Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg (born 6 June1926 in Vienna), is one of the most famous and distinguished Holocaust historians, whose three volume (1,273 page) The Destruction of the European Jews is widely regarded as the first seminal study on the Jewish Holocaust. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 26, 2005.

His family left Austria in 1939 and, after staying briefly in Cuba, ended up in New York City, where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College. He entered the graduate History program at Columbia University after completing military service in World War II, completing his Ph.D. under the supervision of Franz Neumann. Much of his teaching career has been spent at the University of Vermont, where he was a member of the Department of Political Science. The first edition of The Destruction of the European Jews went to press in 1961, a time when the Holocaust was not a matter of frequent reference and had not yet assumed its current central role in education and culture in the United States.

Hilberg's understanding of the relays between the leadership of the Third Reich and implementers of various phases of the Holocaust has evolved from an interpretation focused on orders to the RSHA originating with Adolf Hitler but proclaimed via Hermann Göring to a thesis according with Christopher Browning's The Origins of the Final Solution, an account in which initiatives were undertaken by mid-level officials in response to generalized orders, such initiatives were broadened by mandates from more senior officials propagated by increasingly less official channels, and the experiences gained in the furtherance of these initiatives fed increasingly a shared sense across the bureaucracy that increasingly radical goals were achievable, progressively reducing the need for explicit direction. As Hilberg put it in a recent 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. And finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do.[1]

This stands explicitly against the thesis advanced by Daniel Goldhagen that the ferocity of German antisemitism is sufficient as an explanation, and Hilberg has noted that antisemitism was even more virulent in Eastern Europen than in the Third Reich. Hillberg has been extremely critical of Goldhagen's scholarship, which he has generally characterised as poor ("his scholarly standard is at the level of 1946"), and even more critical of the lack of primary source or secondary literature competence at Harvard by those who oversaw the dissertation research foundational to 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 has been generally supportive of Norman Finkelstein's thesis on the Holocaust industry, although he has expressed his reservation that Finkelstein's book on the subject was "basically true even though incomplete."

What is almost certainly most contentious about Hilberg's work is his assessment that very specific elements of Jewish society beyond the Judenräte (Jewish Councils) became complicit in the Holocaust and that this complicitly was partially rooted in longer-standing qualities of European Jews than attempts at short-term survival or exploitation.

See also

Phases of the Holocaust

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 interview on Finkelstein's The Holocaust industry
• Raul Hilberg - on the Goldhagen thesis, presented by Yad Vashem (יד ושם)

References

• Pacy, James S. and Wertheimer, Alan P. (ed.) Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in honor of Raul Hilberg (Westview Press, Boulder, 1995).
• 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 (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).
• 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).
• Raul Hilberg, "The Fate of the Jews in the Cities." Reprinted in Rubenstein, Betty Rogers (ed.), et al. What kind of God? : Essays in honor of Richard L. Rubenstein (University Press of America, 1995).
• Raul Hilberg, "The destruction of the European Jews: precedents." Printed in Bartov, Omer. Holocaust: Origins, implementation, aftermath (Routledge, London, 2000).

See also: Raul Hilberg, 1926, 1939, 1961, 2005, 6 June, Abraham Lincoln High School, Adolf Hitler, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Antisemitism