Raul Hilberg
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Raul Hilberg (born June 2, 1926) is one of the best-known and most distinguished of genocide 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.
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[edit] Background
Born in Vienna, Hilberg left Austria with his family in 1939. After a brief stay in Cuba, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College. He entered the graduate Public Law and Government program at Columbia University after completing military service in World War II, writing 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 and later a member of the "President's Holocaust Commission".
The first edition of The Destruction of the European Jews went to press in 1961, a time before the Holocaust entered the public eye in the United States. The important German edition was made possible not earlier than in 1982 by Ulf Wolter, Olle & Wolter, Berlin, where Gerhard Schröder, later chancellor, was an author.
[edit] The Destruction of the European Jews
With Christopher Browning, Hilberg is considered to be the foremost representative of the functionalist school of historiography. It has often been observed that The Destruction of the European Jews 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 was in the revised 1985 edition where Hitler is a remote figure hardly involved in the machinery of destruction.
In 1961, when The Destruction of the European Jews was published, historians 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.
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 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 implementers of the Genocide has evolved from an interpretation based on orders to the RSHA originating with Adolf Hitler proclaimed via 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 propagated by increasingly informal channels. The experience gained in the fulfilling them fed an understanding in the bureaucracy that radical goals were attainable, progressively reducing the need for 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. Finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do. [1]
This stands against the thesis advanced by Daniel Goldhagen (also a functionalist) that the ferocity of German anti-Semitism is sufficient as an explanation and Hilberg has noted that anti-Semitism was more virulent in Eastern Europe than in the Third Reich.
Hilberg has been damning of Goldhagen's scholarship, which he has called 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 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 has been supportive of Norman Finkelstein's controversial thesis on the Holocaust industry, with whose "breakthrough" he "totally agree[s]". [2]
What is most contentious about Hilberg's work[verification needed] is his assessment that elements of Jewish society beyond the Judenräte (Jewish Councils) became 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 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." (R. Hilberg, "The politics of memory", pp. 126-127).
[edit] See also
[edit] Bibliography
- 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).
