Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Raul Hilberg, 81, Historian Who Wrote of the Holocaust as a Bureaucracy, Dies

Raul Hilberg, 81, Historian Who Wrote of the Holocaust as a Bureaucracy,
Dies 
Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Reprints Share
DiggFacebookNewsvinePermalink
 
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 7, 2007
Raul Hilberg, a Jewish émigré from Nazi-occupied Vienna who helped begin
the field of Holocaust studies with his long and minutely detailed 1961
study of the massacre of European Jews, died Saturday in Williston, Vt. He
was 81.
Skip to next paragraph 
 
Nancie Battaglia, 1985
Raul Hilberg 
The cause was lung cancer, said Jeffrey R. Wakefield, a spokesman for the
University of Vermont, where Mr. Hilberg had taught for 35 years.
In his landmark work, “The Destruction of the European Jews,” Mr. Hilberg
said the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with
thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a
single order by Hitler. 
As uncountable separate instructions were passed on, formally and
informally, to a range of actors that included train schedulers and gas
chamber architects, responsibility became ever more diluted, he argued,
even as the machinery of death churned inexorably ahead.
“For these reasons, an administrator, clerk or uniformed guard never
referred to himself as a perpetrator,” Mr. Hilberg said in an interview
with The Chicago Tribune in 1992. “He realized, however, that the process
of destruction was deliberate, and that once he had stepped into this
maelstrom, his deed would be indelible.”
Though some critics said Mr. Hilberg had understated the impact of
historic German anti-Semitism, his broad conclusions were based on
painstaking research. He examined microfilm of thousands upon thousands of
prosaic documents like train schedules and memorandums between minor
officials.
“This head-against-the-wall technique is the only virtue I can parade
without blushing,” he said last year when Germany gave him with its Order
of Merit, the highest tribute it can pay to someone who is not a German
citizen.
The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that Mr. Hilberg’s book “reveals,
methodically, fully and clearly, the development of both the technical and
psychological process; the machinery and mentality whereby one whole
society sought to isolate and destroy another, which, for centuries, had
lived in its midst.”
Mr. Trevor-Roper called the book’s most surprising revelation, and its
least welcome one, its suggestion that at least some Jews cooperated in
their own annihilation. Examples included Jews who had helped organize
deportations or led victims to gas chambers. Mr. Hilberg argued that Jews
had a long history of passivity and that some had mistakenly calculated
that the Nazis would not destroy what they could economically exploit.
Many historians, survivors and Jewish leaders disagreed, pointing to
examples of Jewish resistance. But Holocaust historians of all views began
using terminology Mr. Hilberg had devised, including that of calling the
Holocaust’s principals perpetrators, victims and bystanders.
Raul Hilberg was born on June 2, 1926, in Vienna. In his memoir, “The
Politics of Memory: Journey of a Holocaust Historian” (1996), he said his
father, Michael, had been a “middleman,” someone who bought household
goods for people needing credit and paid him in installments. In 1938, the
occupying Nazis arrested him but released him because he was a World War I
veteran.
The Hilbergs emigrated to Brooklyn, where Michael worked in a factory and
Raul attended Lincoln High School. His studies at Brooklyn College were
interrupted when he was drafted into the Army. His unit was housed in the
Nazi Party’s former offices in Munich, where Mr. Hilberg was fascinated by
crates containing Hitler’s personal library.
He returned to Brooklyn College, where he quit chemistry for political
science and history. He went on to Columbia, where he insisted on writing
his doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust, which few academics were
studying. His adviser, Franz Neumann, warned him that his choice of
subject might be his academic funeral. 
At least five publishers rejected his major book. It was published by a
small Chicago house after a wealthy patron agreed to buy 1,300 copies to
go to libraries.
His caustic personal style, which contrasted with the monotone of his
histories, did not always help. When academics asked about his subject
area, Mr. Hilberg was prone to reply, “I study dead Jews.”
He next taught at Hunter College and landed a federal job helping to
catalog documents being released from German archives. He copied material
by hand so he could use it for his own research. 
Mr. Hilberg started teaching at Vermont in 1956 and retired in 1991. In
addition to writing and editing five books besides “The Destruction of the
European Jews” and his memoirs, Mr. Hilberg produced two more editions of
that book (1985 and 2003), adding considerable material. 
Mr. Hilberg’s first marriage, to Christine Hemenway, ended in divorce. He
is survived by two children from that marriage, David, of Brooklyn, and
Deborah, of Jerusalem, and his wife, the former Gwendolyn Montgomery.
The multitudinous materials Mr. Hilberg examined convinced him that those
very documents were the strongest argument against those who contended the
Holocaust had never happened, he told The International Herald Tribune in
1996.
“These individuals are not familiar with the archives, or they would see
that nobody could forge these millions of documents,” he said.
-- 
visitate 
http://www.comunisti-italiani.it/frames/index.htm
 
http://www.italia-cuba.it/associazione/associazione.htm
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 their own annihilation.
Toni e Andrea, avete gia' ballato sulla tomba di questo "rossobruno"?
(che ha difeso strenuamente Norman Finkelstein, e i cui libri non sono
mai stati pubblicati in Israele)
GT