Raul Hilberg died on August 4. A refugee from
Nazi-occupied Austria, Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust
studies.
I cannot now remember when I first read Hilberg’s
magnum opus The
Destruction of the European Jews, but it must have been in my early youth.
In fact at first I wasn’t even sure whether I did plow my way through the first
edition, published in 1961 by Quadrangle Books, with its forbidding double
columns of text in 10-point font but I just pulled it off the shelf, binding
broken, pages loose, and sure enough it was all marked up.
I read the expanded three-volume Holmes & Meier
edition published in 1985 many times. Whenever I ventured to write something on
the Nazi holocaust I would again peruse all the volumes cover to cover. They
provided the psychological security I needed before daring to render a judgment
of my own. Wanting to stand on the firmest possible intellectual foundations I
reflexively reached for Hilberg. As it happens, in preparation for a statement
I was commissioned to write on the Nazi holocaust, I was just in the midst of
reading the three-volume third edition published by Yale University Press in
2003 when news of his death arrived.
Hilberg was not pleased with the first edition–a
vital table he pored over many weeks to get just right was botched in the
cramped composition–but he couldn’t do better: no major publishing house
expressed interest in his groundbreaking study, and he only managed to find any
publisher due to a private benefactor who agreed to defray indirectly some of
the costs. (The Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem had also rejected the
manuscript and initially even barred him from its archive.)
In his often acrid memoir The
Politics of Memory Hilberg tells the story that when he first proposed
studying the Jewish genocide to his advisor at Columbia University, the great
German-Jewish sociologist Franz
Neumann (author of Behemoth:
The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, a classic study of the
organization of the Nazi state), Neumann warned him that “this will be your
funeral.”
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 didn’t
tire of remembering the crimes of the West German “revanchists.” The major
American Jewish organizations rushed to make their peace with Konrad Adenauer’s
government (the Anti-Defamation League took the lead) while those holding
commemorations for the Jewish dead were tagged as Communists, which as a rule
they were.
In Eichmann
in Jerusalem, published in the mid-1960s, Hannah Arendt could draw on only
one other scholarly study apart from Hilberg’s on the Nazi holocaust in the
English language. Nowadays there are enough studies to fill a good-sized
library, although it is perhaps not accurate to grace all these publications
with the descriptive “scholarly.”
Arendt borrowed extensively from Hilberg’s work with
less-than-generous attribution. He never forgave her this oversight and–what
truly is unforgivable–her condescending references to his study in private
correspondence and her recommending against its publication by Princeton
University Press. In his memoir Hilberg parries the insult, asserting, wrongly
in my opinion, that Arendt’s study The
Origins of Totalitarianism lacked originality. It is true that Arendt could
be lazy about facts, which might account for Hilberg’s harsh judgment, but the
first part of Origins contains many shrewd insights on the dilemmas of Jewish
assimilation and paradoxes of the nation-state.
Hilberg reserved even greater contempt (and loathing)
for Lucy Dawidowicz, author of the highly touted The
War Against the Jews. Here it can be said that his verdict was faultless. During the heyday of the Holocaust religion in the
1970s-1980s, [WoodyAllen.] Dawidowicz was its designated high priestess. The
problem was that, as Hilberg brutally demonstrates in his memoir, she got the
most elementary facts wrong. I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek
concentration camp, about Dawidowicz’s depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos
and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps
into the gas chambers. “When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the
women inmates had dyed-blond hair,” my mother laughed. “They had been trying to
pass as Gentiles.” The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be
found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein’s The Stars Bear
Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz’s fantasy.
Hilberg’s reputation for mastery of the primary
sources was such that my former coauthor (and an authority in her own right on
the Nazi holocaust) Ruth Bettina Birn feared their first meeting: no mortal being,
she thought, could have stored so many Nuremberg Tribunal documents in his
brain. The magnitude of Hilberg’s achievement is hard to appreciate today
because the scholarly breakthrough has passed into commonplace. His
sequential-chronological account of the steps pressing ineluctably from
the Nazi definition of Jews to their expropriation, massacre, deportation and
assembly-line extermination has been assimilated into the infrastructure of all
subsequent scholarship.
Stylistically Hilberg’s study might be said to be the
opposite of current Holocaust fare: a sparseness of adjectives and adverbs such
that when he reaches for one it packs unusual intensity. Apart from
professional discipline his terse rendering was perhaps also meant to capture
the desiccated esprit of the bureaucratic–dare I say banal?–process through
which millions of Jews were shoved along to their deaths.
Hilberg didn’t truck in the pieties of what became
the Holocaust industry that exploited the colossal suffering of Jews for political
and financial gain. He rejected the notion that the Nazi holocaust sprang
uniquely from virulent anti-Semitism and concomitantly maintained that “Jews
were only the first victims” of the German bureaucracy’s genocidal juggernaut,
which also targeted Gypsies and Poles, among others. He reckoned Jewish
resistance to be negligible but Jewish cooperation (which however he
distinguished from collaboration) to be significant, while he reckoned the
total number of Jewish victims at closer to 5.1 million. The third volume
contains a 20-page appendix detailing his complex calculations of Jewish dead. In
contrast Dawidowicz gives a figure for each country and then totals the number,
as if this calculation were simply an addition problem whereas, as Hilberg
notes, “the raw data are seldom self-explanatory, and their interpretation
often requires the use of voluminous background materials that have to be
analyzed in turn.”
It should go without saying that whether the figure
is closer to five than six million is of zero moral significance–except for a
moral cretin, who could utter “only five million”?–although Hilberg believed it
was of historical significance. Even if it weren’t he almost certainly would
still have insisted on the 5.1 million figure if his research showed it was
closer to the truth. “Always in my life,” Hilberg wrote unaffectedly in his
memoir, “I had wanted the truth about myself.” This was also how he approached
the study of the Nazi holocaust.
His confident knowledge of the field no doubt
accounted for Hilberg’s easygoing tolerance of Holocaust deniers. Those who
want to suppress them do so not only in disgust at what they might say but also
in dread of the inability to answer them. (The hysterical allegation of
Holocaust deniers lurking in every corner is apparently also contrived to
justify the endless proliferation of Holo-trash.) Hilberg recently made the
provocative statement that whereas the Nazi holocaust is an irrefutable fact
this was “more easily said than demonstrated.”
It is indeed easy for the non-expert to be tripped up
on the details especially when on crucial matters like the gas chambers (a
favorite target of the deniers), there exist, as historian Arno Mayer noted, “many
contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources,” none of which
however “put in question the use of gas chambers in the mass murder.” On a
personal note I myself vividly recall reading Arthur Butz’s Hoax of the
Twentieth Century and not being able at the time to answer many of his simplest
challenges. (If the figure for Jews killed was put at six million right after
the war, and the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz was then estimated at
three million, how–he asked–can the figure still stand at six million if the
estimate of the number killed at Auschwitz has now been scaled down by scholars
to one million?) Her lawyers imposed a gag rule on Deborah Lipstadt during her
trial with David Irving–she was banned not only from testifying in court but
also from speaking to the press–because they knew full well that a single word
from this know-nothing’s mouth would sink the ship. In her account of the trial
Lipstadt can barely conceal the lawyers’ contempt for her, yet she is too
thick-headed to notice the absurdity of her smug two thumbs-up after the jury
announced its verdict. She had as much to do with the victory as I did with
last night’s performance of the Bolshoi.
Mention of Irving’s name didn’t evoke howls of
indignation or torrents of abuse from Hilberg. Instead he recognized Irving’s
impressive apprehension of some of the subject matter, although qualifying
it–with a touch of snobbery–as “self-taught,” and speculated that his
preposterous statements sprung less from anti-Semitism than love of the
spotlight. Of Holocaust denial in the Arab world Hilberg observed that “they
are as confused about the West as we are about them,” while he casually
dismissed the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran as “needless difficulty
and trouble,” and said he was “not terribly worried about it.”
Echoing John Stuart Mill’s On
Liberty, Hilberg even declared that Holocaust deniers served the useful
purpose of posing questions that everyone else assumed were already answered.
Hilberg was derisive of another of the Holocaust industry’s shibboleths, the “New
anti-Semitism.” The much-ballyhooed resurgence of anti-Semitism, he said,
amounted to “picking up a few pebbles from the past and throwing them at
windows.” In his last interview Hilberg also sharply criticized Israel’s
maltreatment of Palestinians, which, I suspect, couldn’t have been easy for
him. (His daughter lives in Jerusalem.)
Although Hilberg suffered professionally because he
chose to study the Nazi holocaust when it was politically imprudent and because
he later resisted the orthodoxies of the Holocaust industry, those wanting
truly to understand the unfolding horror have benefited from his independence
of spirit. Like the best memoirs of the Nazi holocaust (many of which are out
of print), his study was written before ideological exigencies deformed and
debased much of the scholarship on the subject. In recent years Hilberg was
given to observing that most serious scholarship on the Nazi holocaust was
coming out of Germany while “there are not many Holocaust researchers worth
mentioning in this country.” It is hard to conceive a more withering indictment
of the Holocaust industry’s multibillion-dollar operation.
For reasons that frankly still perplex me, Hilberg
was a stalwart and vocal supporter of mine. Truth be told I was always careful
to keep my distance. I didn’t feel worthy of his praise and feared alienating
him. We couldn’t have been more different in academic styles and I am a person
of the Left whereas he was a lifelong Republican.
When Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s
Willing Executioners was released in 1996, I approached it with an open
mind. Both my late parents were of the conviction that all Germans wanted the
Jews dead (my father survived Auschwitz) so I figured maybe there was something
to Goldhagen’s thesis. Reading the book was quite the shock. The reasoning was
bizarre, the evidence nonexistent. In debates on it I was accused of polemical
overkill. It couldn’t be that bad: look at what reviewers were saying. Indeed,
who can forget the endless months of breathless prose in the New York Times for the Holocaust industry’s
new poster boy? It was a singular relief when I read Hilberg’s verdict: “worthless.”
After a division of Henry Holt (Metropolitan) agreed
to publish my critical essay on Goldhagen (together with one by Birn), the
Holocaust industry went ballistic. Its attempts to halt the book’s publication
were neutralized, however, when Hilberg stepped forward to praise my
contribution. But Adam Shatz, wielding the hatchet in Slate, breezily surmised
that Hilberg, along with the half dozen other leading scholars who blurbed the
book, hadn’t read carefully what I wrote. In light of what is known about
Hilberg’s fastidiousness, this would have been strangely out of character.
When my book The
Holocaust Industry could no longer be ignored in the U.S. (it had created a
huge stir in Europe), the floodgates of vitriol opened wider still. New York Times
reviewer Omer Bartov apparently consulted the unabridged edition of Roget’s Ad
Hominems, while Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life,
declared that not a word I wrote could be trusted. (Novick’s study of
Holocaust commemoration in the U.S. originally elicited outrage as well but,
after joining in the assault on The Holocaust Industry, he was heralded as a
responsible critic in contrast to me.) Hilberg stepped forward again to support
my most controversial contention in The Holocaust Industry that the campaign
for Holocaust compensation was a “double shakedown” of the European states as
well as the Holocaust survivors. Hilberg told me that the U.S. Holocaust Museum
and Elie Wiesel relentlessly pleaded with him to retract his endorsement of my
book. He refused.
Prior to publication of The Holocaust Industry
Hilberg had himself denounced American Jews for resorting to the “blackmail
weapon” against Europe. His disgust for the megalomaniacal Edgar Bronfman and
the irredeemably vulgar Rabbi Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress, which
orchestrated the shakedown, is barely disguised in the recently updated Yale
edition of his study.
The charges Hilberg and I independently leveled back
in 2000 have since been vindicated. The $1.5 billion extracted from the Swiss
banks bore no relationship to the pittance they actually owed, while Holocaust
survivors have complained of receiving only a pittance of the fully $20 billion
extracted from Europe in their names.
I only met Hilberg once. I was asked to be the
presenter for a documentary to be shown on British television on Holocaust
compensation (“The Final Insult”), and he was one of the expert
commentators.
Hilberg lived in a modestly furnished home in
Burlington, Vermont. His wife worked in a hospice. He showed me the various
foreign translations of his study in which he took obvious pride (in particular
the Japanese edition), not least for their physical workmanship. I doubt he
ever used the internet, just as it is unimaginable that a citation of an
old-fashioned scholar like him would begin www.
During breaks in the filming I put to him many
questions on the Nazi holocaust–the role of Nazi ideology (he was skeptical of
its importance), the female block in Maidanek (he said very few survived), the
Holocaust industry’s claim that millions of Jews survived (he put his index
finger to his temple, made a circular motion, and said “cuckoo”), other
Holocaust scholars (he was uniformly generous in his appraisals, even of those
whom, he said, would “whisper the worst things about me behind my back”). What
Hilberg never did was lapse into Holocaust cliché which, along with Holocaust
kitsch, he detested.
Hilberg’s last statement for the camera was that next
to the likes of Bronfman and Singer, even Shylock looked good. Fully aware of
just how incendiary the juxtaposition was, Hilberg chuckled after the camera
stopped rolling that he’d probably gotten himself into a lot of trouble.
Ironically the British television station forced the producer to edit out this
statement. Not even Hilberg could be allowed to utter certain truths.
When my tenure troubles at DePaul University reached
a crescendo, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! rang up Hilberg for a comment. It
was a sobering occasion. Ruth Conniff and Mathew Rothschild of The Progressive had
denounced me as a “Holocaust minimizer” for citing Hilberg’s 5.1 million
figure. Jon Wiener, writing in The Nation, another left-of-center
publication, “defended” me by quoting Peter Novick’s “thoughtful” remark
that Alan Dershowitz and I “deserve each other.” Yet Hilberg, the lifelong
Republican, once again stinted no words on my behalf. Character not ideology,
Birn once counseled me, is the better measure of a person.
Hilberg famously used the triad
Perpetrators-Victims-Bystanders to catalogue the main actors in the Nazi
holocaust. It is notable that he didn’t include a category for givers of
succor, presumably because they were so few in number. Judging by the life he
lived, my guess is that, had the tables been turned, Hilberg would have been
among those few.
Primo Levi originally titled his memoir of Auschwitz
If This is a Man. Of Raul Hilberg it might be said, There went a man.
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