So Danny -
Regarding Hilberg's books -I found this for you
Last update - 22:57 28/08/2007
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=898045 The Holocaust scholar who was hard on the Jews
By Dan Michman
Tags: Vermont, Holocaust scholar
Raul Hilberg, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, died on Saturday, August 4. He was certainly one of the most influential scholars in Holocaust research in the world, despite the fact that his list of publications was relatively short. But his relationship with Israeli Holocaust research was ambivalent.
Hilberg fled as a child with his parents from Vienna to the U.S. after the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938). He was recruited to the U.S. army at the age of 18, toward the end of the Second World War, and took part in the last American campaign on German soil. Afterward, he started his studies at Columbia University in New York, attending courses taught by another refugee scholar, Franz Neumann. Through Neumann's mediation, Hilberg became a member of the U.S. War Documentation project, and thus encountered much German-captured documentation. He became intrigued by these documents and by the modes of functioning of the Third Reich as revealed by them, and when he had to decide on a topic for his PhD-thesis in 1950, to be supervised by Neumann, he chose to focus on the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany.
The major question propelling Holocaust research in its initial post-war years was: How could a modern state and society turn into a barbaric, though highly efficient, slaughtering machine? At that time, the term Holocaust was not yet in use (shoah was used only in the Jewish Yishuv in pre-state Palestine), and the murder of the Jews was perceived as one, although perhaps the most extreme, of many atrocities carried out by the Nazis.
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Hilberg finished his thesis in 1954, and later expanded on it; the updated version, which became the masterly comprehensive study of the Holocaust, "The Destruction of the European Jews," was published in 1961.
Indeed, some comprehensive histories of the Holocaust had been published before - by Leon Poliakov (1951), Gerald Reitlinger (1953) and Joseph Tenenbaum (1956). But Hilberg's magnum opus served as the basic introductory study for all who entered the field of Holocaust studies with an analytical and scholarly approach.
The strengths - as well as the flaws - of Hilberg's study lie in two facts: First, he approached the Holocaust from a political scientist's point of view, not as a historian; as such, he viewed the Holocaust as one clearly defined unit, stretching over the years in which the Nazis ruled Germany, 1933-1945, and tried to present a neat model. Second, he focused on the bureaucracy of the state. Hilberg, a highly analytical scholar, with an enormous body of knowledge and an outstanding memory, succeeded in depicting a very clear picture of the bureaucracy of a modern, highly-developed state, which adapted itself to the vague goals set by the leader (Hitler).
The linear path of history
In his eyes, Hitler played actually a minor role in the development, because he himself did not know at the beginning (in 1933) where to lead the movement. Anti-Semitism was not new, and racism existed also elsewhere, such as in the United States. It was the bureaucracy that made the difference. It turned into a "machinery of destruction" (the key term developed by Hilberg), which escalated the whole process - in a linear path, through clear bureaucratic stages (definition of "the Jews," expropriation, concentration, extermination) - from vague beginnings to the enormous killing project which was symbolized by Auschwitz.
From this perspective, the lesson of the Holocaust was universal and related to the dangers of the modern state, which should find ways to balance and control the almost unlimited power and ability of the bureaucracy of the centralized government.
An interesting example of the functioning of an apparently unimportant bureaucratic institution was presented in another study in the 1970s: "German Railways, Jewish Souls." In this study, Hilberg showed how Reichsbahn officials made the deportation system function smoothly and efficiently (for instance: They offered SS clients transportation rate reductions if more Jews were pushed into trains, and exempted children under 4 from payment), and thus contributed their share.
With the rapid development of Holocaust research from the second half of the 1960s, Hilberg's book became a "must" in academic courses on the topic at universities. He therefore published an expanded 3-volume version in 1985, which was translated into many languages. In 2004 he published a third revised version. In the updated and revised versions he added much new material, but never changed his basic interpretation. He also hardly related to historiographical disputes, which affected Holocaust research. Even if the focus of his research was the machinery of destruction, it was he who introduced the categorization of three "players" in the Holocaust arena, which became widely used: perpetrators, victims and bystanders.
The fate of his book in Israel was twisted. Shortly after finishing the manuscript of his book, he presented it to Yad Vashem for publication (1957), through the mediation of Philip Friedman, perhaps the most eminent Holocaust historian at the time. Yad Vashem, headed by its chairman, historian Prof. Ben-Zion Dinur, and its director, Dr. Jozeph Melkman (later: Michman, father of this writer), first agreed, but later declined. The reason was not the quality of the whole work - it was evaluated as the best comprehensive study to date - but Hilberg's evaluation of Jewish behavior vis-a-vis the Nazis, especially the Judenrate (Jewish Councils), whom he saw as a cog in the destruction machine.
He had written that "if we look at the whole Jewish reaction pattern, we notice that in its two salient features it is an attempt to avert action and, failing that, automatic compliance with orders. Why is this so? Why did the Jews act in this way? They hoped that somehow the German drive would spend itself. This hope was founded on a two-thousand-year-old experience. In exile, the Jews had always been in a minority; they had always been in danger; but they had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies. This experience was so ingrained in the Jewish consciousness as to achieve the force of law. A two-thousand-year-old lesson could not be unlearned; the Jews could not make the switch [to resistance when their leadership realized] that the modern machine-line destruction process would engulf European Jewry."
Once rejected, later embraced
Hilberg had grown up in a Zionist revisionist family and youth movement (adherents of Jabotinsky) in Vienna, and his view of Jewish behavior in the diaspora, as well as of the Jewish Councils, was in the 1950s the dominant one in Israel too.
He had hoped that the major Holocaust memorial site in the Jewish state would be the first place to accept his book.
Therefore, Hilberg could not understand the decision of the Yad Vashem historians, who thought his was an unfair generalization of Jewish behavior; he felt insulted and remained critical of Yad Vashem for many decades to come. No other Israeli publisher took it upon himself to publish the book.
Later on, a second polemic would emerge. Hilberg was a scholar of documents, mainly of German ones. He also published Adam Czerniakow's diary (together with Yad Vashem's Joseph Kermisz), but remained extremely critical of the value of survivor testimonies until his death (see his Sources of Holocaust Research, 2001).
Yad Vashem and Hebrew University historian Prof. Israel Gutman, a participant of the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto and a survivor of Auschwitz, was very much in favor of using them, although with critical examination. They directly and indirectly clashed on this on several occasions.
Nevertheless, in spite of what has recently been claimed by some, Hilberg was never "banned," neither did he sever contacts with Israeli scholars. He wrote several articles for Yad Vashem publications and used its resources, and his book was (and is) used in Holocaust education at Israeli universities.
Hilberg himself was invited to Yad Vashem several times, and participated in its international conferences on the Jewish Leadership (1977) and on the history of Holocaust historiography (2004).
On the last occasion, the hall was packed during his concluding talk, which was attended by about 500 people. Immediately after that last conference, Yad Vashem decided, together with several universities and research institutions, to finally undertake the translation of Hilberg's book, and he responded enthusiastically. While working on the manuscript, he constantly made updates and responded to questions raised by the Yad Vashem experts; the Hebrew version, which will hopefully be ready in the forthcoming year, will therefore be the most updated and precise version.
Unfortunately, he will not be present at the closing of the circle, to which he so much looked forward.
The writer is a professor of modern Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University and chief historian at Yad Vashem
And here is the translation -from Hebrew of an interview with Hilberg and with Prof. Dan Mekman, the son of Yossi Melkman who the head of Yad Vashem in its first years - sorry if there are similiar paragraphs - I chose to translate it as a whole).
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=508416&contrassID=2&subContrassID=2&sbSubContrassID=0And so the Outcast Holocaust Historian is cleared
Yair Sheleg, Haaretz
46 Years after Yad Vashem had refused to publish the book of Prof. Raul Hilberg, a researcher in the field of Holocaust History, he enetertained him, as a distinguished lecturer. But the debate about the guilt of the Yudenrats and the true number of those who had perished in the Holocasut continues in full power.
This was indeed a remarkable closure: at a conference on the subject of "Research of the Holocaust and its connections", which took place last week in Yad Vashem commemorating 50 years fot the instituition, Prof. Raul Hilberg was invited from the US to be one of two speakers in the prestigious closing session. In 1958, this institute had rejected the offer to publish Hilberg' fundamental study book 'The Extermintaion of the European Jews' under Yad Vashem publications. Druing the ywears that followed, the scholars of Yad Vashem had continued to argue bitterlt with the book; So, even nine years ago, when Hilberg had published his autobiographical book, no a single book of his had been translated to Hebrew.
what was it so upsetting for Yad Vashem in Hilberg's book? Two main claims were raised; The first: Hilberg, and Austrian born Jew (1926), had immifgrated to the US on the day WWII had started, was not a Hebrew speaker, nor Yiddish speaker nor East-european languages, and wrote his book on the basis of German sources only. The second that had angered Yad Vashem was that in spite of fact he only knew German, he did not hesitate to criticise in his book the function of the Jewish communities, and the Yudenrats in particular, as accomplices for the German extermination machine and claimed that their cooperation was in continuation of the traditional policy of the Diaspora Jews against decrees who effected them.
In his lecture last week, who had tried to objectively anlise the developement of the Holocaust reasearch, Hilberg reffered to the claim about the exclusiveness of German sources in a somewhat apologetic way. He explained this based on the fact that the main initial sources were the thousand German documents the allies had assembled during the Nuernberg trials. He also claims that 'The victims had no idea of what was going on outside the Ghetto walls (which Yorky had obviously been able to show was not the case at least in some cases, if not in most cases.)
This argument was developled in much less apologetic way, at an interview for the newspaper: "It is obvious that the study of the Holocaust cannot rely solely on German sources, but I still believe they should be the main source. Eventually, the Jew enclosed within the Ghetto walls had no idea what was going on around him. Those who planned the extermination and had executed it were the Germans, so if we want to write about the extermination process it must mainly be done from their point of view."
And of course - this coming from German sources.The Germans were afraid
He also sticks to his criticism of the communities and the Yudenrats. "The Nazis had no idea about the Jewish communities they reached, They had no list of the residents and their numbers, the Yudenrats supplied them with that. They asked even the Ghetto maps from the Jews. Somebody had to give them the information, otherwise it would have been chaos, and the Germans hated chaos. The strategy was minimizing the damage done, as always Diaspora Jews tried to defend the 'Hard Core' of the community, even in the case of giving in others; Like JEws used to send the 'simple' kids to the army during th Tzar's decree instead of the Yeshiva boys."
I have no argument with this idea - but this is exactly why some Jews had previously adopted Zionism - hundreds of years of letting the Goyim get away with it, even before the Holocaust.Read this carefully Danny...
With this in mind he does have reservations about the words of the Jewish German philosapher Hanna Ardent, who in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem' was relying on his research to claim that the Yudenrats had a part in responsiblity for extermination. Hilberg: "I do not blame them with responsiblity for the extermination. It is foolish to think that the Yudenrats had and option to prevent the extermination. You could however ask if the Yudenrats could not, and Jewish commuinities in general, save more people. If they wouuld have refused to cooperate, the extermination would have gone ahead anyway, but might have been more difficult to be executed. It is hard to accept the facts that Germans had it so easy to execute the extermination: In most Ghettos there were about 60 guards and about 100 local Jewish Policemen. A threat to the Germans could have helped, since they were afraid of any threat."
An amazing evidence of that he found in a research made by DR. Yitzhak Arad (previously the head of Yad Vashem and himself a Holocaust survivor.), who wrote about a postcard sent by an anonimous Jew to one of the German newspapers where he wished:"may your child suffer like children die and suffer.". "The Gestapo", says Hilberg, "had spent weeks to locate the man. A huge effort for a tiny postcard. So they were afraid the threat even fron one Jew. That goes to show how they were afraid of any threat."
It is interesting that it is the 'Diaspora' Historion critisises so the behaviour of the Communities in the Holocaust, a criticism the Israeli society had grown accustomed to restraint. That would make you think about the reason for rejection of his book by Yad Vashem during the fifties - seemingly years where the Israeli society could have used his research to 'negate the Diaspora' that was so common back then, And indeed, Hilberg himself was wondering and still wonders as to why his research was rejected, 'When even Dinur (the first head of Yad Vashem), said even more extreme things about the behaviour iof the communities than I did. His explnation is that "after all, the establishment here did'nt want the youngsters to think th the the 'Diaspora Jews' are cowards. After all those cowards send us a lot of money. And mainly because the Diaspora Jews werent different in essence than those who came to Israel. Those are people form the same places."
Mechmen says that the problem 'Yad Vashem' with Hilberg's book was not that it was unsuitable for publishing. "Despite the division of opinion we had with it, it is indeed an important book. The problem is that at the time there was no comprehensive book in Hebrew about the History of the Holocaust, and we were afraid that publishing his book as such a 'first book' would set a feeling that this is THE authoritative book, or Yad Vashem's point of view when dealing with the research of the holocaust. Why, if so, wasn't it published until today? according to Mechman, because of Inertia. "during the conference we talked to him abouit publishing his book in Yad Vashem soon' he says.
Hilberg blames his critics for countinuing to attack his work throught the years with claims that may have been valid in 1961. "This is 2004, you cannot criticise mee based on what I wrote then." Then he says the the allegations about ignoring Jewish resources is ridiculous: "After all, I spent six years on the diaries of Adam Czerniakoff (The leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Yudenrats who had commited suicide)."
If he would have re-writing his book based on Jewish and other sources, who he be changing anything fundemental? "No. I would have of course included more details and insights about the Ghetto and German beaurocracy, and would have tried to deepen the analysis, but nothing substantial. In fact, toda i Believe I understand the behaviour of the Jewish community, it's the German I cannot understand. They say the extermination was a result of Antisemitism. That's nonsesne. Some of the people who had participated in the extermination were married to Jews and had no arguments against Jews. Even Hitler's hate to Jews is unclear to this day. HE had no complaints about a specific Jew. Eventually, says Hilberg, it seems that the extermination process did not neccesarily need Antisemite motivation but was relying more or less on german Beaurocracy."
5 or 6 millions?
Those are exactly he claims the upset the Yad Vashem fellas all over again, Mechmen says: "Hilberg did not write his assertion as a Historian but as a political science expert (which is what he studied originally), whose expertise is the study or organisations. And as such he reaches conclusions about a very systematic and organised extermination process, which have not factual base. He speaks, for example, about a beaurocratic process that begins by defining 'the mission', then dispossession and finally extermination. But in fact, in many places, dispossession began before the definition."
Hilberg, on his end, does not appreciate too the resarch being done in Yad Vashem. When asked about the contribution of the institutionto the resarch opf the holocaust, he says ironically: "yes, they've gave a lot of details. The most important thing they did was assembly of the documents. Actually, there was a researcher way back in 1967, who had told me they should not be writing books. Their contribution should be colleting all the documents. But when it comes to research, even in the numbers they are no precise. They talk about six million, and me, as a person that had studied numbers profoundly, say that there were five. But if they admit it, they will need to change it all, even their emblem." The emblem is a memorial Menorah with six branches.
Mechmen says in response that 'the exact number of the deceased will never be known, but the figure of five million is certainly not accepted in research today. Two teams working seperately about this during the eighties, an Israeli one and a German one came to the assesment of 5.6 million (the German team) to 5.8 millions (the Israeli team)
What does Hilberg think about comparing the Holocaust to other historical events? "In principle, I object to that too, since theoratically you can compare anything to anything else. I hold a letter from one of Al Gore's assistants, asking if you could call the Kosovo massacre a Holocaust. In fact, not only was it not Holocaust, it wasn't even genocide. On the other hand, my objection is not absolute. I myself had previously compared the holocaust to the massacre in Rwanda because there also there was a distinctive component of genocide. You should also remember that Richard Lichtheim, the man who was the first to alert the mass extermination (As the representative of the Jewish Agency in Geneva during the War), would not have been able to recognise what was going on unless he was able to compare it ti the Armenian massacre in 1915, a massacre he knew very well as someone who was in turkey during WWI. So, to be able to compare, one must be very proficient about the events being compared, and very few people are so proficient."
So - Not the whole truth is it Danny Quite a character, and strangely, a very bitter man.
That took some time, and I do have some comments, but anyway, I have an exam tommorow (about another Austrian Jew, named Arnold Schoenberg) - I'll get back on the subject soon.
