay in Cuba, his family arrived in the United States on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
broke out in Europe. During the ensuing war in Europe, Hilberg's family was to lose 26 members in the Holocaust.
The Hilbergs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where Raul attended Abraham Lincoln High School
Abraham Lincoln High School (New York)
Abraham Lincoln High School is a public high school located at 2800 Ocean Parkway, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, and is part of Region 7 in the New York City Department of Education...
and Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
. He intended to make a career in chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, but found that it did not suit him, and left his studies to work in a factory. Having reached draft age, he was then called up for military service. As early as 1942, Hilberg, after reading scattered reports of the Nazi genocide, went so far as to ring Stephen Wise and ask him what he planned to do with regard to 'the complete annihilation of European Jewry'. According to Hilberg, Wise hung up.
Hilberg served first in the 45th Infantry Division (United States) in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, 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
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, 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, though in later years he himself used it.
Academic career
After returning to civilian life, Hilberg chose to study political sciencePolitical science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
, earning his B.A. at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
in 1948. He was deeply impressed by the importance of elite
Elite
Elite refers to an exceptional or privileged group that wields considerable power within its sphere of influence...
s and bureaucracies
Bureaucracy
A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a governmental or organization who implement the rules, laws, and functions of their institution, and are occasionally characterized by officialism and red tape.-Weberian bureaucracy:...
while attending Hans Rosenberg
Hans Rosenberg
Hans Rosenberg, born February 26, 1904 in Hanover and died on June 26, 1988 in Freiburg, was a German refugee historian whose works influenced a whole generation of post-war German scholars.-Life:...
's lectures on the Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
n civil service
Civil service
The term civil service has two distinct meanings:* A branch of governmental service in which individuals are employed on the basis of professional merit as proven by competitive examinations....
. 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 interrupted the lecture to ask why the recent murder of 6 million Jews did not figure in Rosenberg's assessment. Rosenberg replied that it was a complicated matter, but that the lectures only dealt with history down to 1930, adding, "History doesn’t reach down into the present age." Hilberg was amazed by this highly educated, German-Jewish emigrant passing over the genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
of European Jews in order to expound on Napoleon
Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
and the occupation of Spain
Peninsular War
The Peninsular War was a war between France and the allied powers of Spain, the United Kingdom, and Portugal for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars. The war began when French and Spanish armies crossed Spain and invaded Portugal in 1807. Then, in 1808, France turned on its...
. The episode served to strengthen his interest in the subject.
Hilberg went on to complete first an M.A. (1950), and then a Ph.D (1955), at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, where he entered the graduate program in Public Law and Government. Meanwhile, in 1951, he obtained a temporary appointment to work on the War Documentation Project under the direction of Fritz Epstein
Fritz Epstein
Fritz T. Epstein was a scholar and expert on the Soviet Union, born in Saargemünd, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of Germany, in 1898. He emigrated to the United States in the mid-thirties, and after an illustrious career, died in 1979. He was married to a Bertelsmann, by whom he had two...
.
Hilberg was undecided under whom he should carry out his doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
research. Having attended a course on International Law
International law
Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
, he was also attracted to the lectures of Salo Baron, the leading authority on Jewish historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
at the time, with particular expertise in the field of laws pertaining to the Jewish people. According to Hilberg, to attend Baron's lectures was to enjoy the rare opportunity of observing "a walking library, a monument of incredible erudition", active before his classroom of students. 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 interest lay in the perpetrators, and thus he would not begin with the Jews who were their victims, but rather with what was done to them.
Hilberg decided to write the greater part of his Ph.D. under the supervision of Franz Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of...
, the author of an influential wartime analysis of the German totalitarian state
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
. Neumann was initially reluctant to take Hilberg on as his doctoral student. He had already read Hilberg's master's thesis, and found, as both a deeply patriotic German and a Jew, that certain themes sketched there were unbearably painful. In particular he had asked that the section on Jewish cooperation be removed, to no avail. Neumann nonetheless relented, warning his student, however, that such a dissertation was professionally imprudent and might well prove to be his academic funeral. Undeterred by the prospect, Hilberg pressed on without regard for the possible consequences. Neumann himself contacted Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor
Telford Taylor
Telford Taylor was an American lawyer best known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of U.S...
directly, to facilitate Hilberg's access to the appropriate archives. After Neumann's untimely death in a traffic accident in 1954, Hilberg completed his doctoral requirement under the supervision of a Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
, Professor Fox. His dissertation won him the university's prestigious Clark F. Ansley Award in 1955, which carried with it the right to have his thesis published by his alma mater
Alma mater
Alma mater , pronounced ), was used in ancient Rome as a title for various mother goddesses, especially Ceres or Cybele, and in Christianity for the Virgin Mary.-General term:...
. He taught the first college-level course in the United States dedicated to the Holocaust, when the subject was finally introduced into his university's curriculum in 1974.
Hilberg obtained his first academic position at the University of Vermont
University of Vermont
The University of Vermont comprises seven undergraduate schools, an honors college, a graduate college, and a college of medicine. The Honors College does not offer its own degrees; students in the Honors College concurrently enroll in one of the university's seven undergraduate colleges or...
in Burlington
Burlington, Vermont
Burlington is the largest city in the U.S. state of Vermont and the shire town of Chittenden County. Burlington lies south of the U.S.-Canadian border and some south of Montreal....
, in 1955, and took up residence there in January 1956. Most of his teaching career was spent at the university, where he was a member of the Department of Political Science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
. He was appointed emeritus professor upon his retirement in 1991. In 2006, the university established the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professorship of Holocaust Studies.
Hilberg was appointed to the President's Commission on the Holocaust by Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
in 1979. He later served for many years on its successor, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which is the governing body for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history...
. Following his passing, the Museum established the Raul Hilberg Fellowship, intended to support the development of new generations of Holocaust scholars. For his seminal and profound services to the historiography of the Holocaust, he was honored with Germany's Order of Merit
Bundesverdienstkreuz
The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany is the only general state decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany. It has existed since 7 September 1951, and between 3,000 and 5,200 awards are given every year across all classes...
, the highest recognition that can be paid to a non-German. In 2002, he was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
The Geschwister-Scholl-Preis is a literary prize which was initiated in 1980 by the State Association of Bavaria in the Stock Market Society of the German Book Trade and the city of Munich...
for Die Quellen des Holocaust (Sources of the Holocaust). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 2005.
Personal life
Hilberg had two children, David and Deborah, by his first wife, Christine Hemenway. After his divorce, in 1980 he married Gwendolyn Montgomery.Although Jewish, Hilberg was not religious, and considered himself an atheist
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
. In his autobiographical reflections he stated, "The fact is that I have had no God." In a 2001 interview that addressed the issue of Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
, he said, "I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a [historical] record." After his second wife's autonomous decision, 12 years into their marriage, to convert from Episcopalianism
Episcopal Church (United States)
The Episcopal Church is a mainline Anglican Christian church found mainly in the United States , but also in Honduras, Taiwan, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, the British Virgin Islands and parts of Europe...
to Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
, in 1993, Hilberg began quietly to attend services at Ohavi Zedek, a Conservative synagogue in Burlington. What he most esteemed, and identified with in his own tradition, was the ideal of the Jew as 'pariah'. As he put it in a 1965 essay, "Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols... The Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding."
Hilberg was the only scholar interviewed for Claude Lanzmann
Claude Lanzmann
Claude Lanzmann is a French filmmaker and professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.-Biography:Lanzmann attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in Auvergne...
's Shoah
Shoah (film)
This page is about the film by the name of Shoah. For other uses, see Shoah Shoah is a 1985 French documentary film directed by Claude Lanzmann about the Holocaust...
, and according to Guy Austin was "a key influence on Lanzmann" in depicting the logistics of the genocide. A strong supporter of Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
during the latter's controversial tenure battle and of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry
The Holocaust Industry
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering is a book published in 2000 by Norman G. Finkelstein, that argues that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain, as well as to further the interests of...
, Hilberg also made a posthumous appearance in the 2009 film, American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein
American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein is a 2009 documentary film about the life of the American academic Norman Finkelstein, directed and produced by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier...
.
Though a non-smoker, Hilberg died following a recurrence of lung cancer
Lung cancer
Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...
on August 4, 2007, aged 81, in Williston, Vermont
Williston, Vermont
Williston is a town in Chittenden County, Vermont, United States. The population was 8,698 at the 2010 census, an increase of over 1,000 people since the 2000 census...
.
The Destruction of the European Jews
Hilberg is best known for his influential study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews. His final doctoral supervisor, Professor Fox, worried that the original study was far too long. Hilberg therefore suggested submitting a mere quarter of the research he had written up, and his proposal was accepted. His PhD dissertation was awarded the prestigious Clark F. Ansley prize, which entitled it to be published by Columbia University PressColumbia University Press
Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, social work, sociology,...
in a print run of 850 copies. However, Hilberg was firm in desiring that the whole work be published, not just the doctoral version. To obtain this, two opinions in favor of full publication were required. The work was duly submitted to two additional academic authorities in the field, but both judgments were negative, viewing Hilberg's work as polemic
Polemic
A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...
al: one rejected it as anti-German, the other as anti-Jewish.
Struggle for publication
Hilberg, unwilling to compromise, submitted the complete manuscript to several major publishing houses over the following six years, without luck. Princeton University PressPrinceton University Press
-Further reading:* "". Artforum International, 2005.-External links:* * * * *...
turned down the manuscript, after quickly vetting it in a mere two weeks. After successive rejections from five prominent publishers, it finally went to press in 1961 under a minor imprint, the Chicago-based publisher, Quadrangle Books
Times Books
Times Books is a publishing imprint owned by The New York Times Company and licensed to Henry Holt and Company....
. By good fortune, a wealthy patron, Frank Petschek, a German-Czech Jew whose family coal business had suffered from the Nazi Aryanization
Aryanization
Aryanization is a term coined during Nazism referring to the forced expulsion of so-called "non-Aryans", mainly Jews, from business life in Nazi Germany and the territories it controlled....
program, laid out $15,000, a substantial sum at the time, to cover the costs of a print run of 5,500 volumes, of which some 1,300 copies were set aside for distribution to libraries.
Resistance to Hilberg's work, the difficulties he encountered in finding a U.S. editor, and subsequent delays with the German edition, owed much to the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
atmosphere of the times. As Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
once observed,
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."
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, due to the work's documentation of certain episodes of cooperation by Jewish authorities with the executors of the Holocaust — material which the editors said would only play into the hands of the antisemitic right wing in Germany. Hilberg dismissed this fear as "nonsense". Some two decades were to pass before it finally came out in a German edition in 1982, under the imprint of a Berlin publishing house. Hilberg, a lifelong Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
voter, seemed to be somewhat bemused by the prospect of being published under such an imprint, and asked its director, Ulf Wolter, what on earth his massive treatise on the Holocaust had in common with some of the firm's staple themes, Socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
and Women's rights
Women's rights
Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed...
. Wolter replied succinctly: "Injustice!" In a letter of July 14, 1982 Hilberg had written to Mr. Wolter/Olle & Wolter, "Everything you said to me during this brief visit has impressed me very much and has given me a good feeling about our joint venture. I am glad that you are my publisher in Germany." He spoke about a "second edition" of his work, "solid enough for the next century".
Approach and structure of book
The Destruction of the European Jews provided, in Hannah ArendtHannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
's words, 'the first clear description of (the) incredibly complicated machinery of destruction' set up under Nazism. For Hilberg there was deep irony in the judgment since Arendt, asked to give an opinion of his manuscript in 1959, had advised against publication, arguing that it dealt with things one no longer spoke about. Her judgement influenced the rejection slip he received from Princeton University Press following its submission, thus effectively denying 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 refrained from laying emphasis on the suffering of Jews, the victims, or their lives in the concentration camps. The Nazi program entailed the destrution 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
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
. It was enough to chase down each intricate strand of communication over how to conduct the operation efficiently through the enormous archival papertrail to show how this took place. Thus his discourse probed the bureaucratic means for implementing genocide, in order to let the implicit horror of the process speak for itself. In this he differed radically from those who had focused heavily on final responsibilities, as for example in the case of predecessor Gerald Reitlinger
Gerald Reitlinger
Gerald Roberts Reitlinger was a scholar of the economics of art and of history, particularly the Holocaust...
's groundbreaking history of the subject. 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. Hilberg made it clear, however, that such functionaries were quite aware of their involvement in what was a process of destruction. Hilberg's minute documentation thus constructed a functional analysis of the machinery of genocide, while leaving unaddressed any questions of historical antisemitism, 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
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
, a lifelong 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. According to Bauer, Hilberg "did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little." or, as Hilberg himself says interviewed in Lanzmann's film, "I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers."
Hilberg's empirical, descriptive approach to the Holocaust, though it exercised a not fully acknowledged but pervasive influence on the far better-known work of Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a book written by political theorist Hannah Arendt, originally published in 1963...
, 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 genocideGenocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
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 for 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.
Hilberg came to be considered as the foremost representative of what a later generation has called the functionalist
Functionalism versus intentionalism
Functionalism versus intentionalism is a historiographical debate about the origins of the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy...
school of Holocaust historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
, of which Christopher Browning
Christopher Browning
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian of the Holocaust.-Education:Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1968 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999, eventually becoming...
, whose own life was changed by reading Hilberg's book, is a prominent member. This is an ongoing debate, around approximately the following basic points: Intentionalists see "the Holocaust as Hitler's determined and premeditated plan, which he implemented as the opportunity arose", while functionalists see "the Final Solution as an evolution that occurred when other plans proved untenable". Intentionalists argue that the initiative for the Holocaust came from above, while functionalists contend it came from lower ranks within the bureaucracy.
It has often been observed that Hilberg's magnum opus
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
begins with an intentionalist thesis but gradually shifts towards a functionalist position. At the time, this approach raised a few eyebrows, but only later did it actually attract pointed academic discussion. A further move towards a functionalist interpretation occurred in the revised 1985 edition, in which Hitler is portrayed as a remote figure hardly involved in the machinery of destruction. The terms "functionalist" and "intentionalist" were coined in 1981 by Timothy Mason
Timothy Mason
Timothy Wright Mason was a British Marxist historian of Nazi Germany.-Life and work:He was born in Birkenhead, the child of school-teachers and was educated at Birkenhead School and Oxford University. He taught at Oxford from 1971–1984 and was twice married. He helped to found the...
but the origins of the debate go back to 1969–1970 with the publication of Martin Broszat
Martin Broszat
Martin Broszat was a German historian specializing in modern German social history whose work has been described by The Encyclopedia of Historians as indispensable for any serious study of the Third Reich. Broszat was born in Leipzig, Germany and studied history at the University of Leipzig and...
'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
Hans Mommsen
Hans Mommsen is a left-wing German historian. He is the twin brother of the late Wolfgang Mommsen.-Biography:He was born in Marburg, the son of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen and great-grandson of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen. He studied German, history and philosophy at the University of...
had spent their adolescence in the Hitler Youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
and then to say that their work was an apologia for National Socialism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
. 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
RSHA
The RSHA, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt was an organization subordinate to Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacities as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS...
originating with Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
and proclaimed by Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...
, to a thesis consistent with Christopher Browning
Christopher Browning
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian of the Holocaust.-Education:Browning received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1968 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999, eventually becoming...
'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:
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 contradicts the thesis advanced by Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners and...
(also a functionalist) that the ferocity of German anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
is sufficient as an explanation for the Holocaust; Hilberg noted that anti-Semitism was more virulent in Eastern Europe than in the Third Reich itself.
Hilberg vehemently criticized Goldhagen's scholarship, which he called poor ("his scholarly standard is at the level of 1946") and he was even harsher concerning the lack of primary source or secondary literature competence at Harvard by those who oversaw the research for Goldhagen's book Hilberg said, "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." This remark has been echoed by Yehuda Bauer. Conversely, Hilberg was supportive of Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
's book The Holocaust Industry, which he endorsed "with specific regard" to Finkelstein's work showing that the money claimed to be owed by Swiss banks to Holocaust survivors was greatly exaggerated.
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
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
's archives, was his assessment that elements of Jewish society, such as the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), were complicit in the genocide. 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."
The result of his approach, and the sharp criticism it aroused in certain quarters, was such, as he records in the same book, that:
"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."
Further reading
- Encyclopaedia JudaicaEncyclopaedia JudaicaThe Encyclopaedia Judaica is a 26-volume English-language encyclopedia of the Jewish people and their faith, Judaism. It covers diverse areas of the Jewish world and civilization, including Jewish history of all eras, culture, holidays, language, scripture, and religious teachings...
article, "Hilberg, Raul". - Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial (NortonNorton-England:*Norton, County Durham*Norton, Hertfordshire*Norton, Kent*Norton, Northamptonshire*Norton, Nottinghamshire*Norton, Runcorn, Cheshire*Norton, Suffolk*Norton, Dudley, West Midlands*Norton, Worcester, Worcestershire*Norton, Doncaster, South Yorkshire...
, 2002). - Pacy, James S. and Wertheimer, Alan P. (ed.). Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in honor of Raul Hilberg (Westview PressWestview PressWestview Press is an American publishing house. It publishes textbooks and scholarly works for an academic audience.Westview was founded in 1975 in Boulder, Colorado by Fred Praeger. The press was sold in 1991 to SCS Communications. HarperCollins acquired the company in 1995. Since 1998, it has...
, Boulder, 1995).
External links
- Raul Hilberg overview, by Facing History and Ourselves
- Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg
- 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 ShlaimAvi ShlaimAvi Shlaim FBA is a British/Israeli historian. He is a professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy.Shlaim is especially well known as a historian of the Arab-Israeli conflict...
speak in support of Norman FinkelsteinNorman FinkelsteinNorman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
's scholarship and "The Holocaust Industry" specifically.)