Raul Hilberg: In Memoriam

"My father once told me that even before I was born I was sufficiently unruly to cause a serious problem for my mother."¹

With these words Raul Hilberg opened his 1996 memoir, The Politics of Memory. To his immense credit, the great political scientist and historian of the Holocaust, who passed away last August 4th, managed to retain this "unruliness" throughout his long career. His work rarely comforted its audience or hewed to the narratives of his peers. There were no "life-affirming" lessons to be gleaned from his scholarship-to use the cliché that misleadingly graces the back covers of many Holocaust-related works-and he did not make it easy for his readers or fellow scholars to arrive at simplistic answers to the difficult questions raised by the Jewish catastrophe.

Hilberg did not follow the easiest or most predictable path to academe: His mother was one of eighteen siblings, half of whom died in infancy; after migrating with his family from Austria to the United States in 1939, the young Raul worked in Manhattan factories while in high school, and into his first couple of years at Brooklyn College. Conscripted into the United States Army, Hilberg was in an army division that reached Munich, and was quartered in the Nazi party headquarters. Rummaging through papers and books in the building, he realized he had stumbled upon an important archive, including Hitler's private library. Thus, Hilberg made a discovery that would be the envy of any historian; but then, few of us find ourselves in armies that are occupying major European cultural centers.

This discovery, along with courses on Prussian civil service that he took after resuming his undergraduate education at Brooklyn College, led him to his doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust and its organization, which he pursued at Columbia beginning in 1948. His subsequent research led to a revelation that would serve as the overarching theme of his work: The Nazi genocide was organized and propelled not simply by "evil" men or racial fanatics, but by careerists and bureaucrats who strove to please their superiors and to "do their job." "When in the early days of 1933 the first civil servant wrote the first definition of a 'non-Aryan' into a civil service ordinance, the fate of the European Jews was sealed," wrote Hilberg.² He was compelled to analyze and expose this milieu and its logic:

These potentates were an unstoppable force. As administrators they would always follow precedent, but if need be they would break new ground, without calling attention to themselves or claiming a patent, trademark, or copyright. The bureaucracy was a hidden world, an overlooked world, and once I was conscious of it I would not be deterred from prying open its shuttered windows and bolted doors.³

In his dissertation and subsequent book, Hilberg documented with pitiless precision how the German bureaucrat "beckoned to his Faustian fate," overcoming all logistical as well as moral obstacles⁴: "In retrospect it may be possible to view the entire design as a mosaic of small pieces, each commonplace and lusterless by itself. Yet this progression of everyday activities . . . embedded in habit, routine, and tradition, were fashioned into a massive destruction process."⁵ Articulating an insight that has broad implications, Hilberg uncovered the potentially deadly logic of bureaucracy and careerism: "More harmless measures were always the prerequisite for later, more harmful ones."⁶

But the fruit of this research-which would be largely responsible for the development of an entire field of study-may never have seen the light of day. Prominent in Hilberg's obituaries was the story, well known by Holocaust scholars, of his long, lonely struggle to find a publisher for his dissertation, which he had expanded to about two thousand pages.⁷ His doctorate advisor, Franz Neumann, famously attempted to dissuade Hilberg from writing on the Holocaust: "It's your funeral" was the response of the eminent German political scientist, who had made his own reputation in the United States only a few years earlier with his brilliant analysis of the Nazi state (Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism...