Raul Hilberg The Destruction of the European Jews

Summary

Twenty-five years have passed since Raul Hilberg published his monumental history of The Destruction of the European Jews. During this period Holocaust historiography has begun to come of age and Holocaust studies have extended into many untapped areas, while reassessing on the basis of much new documentation former conceptions, research and conclusions. Raul Hilberg's first edition, which initially attracted minor public interest, eventually became the standard work upon which all future study was to be based and served as a catalyst for much historical research. With the appearance in 1985 of a second ‘revised and definitive edition’ of Hilberg's classic work, a welcome opportunity presents itself both to assess his astounding achievement in the light of the last two and a half decades of historical analysis, and to evaluate his synthesis and incorporation of recent findings and perspectives.

Hilberg’ s predominant concern in 1961 and again in 1985 was to fully disentangle the labyrinth of the intricate Nazi bureaucracy, which remains for him the clue to understanding how the mass murder of some 5,200,000, according to Hilberg's calculation, was possible. Thus, Hilberg has fully preserved the structure, the method of inquiry and the interpretation embedded in the first edition and rarely sees the need to deviate from his earlier presentation. The prism of the German bureaucracy serves Hilberg to view the evolution of the destruction process - from the stage of definition of the Jews to their annihilation - and it is through its horrifying success that the tragic failure of the Jews to counter effectively the destruction process is assessed. As such, Hilberg looms as the functionalist par excellence. Save for his opening chapter, where he pits Nazi anti-semitism against previous anti-semitic regulations to show the ideological and legalistic parallels and divergencies, Hilberg shies away from some of the major questions which have attracted historical enquiry in the last quarter of a century- the nature of Nazism, the importance of the ‘Jewish Question’ to Nazi ideology, and Hitler's role in unleashing the human reins on turning annihilation into a nation's policy. Relegating these issues to an introductory chapter may oversimplify matters, as Eberhard Jäckel has recently warned in his Hitler in History (1984): ‘If we want to know how the decisions behind the Holocaust were made, we must not only ask when they were made. We must frame our questions carefully.