RAUL HILBERG: HISTORIAN PREPARED TO RISK HIS CAREER TO EXPOSE THE HOLOCAUST
The Guardian (London)
September 25, 2007 Tuesday
Could a bizarre encounter in postwar Munich have prompted the career
of the world’s pre-eminent Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, who has
died of lung cancer, aged 81? His magisterial three-volume study, The
Destruction of the European Jews (1961), has informed such diverse
Holocaust projects as Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Shoah documentary
(1985) and Jonathan Littell’s prizewinning novel, Les Bienveillantes
(The Benevolent Ones, 2006). But back in 1945, when Hilberg was just
a teenage soldier with the US army of occupation in Germany, he came
across a crate containing Adolf Hitler’s personal library.
Hilberg was a refugee from Austria; his family had escaped the Nazi
dragnet just in time in 1939. Now he was handling books that belonged
to the man bent on eradicating all European Jews.
On his return to New York, Hilberg dedicated his life to unearthing
evidence of arguably the worst single crime in modern history.
Jettisoning his chemistry studies, he took up political science at
Brooklyn College, and later, at Columbia University. He insisted
on writing his doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust, although he
was advised that the idea could damage his academic career; there
was still a reluctance in America to acknowledge the full horror of
the catastrophe. But Hilberg was adamant. As he wrote in his 1996
memoir, The Politics of Memory: Journey of a Holocaust Historian:
"(My supervisor) Franz Neumann realised that I was separating myself
from the academic mainstream to tread in territory that had been
avoided by the public and academia alike."
The resultant 1955 thesis became The Destruction of the European Jews,
though it was not until a small publishing house in Chicago accepted
it six years later that the work appeared. Expanded from 700 to 1,273
pages, and widely translated and updated, it remains "the single most
influential work in our field and the benchmark for the discipline,"
according to Paul Shapiro, director of the Centre for Advanced
Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
In 1945, one inscription from the Hitler crate particularly caught
Hilberg’s eye: a dedication to "the architect", referring to the
fuhrer’s earlier would-be career. Sixty years later, Hilberg recalled
the moment in a lecture at the Holocaust museum. "I saw that Hitler
was really an architect of destruction. The process of destruction
has an architectural form, and it would be an unfinished edifice if
any Jews were left alive."
Hilberg’s work stressed the systematic way in which a "far-flung,
sophisticated bureaucracy" made mass murder commonplace. An inexorable
process ensued: identifying "the Jew", removing him from the economy,
then ghettoisation and finally annihilation. Formal orders gave way
to a network of understood hints. Clerks, gas chamber architects,
factory owners, accountants and train schedulers competed for
opportunistic new "solutions". Thus everyone was complicit, yet no
one accepted responsibility. Hannah Arendt embroidered that theme
in Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963),
which relied heavily on Hilberg’s research.
Hilberg, professor of political science at Vermont University from
1956 to 1991, was devoted to documentation-based fact. But he could
still be moved to tears by small examples of cruelty or pathos – the
story of a doomed Warsaw Jew protesting over a missing coffee coupon,
or Hilberg’s discovery of a slain man’s chemistry books. At times,
the truth could seem unpalatable, such as his conclusion – unpopular
in Jewish circles – that resistance to the Nazis was the exception
not the rule, and that some Jews collaborated with their tormentors
in the hope of saving a few lives.
Hilberg believed that the Holocaust should not be seen in isolation,
either from other wartime events or from other acts of genocide.
Returning through the American deep south in the 1940s, he was
shocked to see separate benches for blacks and whites. "Don’t tell
me that what happened (in Europe) can’t happen some place else," he
told a colleague. More recently, he repeatedly challenged gender and
racial discrimination, chastised President Bill Clinton for dithering
over the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and petitioned the US Congress to
recognise the 1915-17 Turkish massacre of Armenians.
Hilberg was born in Vienna; he was 12 when the Nazis invaded Austria
in 1938. The following year, his father got the family on to a ship to
Cuba, en route to New York. Raul interrupted his chemistry studies to
enlist with the 45th Infantry Division in Europe. Given his proficiency
in German, he was soon poached by the US army documentation division.
Back in peacetime America, he took an MA at Columbia University’s
school of public law in 1950. The following year he began microfilming
and scrutinising millions of Nazi documents in the Alexandria project,
located in a disused torpedo factory in Virginia.
For a while he taught, in Spanish, at a college in Puerto Rico. Then,
in 1956, he moved to Burlington, Vermont, with his first wife,
Christine.
Hilberg served on the president’s commission on the Holocaust
(1978-79) and the US Holocaust memorial council (1980-88). He helped
unlock long- closeted Soviet archives, and inspired a generation
of German scholars. In 2006, he was awarded the Order of Merit,
Germany’s highest honour for a non-citizen. His other books include
Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945
(1992) and Sources of Holocaust Research: an Analysis (2001).
He is survived by his second wife, Gwendolyn, whom he married in 1980,
and David and Deborah, the children of his first marriage.
Lawrence Joffe Raul Hilberg, historian, born June 2 1926; died August
4 2007.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
