Hilberg is best known for his influential study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews. His final doctoral supervisor, Professor Fox, worried that the original study was far too long. Hilberg therefore suggested submitting a mere quarter of the research he had written up, and his proposal was accepted. His PhD dissertation was awarded the prestigious Clark F. Ansley prize, which entitled it to be published by Columbia University Press in a print run of 850 copies.[25] However, Hilberg was firm in desiring that the whole work be published, not just the doctoral version. To obtain this, two opinions in favor of full publication were required. The work was duly submitted to two additional academic authorities in the field, but both judgments were negative, viewing Hilbergs work as polemical: one rejected it as anti-German, the other as anti-Jewish.[26] Struggle for publication Hilberg, unwilling to compromise, submitted the complete manuscript to several major publishing houses over the following six years, without luck. Princeton University Press turned down the manuscript, after quickly vetting it in a mere two weeks. After successive rejections from five prominent publishers, it finally went to press in 1961 under a minor imprint, the Chicago-based publisher, Quadrangle Books. By good fortune, a wealthy patron, Frank Petschek, a German-Czech Jew whose family coal business had suffered from the Nazi Aryanization program,[27] laid out $15,000, a substantial sum at the time, to cover the costs of a print run of 5,500 volumes,[28] of which some 1,300 copies were set aside for distribution to libraries.[13] Resistance to Hilbergs work, the difficulties he encountered in finding a U.S. editor, and subsequent delays with the German edition, owed much to the Cold War atmosphere of the times. As Norman Finkelstein once observed, It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didnt tire of remembering the crimes of the West German revanchists.[29] The German rights to the book were acquired by the German publishing firm, Droemer Knaur, in 1963. Droemer Knaur, however, after dithering over it for two years, decided against publication, due to the works documentation of certain episodes of cooperation by Jewish authorities with the executors of the Holocaust — material which the editors said would only play into the hands of the antisemitic right wing in Germany. Hilberg dismissed this fear as nonsense.[30] Some two decades were to pass before it finally came out in a German edition in 1982, under the imprint of a Berlin publishing house.[31] Hilberg, a lifelong Republican voter,[32] seemed to be somewhat bemused by the prospect of being published under such an imprint, and asked its director, Ulf Wolter, what on earth his massive treatise on the Holocaust had in common with some of the firms staple themes, Socialism and Womens rights. Wolter replied succinctly: Injustice![33] In a letter of July 14, 1982 Hilberg had written to Mr. Wolter/Olle & Wolter, Everything you said to me during this brief visit has impressed me very much and has given me a good feeling about our joint venture. I am glad that you are my publisher in Germany. He spoke about a second edition of his work, solid enough for the next century. Approach and structure of book The Destruction of the European Jews provided, in Hannah Arendts words, the first clear description of (the) incredibly complicated machinery of destruction set up under Nazism.[34] For Hilberg there was deep irony in the judgment since Arendt, asked to give an opinion of his manuscript in 1959, had advised against publication,[4] arguing that it dealt with things one no longer spoke about. Her judgement influenced the rejection slip he received from Princeton University Press following its submission, thus effectively denying him the prestigious auspices of a mainstream academic publishing house. With a terse lucidity that ranged, with unsparing meticulousness, over the huge archives of Nazism, Hilberg delineated the history of the mechanisms, political, legal, administrative and organizational, whereby the Holocaust was perpetrated, as it was seen through German eyes, often by the anonymous clerks whose unquestioning dedication to their duties was central to the efficacy of the industrial project of genocide. To that end, Hilberg refrained from laying emphasis on the suffering of Jews, the victims, or their lives in the concentration camps. The Nazi program entailed the destruction of all peoples whose existence was deemed incompatible with the world-historical destiny of a pure master race – and to accomplish this project, they had to develop techniques, muster resources, make bureaucratic decisions, organize fields and camps of extermination and recruit cadres capable of executing the Final Solution. It was enough to chase down each intricate strand of communication over how to conduct the operation efficiently through the enormous archival papertrail to show how this took place. Thus his discourse probed the bureaucratic means for implementing genocide, in order to let the implicit horror of the process speak for itself.[35] In this he differed radically from those who had focused heavily on final responsibilities, as for example in the case of predecessor Gerald Reitlingers groundbreaking history of the subject.[36] Because of this layered departmentalized structure of the bureaucracy overseeing the intricate policies of classifying, mustering and deporting victims, individual functionaries saw their roles as distinct from the actual perpetration of the Holocaust.[37] Hilberg made it clear, however, that such functionaries were quite aware of their involvement in what was a process of destruction.[13] Hilbergs minute documentation thus constructed a functional analysis of the machinery of genocide, while leaving unaddressed any questions of historical antisemitism, and possible structural elements in Germanys historical-social tradition which might have conduced to the unparalleled industrialization of the European Jewish Catastrophe by that country. Yehuda Bauer, a lifelong adversary and friend of Hilberg, who often clashed polemically with the man he considered without fault over what Bauer saw as the latters failure to deal with the complex dilemmas of Jews caught up in this machinery, recalls often prodding Hilberg on his exclusive focus on the how of the Holocaust rather than the why. According to Bauer, Hilberg did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little.[38] or, as Hilberg himself says interviewed in Lanzmanns film, I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers. Hilbergs empirical, descriptive approach to the Holocaust, though it exercised a not fully acknowledged but pervasive influence on the far better-known work of Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem,[39] in turn aroused considerable controversy, not least because of its details concerning the cooperation of Jewish councils in the actual procedures of evacuation to the camps. Critical reception At the time, most historians of the phenomenon 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. This clashed with the lesson Hilberg had absorbed under Neumann, whose Behemoth:The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942) described the Nazi regime as a virtually stateless political order characterised by chronic bureaucratic infighting and turf disputes. The task Hilberg set for himself was to analyse the way the overall policies of genocide were engineered within the otherwise conflictual politics of Nazi factions. It helped that the Americans classifying the huge amount of Nazi documents used, precisely, the categories his future mentor Neumann had employed in his Behemoth study.[32] Hilberg came to be considered as the foremost representative of what a later generation has called the functionalist school of Holocaust historiography, of which Christopher Browning, whose own life was changed by reading Hilbergs book,[40] is a prominent member. This is an ongoing debate, around approximately the following basic points: Intentionalists see the Holocaust as Hitlers determined and premeditated plan, which he implemented as the opportunity arose,[41] while functionalists see the Final Solution as an evolution that occurred when other plans proved untenable.[41] Intentionalists argue that the initiative for the Holocaust came from above, while functionalists contend it came from lower ranks within the bureaucracy. It has often been observed that Hilbergs magnum opus begins with an intentionalist thesis but gradually shifts towards a functionalist position. At the time, this approach raised a few eyebrows, but only later did it actually attract pointed academic discussion.[42] A further move towards a functionalist interpretation occurred in the revised 1985 edition, in which Hitler is portrayed as a remote figure hardly involved in the machinery of destruction. 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 Broszats The Hitler State in 1969, and Karl Schleuness 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. Hilberg was Jewish and an Austrian who had fled to the United States to escape the Nazis and 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. Hilbergs understanding of the relationship between the leadership of the Third Reich and the implementers of the genocide evolved from an interpretation based on orders to the RSHA originating with Adolf Hitler and proclaimed by Hermann Göring, to a thesis consistent with Christopher Brownings 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 and propagated by increasingly informal channels. The experience gained in fulfilling the initiatives fed an understanding in the bureaucracy that radical goals were attainable, progressively reducing the need for direction. As Hilberg put it in a late 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.[43] ” In earlier editions of Destruction, in fact, Hilberg discussed an order given by Hitler to have Jews killed, while more recent editions do not refer to a direct command. Hilberg later commented that he made this change in the interest of precision about the evidence[...]. Notwithstanding Hilbergs focus on bureaucratic momentum as an indispensable force behind the Holocaust, he maintained that extermination of Jews was one of Hitlers aims: The primary notion in Germany is that Hitler did it. As it happens, this is also my notion, but Im not wedded to it (qtd. in Guttenplan, p. 303). This contradicts the thesis advanced by Daniel Goldhagen (also a functionalist) that the ferocity of German anti-Semitism is sufficient as an explanation for the Holocaust; Hilberg noted that anti-Semitism was more virulent in Eastern Europe than in the Third Reich itself. Hilberg criticized Goldhagens scholarship, which he called poor (his scholarly standard is at the level of 1946) and he was even harsher concerning the lack of primary source or secondary literature competence at Harvard by those who oversaw the research for Goldhagens book. Hilberg said, 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. This remark has been echoed by Yehuda Bauer. Conversely, Hilberg was supportive of Norman Finkelsteins book The Holocaust Industry, which he endorsed with specific regard to Finkelsteins work showing that the money claimed to be owed by Swiss banks to Holocaust survivors was greatly exaggerated.[44] What is most contentious about Hilbergs work, the controversial implications of which influenced the decision by Israeli authorities to deny him access to the Yad Vashems archives,[7] was his assessment that elements of Jewish society, such as the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), were complicit in the genocide.[45][46] and that this was partly rooted in long-standing attitudes of European Jews, rather than attempts at survival or exploitation. In his own 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.[47] The result of his approach, and the sharp criticism it aroused in certain quarters, was such, as he records in the same book, that: It has taken me some time to absorb what I should always have known, that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought.[7]
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 08:34:25 +0000
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