Raul Hilberg Documented the Destruction of Europe’s Jews at a Time Few Wanted to Know About it

The day Raul Hilberg, a 13-year-old Jewish refugee from Vienna, set foot on US soil, the World War II broke out in Europe.

The year before, Adolf Hitler had annexed Austria, and young Raul had looked on in dismay as ‘’a Christian neighbour was crying because her thousand-year-old Austria had ceased to exist”. Giant Swastika flags were draped from the upper stories of apartment houses and photographs of Hitler were hung from windows. As armed youths goose-stepped through the streets of Vienna to the accompaniment of war drums, “Jews, huddling in their apartments, breathed the ominous air and wondered what would happen to them if they did not emigrate in time”.

“Hitler will put us to the wall,” Raul’s father had declared. With that, Raul’s childhood ended in one stroke.

“As I gazed from my window, observing the scene, a thought flashed trough my mind: Some day I will write about what I see here.”

The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg.

Raul Hilberg did get around to writing about that time, but his book turned out to be very nearly a still-born project. The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg’s magisterial monograph on the Holocaust, failed to secure a publisher for as many as six years (1955 to 1961), though Hilberg’s PhD dissertation, out of which his book had taken shape, had been judged the best doctoral thesis in the social sciences by Columbia University in 1955.

After many better-known imprints including Columbia’s own publishing arm declined to back it, Hilberg had to find a sponsor, and then place the book with a small-time Chicago publisher who issued Hilberg’s opus in what Hilberg thought was an eminently forgettable format. Equally annoyingly, the book’s dust jacket appeared to mimic that of a contemporary best-seller’s design and colour scheme. Hilberg was not amused.

But what really troubled him was how the book received little notice from the wider reading public. Hilberg found it odd to be told that perhaps his work on the Holocaust had appeared a little too early to make an impact. But, as intriguing as he found such a notion, what surprised him still more was how Jewish voices in America reacted to the book –  at times with something bordering on open hostility, accusing Hilberg of ‘defaming the dead’.

Over the more than six decades since its first appearance, however, The Destruction of the European Jews has transitioned from  a little-noticed but much-misunderstood book to the status of a classic, a true trail-blazer in Holocaust scholarship. The book’s progress to recognition and fame presents a fascinating story. But, before going over that narrative, let us turn briefly to how Hilberg went about documenting the Nazi genocide. In other words, to his methodology. It's important to note that part of academia’s initial reservations about the book stemmed from Hilberg’s method itself.

Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, by Raul Hilberg.

Hilberg had  recognised that no single individual or group of individuals, however powerful or enterprising, could have driven the genocide all by themselves. The Holocaust, in his view, was essentially a giant bureaucratic process in which all the four organs of the German state – the Nazi Party, the military, the German industry and the government bureaucracy – closely collaborated with one another, and supplemented one another’s efforts towards their common goal. In Hilberg’s words (from his 1992 book Perpetrators Victims Bystanders):

"...(N)o one man and no one organisation was solely responsible for the destruction of the Jews. No single budget was allocated for the purpose. The work was diffused in a widespread bureaucracy, and each man could feel that his contribution was a small part in an immense undertaking. For these reasons, an administrator, clerk, or uniformed guard never referred to himself as a perpetrator. He realised, however, that the process of destruction was deliberate, and that once he had stepped into this maelstrom, his deed would be indelible…"

The body of evidence Hilberg produced in support of his thesis is staggering. Administrative orders, gazette notices, courthouse proceedings, official file notings, memos to ghetto administrators, notices stripping Jewish firms of their business licences, deportation train schedules, bulk orders for (poison gas) Zyklon B ostensibly for ‘pest-control’ purposes: Hilberg had painstakingly put thousands of such documents together.

He had based his research on the first Nuremberg trial papers and followed it up with work on the USA’s colossal War Documents Project which housed “28,000 linear feet of shelves” containing Nazi era records seized by the US after the war.

He had then proceeded to allocate to each document its proper place in the big picture of the mass murder which, far from being a chaotic or episodic project, fell neatly into a coherent pattern. The pattern that had emerged from Hilberg’s reaseach  was a five-step process of destruction: identification (of who was or was to be treated as Jewish); isolation/segregation (exiled or ghettoed); dispossession (of jobs, wealth, property and income); deportation; annihilation. The whole process played out like a gigantic industrial enterprise whose every apparatchik knew and scrupulously performed their appointed task. And not that alone.

When there were disruptions or dislocations in settled plans or schedules, each one of those apparatchiks – however lowly placed in the hierarchy – needed  to innovate and to anticipate what was expected of them so that the plans could be brought back on track, the schedules restored. And such disruptions were bound to be many: after all it was a massive, extremely complex project targeted at 11 million Jews spread across several countries, including occupied territories as well as vassal states who were not always on the same page as the suzerain in their Jewish policies. And yet the Nazi state managed to achieve its mission in large measure, if not wholly, liquidating 6 million of Europe’s Jews. That’s a sure testimony to the murderous efficiency of the machine laid bare in Hilberg’s great book. 

And yet it’s true that the book had arrived before its readers – especially US  readers– were  ready to receive it. The Jewish catastrophe now known as the Holocaust had garnered little public or academic attention till the early 1960s. In fact the word Holocaust itself had not come into wide use until much later. For the US, the immediate post-war years were all about the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Germany (meaning the Federal Republic of Germany) had to be recruited to the ranks of the Free World, and done so fast. So the denazification of Germany needed to be put on the back-burner, if not buried altogether. Many prominent ex-Nazis – scientists as well as spies – had been whisked away to the US soon after the war and their services harnessed in the Cold War.  Many more were soon quietly rehabilitated in positions of power in the FRG. In such a scenario, the US was necessarily ambivalent to the crimes of Hitler’s Germany, an ambivalence mirrored in the easy-going American handling of the later Nuremberg trials. This ambivalence was also reflected in the interest deficit among the American public about the Jewish genocide. Indeed, interest in the Holocaust and in Holocaust studies began to surge only in the 1970s.

By then in Germany, the new, post-Nazi generation of Germans had commenced the process of coming to terms with their disagreeable inheritance. So the US could now afford to be a tad less sensitive to German sensibilities. Also, the Cold War no longer seemed to present such a fraught aspect as before. Holocaust memorials, memorials to Jewish culture and museums dedicated to the horrors of Nazism started appearing in large numbers across the US, Germany and other Western countries at that point. The President’s Commission on the Holocaust was established in the US only in November, 1978, though the country’s first memorial to the Holocaust had been unveiled in Philadelphia in 1964. Israel’s Six-day War of 1967, which brought the US and Israel  closer to each other than ever before, proved to be the historical ballast for the burgeoning project of Holocaust remembrance. 

Hilberg’s pre-publication travails should not therefore surprise us. In fact he had been forewarned  about the likey welcome that awaited his work. Franz Neumann, Hilberg’s PhD supervisor and highly-regarded scholar of Nazi Germany,  had told him that work on the Jewish genocide could be Hilberg’s ‘funeral’. Regardless, Hilberg soldiered on. We must count ourselves lucky that he did. The 1961 edition of The Destruction of European Jews was followed by a significantly enlarged edition in 1985, and a third, even more detailed edition in 2005. It’s a book that has arguably influenced Holocaust research more than any other work published before it or after.                                                        

But, once out, the book also experienced significant pushback, in particular from Jewish commentators. One criticism was directed at Hilberg’s method. Why had he drawn almost entirely on German sources alone, to the near-total exclusion of Jewish sources? Didn’t the survivors have anything of value to add to Hilberg’s inquiry? Couldn’t survivor accounts have shone a light on the machine shoving the Jews to extinction, on life in the ghetto or in the death camps in the last days of victims’ lives?

To frame such criticisms a little differently: how can you hope to construct a history of the Jewish genocide without talking to the Jews in the first place? Hilberg, one particularly severe critic complained, had banished all the victims “into the anonymous grave of concealment and forgetting” and had covered the dead “with the records of the murderers”.

Hilberg’s response to such criticisms was two-tiered.

First: that it was the Nazis who destroyed European Jews and only Nazi records held the clue to how that destruction was accomplished. As the victims, Jews no doubt experienced the workings of the process , but they could never come to grips with the whole diabolical process in concrete terms. And it was Hilberg’s objective to trace the whole process of destruction and show how virtually the entire German state was involved in that process.

Secondly, Hilberg makes no secret of his distrust of survivor testimony as the basis of history writing. Survivor accounts, he believed, seldom touch on those experiences that are most humiliating or embarrassing to tell. Again, more often than not, such accounts tend to approximate to the narrator’s self-portrait. They tell us what it took for an individual to survive, but not necessarily how the machine ground to dust others who failed to survive. In other words, as Prof David Carlo Boder memorably said in the context of survivor testimony: you cannot “interview the dead”. 

But what most Jewish commentators found even more contentious was a theme that ran right through Hilberg’s book. That’s the theme of the absent Jewish resistance to the genocide. “The reaction pattern of the Jews”, Hilberg contends, “is characterised by an almost complete lack of resistance…(T)he documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight.” Hilberg attributed this failure to resist to the centuries-old Jewish experience as a minority, as virtual exiles in a hostile milieu. “(O)ver a period of centuries”, Hilberg avers, “the Jews had learned that in order to survive, they had to refrain from resistance”; in other words, that they needed to accommodate the majority’s expectations from them.

Besides, Hilberg argued, the Jews continued to believe till quite late in the day that the worst outcome to their fate was unlikely, because “the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit”. So resistance may have been deemed not only unfeasible, but also expendable. 

Not unexpectedly, such a reading of Jewish behaviour infuriated the American Jewish Committee and other prominent Jewish voices, both in the US and in Israel. Many of them insisted on seeing the victims as almost invariably heroic, engaged forever, at a minimum, in some form of passive resistance, and often in active resistance as well. Hilberg suggests that such claims are a bit of a stretch: they redefine resistance to accommodate such  action choices as ‘renunciation of a chance to escape’, feeding or caring for the sick in the ghetto, even  ‘dying with dignity’. This ‘campaign of exaltation’, Hilberg believes, does great disservice to the active resistance mounted by Jewish underground groups in inevitably isolated cases. The exceptional courage and the extraordinary capacity for  self-sacrifice that these poorly-armed groups demonstrated could only be atypical. Bracketing their efforts with those implicit in ‘passive’ resistance only helps devalue the meaning of true resistance. 

Hilberg’s research also unveiled the unedifying spectacle of many Jews in positions of power collaborating with the Nazi genocidal machinery, at times willy-nilly, at others, with alacrity. This mostly involved Jewish leaders appointed by the Nazis to the Judenrats (Jewish Councils) charged with running the administration of the ghettos. Required to do the Nazis’ every bidding, however odious, Judenrat leaders were often known to be dodgy characters. They cut deals with corrupt Nazi officials and made sure their own families and friends stayed comfortable while the broad ghetto population suffered dreadfully from hunger and disease. It was these councils that produced on Nazi orders the lists of potential deportees to the death camps. And, with such honourable exceptions as Adam Cherniakow of the Warsaw ghetto who killed himself when he was unable to stall the deportation of children, the Judenrats did not cover themselves with glory by their leaders’ personal conduct as annihilation loomed. 

These ‘heresies’ made Hilberg deeply unpopular with most Jewish institutions. He was persona non grata in Israel for much of his career, Indeed, the first Hebrew translation of The Destruction of European Jews was not sponsored by Israel before 2012, or until five years after Hilberg’s death. But, even in his later writings, such as Perpetrators Victims Bystanders(1992) or his wonderfully readable memoir The Politics of Memory(1996), Hilberg never substantively revised his views on the machinery of the Holocaust or how the Jewish community faced up to its annihilation. 

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

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