August 4: Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg, the world’s most exhaustive scholar of the Holocaust, died in Vermont on this date in 2007. Born in Vienna in 1926, Hilberg fled with his family to the U.S. following the Nazi takeover of Austria; twenty-six members of his extended family would die in the Holocaust. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and discovered Hitler’s crated private library in Munich while working with the War Documentation Department; this discovery prompted his post-war research, which ultimately took shape as the three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). It took Hilberg six years to find a willing publisher for his book, which was written at a time when the U.S. was closely allied with a barely de-Nazified West Germany in the Cold War. “In his landmark work,” wrote the New York Times in its obituary for Hilberg, he extensively documented that “the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a single order by Hitler . . . As uncountable separate instructions were passed on, formally and informally, to a range of actors that included train schedulers and gas chamber architects, responsibility became ever more diluted, he argued, even as the machinery of death churned inexorably ahead.” Hilberg taught at the University of Vermont for thirty-five years. He wrote or edited five other books and two updated editions of The Destruction . . .
“Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols . . . The Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding.” —Raul Hilberg
Watch Raul Hilberg speak about “Professionals and the Holocaust” at a Conference on Evil:
Part 1

Part 2