THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS Revised and Definitive Edition. By Raul Hilberg. Three volumes. Maps. 1,274 pp. New York: Holmes & Meier. $159.50.THE Holocaust was a pivotal event in the history not only of the Jewish people but of all mankind.Its implications – for Jews, Christians and Western civilization – are deep and complex. And they are only beginning to be understood. Basic knowledge of the Holocaust is the essential first step to understanding its meanings and its lessons. For nearly a quarter of a century we have been in debt to Raul Hilberg for having made much of that knowledge available in reliable and readable form in ”The Destruction of the European Jews,” published in 1961. That volume, numerous articles he has written, a book of documents he edited, and ”The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow,” which he co-edited, make him the pre-eminent scholar of the Holocaust.Mr. Hilberg has now brought his 36-year investigation of ”how the Jews of Europe were destroyed” to culmination in a revised and definitive edition of ”The Destruction of the European Jews.” What was already a comprehensive, 790-page study has been expanded to a three-volume set of 1,274 pages. The book marshals a vast array of sources, including archives in Germany, Israel and the United States. It is superbly organized. The scholarship is thorough and careful. All information in it is clearly footnoted. The writing is clear, readable, often graceful. Occasionally the author even hides a little humor in the overwhelmingly distressing march of events. For instance: ”The Italian area [of Greece] was much larger than the German, for the Italians, after all, had been the first to attack Greece, and the Germans had come in only after the Italian invaders had been pushed by the Greek army almost 50 miles into Albania.” And this from a secret report by a German journalist in Rumania: ”In many quarters we have been told that Marshal Antonescu has syphilis, a disease that is notoriously as common among Romanian cavalry officers as in Germany the cold.”
The new edition is structured almost exactly as the old. Mr. Hilberg opens with a brief history of anti-Semitism, the cultural taproot that made the Holocaust possible: first, Christian anti-Semitism, the anti-Jewish attitudes that were embedded in Western consciousness over the centuries by the Christian church; then the emergence in the 19th century of racial and political anti-Semitism. A salient point here is that the Christian policy of converting all Jews and state policies of getting rid of Jews by expulsion had never advanced to physical annihilation. It took Hitler, the Nazis and the Third Reich to plunge into the abyss of savagery. ”The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews,” Mr. Hilberg writes. ”The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live. . . . The German Nazis, then, did not discard the past; they built upon it. They did not begin a development; they completed it.”
Other early chapters define and analyze the ”destruction process” (definition of who the Jews are, expropriation of their property, concentration of the victims and then their annihilation) and the ”machinery of destruction” (the civil bureaucracy, the Nazi Party, the armed forces and the business sector). The first half of the first volume constructs the theoretical framework for the later unfolding of the ”Final Solution.” These chapters also trace the history of Germany’s assault on the Jews and the Jews’ reactions to it, through the pre-extermination years of 1933-1940. The chapter on concentration, it should be noted, brings in the first steps in Germany’s devastation of Polish Jewry, a catastrophe that ended in the death of 3 million of Poland’s 3,350,000 Jews and the extinction of a centuries-old center and seedbed of Jewish culture. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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A Conscious Pariah
Nathaniel Popper
The Nation, Mar. 31, 2010
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Paul Hilberg was known for cultivating enemies. During faculty meetings at the University of Vermont, where he was a professor of political science from 1956 to 1991, the renowned historian of the Holocaust would unfailingly denounce the consensus position, whether it concerned faculty appointments or vacation policy. “He was an intensely stubborn and contrary person,” one of his old colleagues told me. In T’he Politics of Memory,’ an autobiography published in 1996, Hilberg dedicated a chapter to attacking fellow historians whose work he considered derivative or misguided. Among those admonished was Lucy Dawidowicz, a popular Holocaust scholar and author of the emotional bestseller The War Against the Jews (1975); Dawidowicz provided “vaguely consoling words” that “could easily be clutched by all those who did not wish to look deeper,” Hilberg complained.
But no one who wrote about the Holocaust nettled Hilberg more than Hannah Arendt. Hilberg’s anger toward the German refugee and New York intellectual erupted with the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt told the tale of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for implementing the Final Solution, against the backdrop of his trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina in May 1960. His trial in Jerusalem began in April 1961, and he was executed in May 1962.) Arendt’s study was serialized in five installments in The New Yorker in the spring of 1963 and then quickly published in book form in May of that year by Viking Press with its now infamous subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” The work has attained a mythic status. Penguin publishes it in two inexpensive paperback editions–one a “Penguin Classics” and the other a “Great Ideas” version that, with its matte blue-and-white cover, is attractively designed for display next to cash registers as an impulse buy. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg
Logos Journal, Issue 6, 1-2, 2007
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Q: You have famously argued that there were three solutions to the Jewish problem; conversion, expulsion, and finally extermination. Could you explain what you mean by that?
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Raul Hilberg: This is an underlying pattern to which I came to early on in my research. Looking through the sweep of history it is clear that conversion was an object of the Christian world. The expulsions began in the late Middle Ages when it would appear that the Jews were not willing to become Christians. That pattern existed for several hundred years in Europe. You could take it back to Oxford and then go to Spain in 1492 and Portugal a few years later. So we are really talking about the later Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times for the expulsions.
Now, the business of a final solution, that permanent solution, is a Nazi idea. You go back even to the beginnings of the Nazi party and find that they are still thinking in terms of the emigration of the Jews —there was a plan called the Madagascar plan, which was actually a thought in Poland and even in France (Madagascar was a French possession), maybe all of the Jews could be shipped there. So this idea was still floating in the German foreign office and all the way up to Hitler as late as 1940, especially 1940 when France surrendered.
However, when the War did not end as the Germans had hoped it would with the West (they were already making preparations to attack the Soviet Union), the serious thought of annihilating the Jews emerged. The earliest indication of this is a meeting Hitler had with a bunch of party members early in February of 1941. He had by then not quite formed the decision, but it was on the way.
Q: There was the revisionist conference in Iran several months ago. How worried should scholars and the general public be about the capacity of this kind of revisionism to engender anti-Semitism?
Hilberg: This revisionism began in the 1960s. It is not new. I boycotted Germany for quite a while, but when I passed through a while back Munich I went to a kiosk and bought a local right wing paper, a German paper, I found to my great astonishment that I was mentioned on the title page as a Zionist leader. Now, that was a big surprise to me, but the headline was: “The Lie of the Holocaust”. So, Germany in the sixties had adherence to this belief, even though there they should have known better than anywhere else. There was a Frenchman who was already in print in the 1960s. Half of his book was devoted to me. It was a neo-Nazi publication. As soon as my book, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews,’ was out in 1961, I became a target of these groups. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK– Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
Raul Hilberg: Season 6 Episode 62, PBS, May 4,2007 — Fran Stoddard interviews Raul Hilberg, of Burlington, Vt., professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, distinguished genocide historian and author of the seminal work “The Destruction of the European Jews.”
Raul Hilberg Part 1: Professionals and the Holocaust: YouTube, July 17, 2009 — At a conference on evil, Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg maintains that the Holocaust was a rational anti-Semitism carried out by the lawyers, the doctors, and the soldiers.
Shoah-Part 2: Interview with Raul Hilberg: YouTube, July 17, 2020 — Director Claude Lanzmann interviews Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg about the train schedules that represent the deaths of thousands of Jews, calling into question Walter Stier’s and other Germans’ claims that they knew nothing about the Final Solution.
Getting it Right, Getting it Wrong: Recent Holocaust Scholarship in Light of the Work of Raul Hilberg: Dan Michman, The 2017 Annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture: The University of Vermont Carolyn & Leonard Miller Center For Holocaust Studies, Oct. 24, 2017 — Allow me to start by quoting the following exchange of letters: August 24th, 1958 Dear Professor Hilberg, Your manuscript on the extermination of the Jews has been read in the course of the last two months by several of our staff, each of whom is an expert in one of the aspects involved.
God and the Holocaust Is Debated Here: Israel Schenker, NYTimes, Mar. 5, 1975 — Where was God during the Nazi extermination of the Jews? Inevitably, the four‐day scholars’ conference here on “The Holocaust—A Generation After,” having dealt with man’s inhumanity to man, turned yesterday, on its second day, to the role of God and of Christianity.
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This week’s Communiqué Isranet is Communiqué: N’oublions pas les réfugiés juifs du monde arabe (Dec 4,2020)
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