Raul Hilberg (1926–2007) In Memoriam

The book is long, its prose flat and its topics almost unbearably grim, but everybody from researcher to casual reader looking at the Holocaust has likely had occasion to open Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. Before 1985 that meant the Quadrangle Press original (1961) or paperback (1967) with 800 pages of small typeface, double-columned text resembling a medieval bible. Indeed, one historian has described his switch as a young scholar from French to Holocaust history after reading "Hilberg" as a near-conversion experience.¹

Hilberg later revised his tome twice and wrote some four other books on the Holocaust and a memoir,² as well as dozens of essays, conference papers, and reviews, but it was this first edition of Destruction—his first publication³—that made him an acknowledged master of the field. In time, Hilberg was praised not only for his book but for having created largely by that book a new discipline of Holocaust studies. Yet the book's encyclopedic, relentless quality also gave Hilberg the reputation of a scholar whose work was merely descriptive, and whose style was disputatious. The impression was underscored by his growing public profile, including interviews where he described himself as "a protesting sort of person, a nonconformist, even a misfit," a researcher who brought "brute force" to grind through mountainous archives.⁴ It was locked in place by his memoir (1996) that opened with a chapter called "The Review" reacting to a nasty review by an ex-friend and that seemed intent on recounting every wound and savoring each moment of revenge. Late in his career, Hilberg was widely seen as a paradox, expert on almost all aspects of the Holocaust but a cantankerous grouch, publicly authoritative but professionally and personally difficult.

The reputation was largely unfair. For one thing, Hilberg was generous to many scholars, especially junior ones, and helped scores over his career. Despite his self-characterization he was not cranky at all, but demanding and contrarian. If that meant sometimes displaying a sharp reaction to senior colleagues, it also brought a genuine interest in others' work and a surprising sympathy for many embattled or obscure colleagues.

Beyond being unfair, the stereotype of Hilberg as cranky encyclopedist misses the richer ironies of his career. He was, for instance, a master historian with no doctoral students; a historian who typically described himself as the political scientist he was by training; a Holocaust scholar who focused, almost exclusively in his early career, on perpetrators rather than Jews. He was a collector of thousands of stories, almost granular in their detail, but they are chiefly drawn from official records, and his early work tends to avoid two obvious source for stories, private papers and oral evidence, especially from victims. He was a master who did not, unlike masters in other fields, preside at meetings of learned societies and benignly settle or mediate quarrels. On the contrary, he fiercely engaged in every historiographic battle from the early 1960s onward.

And perhaps most ironic is that his work, while a foundation for most subsequent Holocaust history, seems to have settled nothing in broader public discourse. For if there is one bright thread in Hilberg's entire work, it is that the Holocaust was accomplished by the efforts of many thousands of Germans organized in autonomous but functionally fused hierarchies, working often without plan but highly efficiently. The leading figures were indispensable, but it was a system of many thousands, a bureaucracy, that killed Jews and needs explaining, and Hilberg tried to describe it as political scientist. The motives, backgrounds, and idiosyncrasies of the diverse perpetrators (and victims) mattered almost not at all, though Hilberg catalogued them in an influential typology of perpetrator-victim-bystander.⁵ Yet however persuasive his deemphasis of individuals, every day brings new books, television shows and films, articles and conferences and now online postings, weighing the personal responsibility of leading Germans and others whose ostensible complexities are felt to be of interest. Almost everybody engaged in this outpouring cites Hilberg. In most cases, he would be appalled at the...