Hilberg, Raul 1926-

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HILBERG, Raul 1926-

PERSONAL: Born June 2, 1926, in Vienna, Austria; immigrated to the United States, 1939; son of Michael and Gisela (Schachter) Hilberg; married Christine Hemenway (an instructor), March 14, 1964 (divorced); children: David, Deborah. Education: Brooklyn College (now Brooklyn College of the City University of New York), B.A., 1948; Columbia University, M.A., 1950, Ph.D., 1955. Politics: Independent.

ADDRESSES: Home—236 Prospect Pkwy., Burlington, VT 05401. Office—Department of Political Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05401. Agent—Theron Raines, 475 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10017.

CAREER: Educator and historian. War Documentation Project, Alexandria, VA, research specialist, 1951-52; VIVO Institute, Alexandria, VA, member of research mission, 1955; University of Vermont, Burlington, assistant professor, 1956-61, associate professor, 1961-67, professor of political science, 1967-91, professor emeritus, 1991—. Member of President Carter's Commission on the Holocaust; member of United States Holocaust Memorial Council. Military service: U.S. Army, 1944-46.

MEMBER: American Political Science Association, American Society of International Law, Jewish Studies Association, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Jewish Cultural Reconstruction fellowship, 1956; University of Vermont faculty summer research fellowships, 1958, 1966; Anisfield-Wolf Award, Saturday Review, 1968. The University of Vermont created a Department of Holocaust Studies in honor of Hilberg.

WRITINGS:

The Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle Books (Chicago, IL), 1961, 3rd edition, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

(Editor) Documents of Destruction, Quadrangle Books (Chicago, IL), 1971.

(Editor, with Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz) Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1979, reprinted, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1999.

Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, Aaron Asher Books (New York, NY), 1992.

The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a HolocaustHistorian (memoir), Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1996.

Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2001.

Contributor to journals and periodicals, including Midstream and Societas. Editor, Jewish Encyclopedia Handbooks, 1962-63.

SIDELIGHTS: A specialist in international relations and American foreign policy while he was professor of political science at the University of Vermont, Raul Hilberg is widely recognized as one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust. In 1939, when he was thirteen, Hilberg and his family fled the Nazi regime in his native Vienna, and he returned to Europe at the end of World War II as a U.S. soldier. In Munich, where he was quartered in the former Nazi party headquarters, Hilberg discovered Hitler's private library packed in crates. Later Hilberg worked on classifying German documents while serving as a member of the War Documentation Project. Thus began the research for what would later become his first book, The Destruction of the European Jews.

The Destruction of the European Jews, according to Edward Alexander in Commentary, "was justly recognized on its appearance as the definitive history of the process and the machinery of Nazi destruction. It was the first study based upon the entire unindexed collection of Nuremberg documents. Its incisive analysis embraced, in addition to those who killed their victims 'personally,' . . . the huge network of desk-killers in the German administrative bureaucracy. And not the least of the book's virtues was that Hilberg wrote of the most appalling events in a detached and understated, even ironic, style." As Berel Lang further pointed out in Judaism, "The categories Hilberg introduced for distinguishing both the Holocaust's principals—'perpetrators, victims, bystanders'—and its stages of development—'identification, expropriation, concentration, annihilation' have remained the basic angles of vision in Holocaust historiography."

Some critics, however, faulted The Destruction of the European Jews for concentrating on the destroyers and excluding the victims. Perhaps in response, Hilberg wrote Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, in which he puts a name and a face on many of the people caught up in the Holocaust. In the words of Edward Alexander in Commentary, "Both the amount and the nature of the attention given to the Jewish victims in the book's second section may serve to blunt some of the criticism of Hilberg's past views on this subject." A Publishers Weekly reviewer, who noted Hilberg's "meticulous documentation" and "unemotional analysis," called the book an "understated, provocative work." "Hilberg's calm detachment," the reviewer concluded, "gives this portrait gallery its cumulative power."

In his later memoir, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, Hilberg revealed that he had to overcome many obstacles before his first book, The Destruction of the European Jews, was published. As Berel Lang explained in Judaism, "Not only did the history he decided to write have no precedents, but the topic itself was suspect: looked askance by the academy as parochial, questioned even by those who had been inside as still too raw and menacing. And to these impediments was added the burden of one thesis of Hilberg's that has ever since been an item of contention even for many admirers—his claim that, beyond the primary role of the Nazis, the Jews themselves, mingling compliance and self-deception, 'cooperated in their own destruction.'" The crux of The Politics of Memory, according to George Cohen in Booklist, "is what Hilberg terms the 'Thirty-year War,' a defense of his belief that the behavior of the European Jewish community during the Holocaust 'dictated accommodation and precluded resistance.'" Hilberg's memoirs, in Lang's estimation, "turn out to be a history of his masterwork; if ever there has been a case where the man is the book (and also, we now see, the book the man), this is it." A writer for Kirkus Reviews summed up, "This is very much the memoir of a scholar; those hoping for extensive insights into Hilberg the man will be disappointed. One is left wanting more, though also filled with admiration for this remarkable historian's single-minded dedication to his craft."

Hilberg commented in Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust: "In all of my work I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers; and I have preferred to address these things which are minutiae or details in order that I might then be able to put together in a gestalt, a picture, which, if not an explanation, is at least a description, a more full description, of what transpired. And in that sense I look also at the bureaucratic destruction process—for this is what it was—as a series of minute steps taken in logical order and relying above all as much as possible on experience. And this goes not only, incidentally, for the administrative steps that were taken, but also the psychological arguments, even the propaganda. Amazingly little was newly invented till, of course, the moment came when one had to go beyond that which had already been established by precedent, that one had to gas these people or in some sense annihilate them on a large scale. Then these bureaucrats became inventors. But like all inventors of institutions they did not copyright or patent their achievements, and they prefer obscurity."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah: The Complete Text of theAcclaimed Holocaust Film, Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 1955.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1992, George Cohen, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, p. 119; August, 1996, George Cohen, review of The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, p. 1877; July, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Politics of Memory, p. 1998.

Book Report, January-February, 1994, Shelley Glantz, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 57.

Book World, March 24, 1996, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 8; September 1, 1996, review of The Politics of Memory, p. 1.

Choice, January, 1979, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 1490; July, 1992, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 1641; December, 1996, review of The Politics of Memory, p. 662; April, 2002, B. Kraut, review of Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, p. 1474.

Commentary, February, 1993, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 32, Edward Alexander, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 35-36.

Journal of Modern History, March, 1987, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 129, 137; March, 1995, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 55; March, 1999, review of The Politics of Memory, p. 150.

Judaism, fall, 1997, Berel Lang, review of The Politics of Memory, pp. 492-497.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 1985, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 466; August 15, 1992, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 1038; June 1, 1996, review of The Politics of Memory, p. 802.

Library Journal, September 15, 1992, Paul Kaplan, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 75-76; August, 1996, Frederic Krome, review of The Politics of Memory, p. 89.

New Statesman & Society, March 31, 1995, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 43.

New York Review of Books, October 22, 1992, Istvan Deak, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 40-43.

New York Times, May 30, 1985, Edwin McDowell, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 25.

New York Times Book Review, June 8, 1980, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 41; August 11, 1985, David S. Wyman, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, pp. 3-5; September 20, 1992, Michael R. Marrus, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 14; October 17, 1993, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 52.

Partisan Review, fall, 1994, James E. Young, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 700-704.

Publishers Weekly, August 3, 1992, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 56; June 10, 1996, review of The Politics of Memory, p. 78; June 25, 2001, review of Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, p. 58.

Spectator, December 7, 1985, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 34.

Times Literary Supplement, March 8, 1985, review of The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 247; January 7, 1994, Bernard Wasserstein, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 4-6; March 7, 1997, Michael Andre Bernstein, review of The Politics of Memory, pp. 3-4; March 1, 2002, Saul Friedlander, "True Believers: Greed, Power and Lust As Motives for the Holocaust," review of Sources of Holocaust Research, pp. 4-6.

U.S. Catholic, February, 1993, Gerald M. Costello, review of Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, pp. 48-51.