# Robert L. Hilliard (professor)

Robert "Bob" L. Hilliard was an American WWII era veteran who succeeded in informing American citizens and politicians of the deplorable plight of post WWII concentration camp survivors who continued to die by the thousands, and of those survivors taken to an unequipped hospital which was formerly St. Ottillien Monastery in the district of Landsberg, Oberbayern Germany. The monastery, built in the 16th century as a castle, was remodeled in the 17th century. After the war, Hilliad became an accomplished academic, playwright, author of fiction and textbooks, and professor of communications and journalism.

## How Hilliard helped the survivors

Acting against the stated policy of the American military to refrain from political activities while in the service, Hilliard, treated for frostbite and twice wounded in WWII, wrote hundreds of letters to American citizens, and Congressmen informing them of the absence of food, medicine, and clothing available to the surviving concentration camp survivors at the end of WWII, then known as displaced person's camps, and at the hospital where many were taken at St. Ottilien in Bavaria in Germany. After getting a letter to President Harry Truman who championed their cause with the Truman Directive of December, 1945, Hilliard and his partner Edward Herman, both Privates in the U.S. Army, succeeded, with the aid of concerned American citizens and the Truman administration, to supply food, clothing and medicine to the patients at St. Ottilien, and to the remaining concentration camp survivors. They also helped to change the American policies restricting displaced persons from voluntarily leaving the camps, or the countries in which they resided. At the time, the camps were heavily surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed American servicemen instructed to shoot escapees, as had been the German servicemen that formerly guarded the camps. Due to the efforts of Hilliard, Herman, President Truman and colleagues, displaced persons were fed, clothed, and treated, and were allowed to eventually leave the camps and immigrate to other countries in greater numbers, particularly Palestine, and the United States.

## Background

Robert Hilliard was born in New York City on June 25, 1925. Just out of High School, he was drafted at 18 in February, 1944, and was assigned to the Ninth Regiment of the Second Infantry division. Having received instruction in morse code and radio operation, he was responsible for serving in an advanced unit that would inform American command of the location of the enemy. He was soon wounded by mortar fire, and later served during the bloody combat that took place at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest in the frigid winter of December, 1944. He was wounded again in the Spring of 1945 by flak from an 88mm German gun, and like many American troops, also suffered from frostbite.
After recovering, he was assigned to the Second Air Disarmament Wing. Hoping only to research a good story for a serviceman's newspaper he founded to provide news for allied troops, he drove a jeep for miles to attend a concert put on by the newly liberated concentration camp survivors at the hospital at St. Ottillien. He found himself driven to tears by the emaciated and sick survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau, still on stretchers, without food, and wearing the cold, threadbare and inadequate striped uniforms they had formerly been issued as camp inmates. Hilliard and Herman tried to buy food from the black market to supply refugees, but the supply was inadequate, and they lacked funds to make a significant improvement in the lives of the survivors. German citizens and American officers often judged Hilliard and the survivors for buying food on the black market, despite their having few other sources.
After Truman received the letter from Hilliard and Herman, he may have criticized General Eisenhower, who sent a full Colonel to inform Hilliard and Edward Herman that the military would improve the situation, but that he and Herman should refrain from writing any more letters, as they might end up assigned to a highly undesirable location like the frigid Aleutian Islands. Hilliard took the advice primarily as a threat, rather than a promise to help holocaust survivors. He and Herman continued to push their cause of informing the American public. Beginning to see results on September 30, 1945, a prominent New York Times headline loudly announced “President Orders Eisenhower to End New Abuse of Jews . . . Likens Our Treatment to that of the Nazis.”
Coming more than six months after the surrender of Germany, the Truman Directive of December 22, 1945, among other objectives, intended to set the United States as an example to the World by vastly increasing and expediting the admission of displaced persons to the United States, and to open U.S. immigration to full use. It also requested that Great Britain allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. On October 21, 1945, 1,500 packages containing food, clothes and medicine arrived at St. Ottillien. The arrival of supplies prior to October had been partly the result of U.S. Military and State Department policy to with hold the delivery of the supplies.

## Examining U.S. policy toward immigration during WWII

Though controversial, author David Wyman wrote in The Abandonment of the Jews, that the policy of both the U.S. Army under Eisenhower and the U.S. State Department were at best lax, and at worst instrumental in obstructing the flow of food, medicine, and clothing to the survivors of the Holocaust and in summary, made the following points:
* President Roosevelt failed to act for fourteen months after he and the American press were informed in November, 1942 that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jews.
* Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, was in essence powerless to improve the situation facing European Jews, received no cooperation from Roosevelt or his administration, and received only 10% of its funding from U.S. Goverment sources. 90% was funded by the American Jewish community, despite facing shortages and economic pressures during WWII.
* Only 21,000 refugees were permitted to enter the United States during the 42 months America was a war with Nazi Germany. In noted contrast, American immigration quotas would have allowed around 210,000 refugees to immigrate to the United States during that period.
* Factors that restricted immigration included; Anti-Semitism in American society, much of the U.S. military leadership, and entrenched among many leading members of the American Congress, failure of the American media to publish news of the Holocaust despite having the information available through wire services and other news sources, the silence of the vast majority of the leadership of Christian Churches, and President Roosevelt refraining to speak out on the issue.

## How anti-Semitism affected American policy

David Wyman, also made the significant observation that it was inefficiency, not lack of knowledge that led the State Department to fail to act, and more importantly that the leadership of the U.S. State Department feared that a large number of Jews might actually leave Germany and the area occupied by the Axis. This fear dominated the thinking of the U.S. State Department at least during the Roosevelt administration. Also of considerable importance, it was noted by University of Virginia History Professor Joseph W. Bendersky that in addition to the State Department, "Anti-Semitism permeated not only the thinking of the State Department but also the thinking of the military officers and attaches assigned to the European embassies who attempted to influence Roosevelt administration policy in favor of Hitler and the Third Reich...". Anti-Semitism was also widely existent among many of the high ranking officers in the U.S. military which Wyman believed included "Mark Clark, George Van Horn Mosely, George Patton, Truman Smith, Albert Wedemeyer, and Charles Willoughby". Bendersky wrote that many of these officers promulgated some of the same stereotypes about Jews held by European anti-Semites, a form of social Darwinism that held that somehow Jews were largely responsible for their plight in Eastern Europe due to their greed and avarice.

## Hilliard as academic

Not atypical of an American playwright, journalist, and communication's professor, Hilliard's education was broad and varied. He received his Bachelors from the University of Delaware in 1948. He received a Masters of Arts, from Western Reserve University in 1949, and following in 1950, he earned a Masters of Fine Arts, from Western Reserve University. His PHd. was from Columbia University in 1959, an institution noted for their programs in journalism and the literary arts. In 1960, he followed with postgraduate work at Columbia Teachers College.
Hilliard's role as a professor was broad and varied. From 1943 - 1964, he worked as a theatre professional, while serving in a variety of full-time academic roles. From 1950-1956, he was an instructor at Brooklyn College, and from 1956 - 1960, served as an assistant professor at Adelphi University. From 1960 - 1964, he was an associate professor at the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1964 - 1980, in public service he was Chief, of the Educational/Public Broadcasting Branch in Washington D.C. while simultaneously serving from 1965 - 1978 as a Chairman of the Federal Interagency Media Committee.
While serving as a professor at Boston's Emerson College of Communication, in Boston, he collaborated with Boston College professor Michael Keith, in writing Waves of Rancor: Tuning in the Radical Right. Emerson had an early focus on the media of radio, and would later focus on theater as well. While at Emerson, he gained interest in his class known as "hate.com", which examined how hate groups target impressionable youth through online websites, how they grow, and how they spread rage. With important insight and relevance to contemporary society, Hilliard observed that hate groups build interest in gaining young members slowly using rock music and games, while avoiding inflammatory rhetoric and epithets. The book was well-received and was read by William Clinton during his presidency. In 1993, there were more than 300 extremist websites, though many scholars, including Holocaust author Eli Wiesel, considered their number to be closer to 800.

### Honors

Hilliard's military and civilian service honors are varied and extensive. While with the U.S. military, his decorations included but were not limited to the Purple Heart, Combat Infantry Badge, and Commendation Ribbon.
In the public sector he was a recipient award Ohio Medical Education Network award, Broadcast Preceptor award, the Kappa Delta Pi, World Communications Year award, the Phi Delta Kappa, Annual award. He also received the Cambridge Community television, Lifetime Achievement award for Emerson College. He received national playwriting awards and a Columbia Distinguished Alumni award. He was the recipient of a Goethe Institute fellowship.
Hilliard has lived on Florida's Sanibel Island since 1998, and is the father of two children.

## Partial list of books by Robert Hilliard

* Hilliard, Robert L., and Keith, Michael, C., The Quieted Voice: The Rise and Demise of Localism in American Radio, (2005), Text Book, Southern Illinois University Press, ISBN 10 0809326744.
* Hilliard, Robert L., Surviving the Americans: The Continued Struggle of the Jews After Liberation, (1996), New York, Seven Stories Press
* Hilliard, Robert L., and Keith, Michael, C., Waves of Rancor: Tuning into the Radical Right (1999), Routledge Publishing, New York City, Milton Park, Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, UK
* Hilliard Robert, L., Phillipa, fiction, (2010) Parlance
* Hilliard, Robert, Writing for Television, Radio, and New Media
* Hilliard, Robert L., Selected Plays by Robert Hilliard, Volume 1 (2021) Parlance, ISBN-13: 9780984248964