Remembering Raul Hilberg
Remembering Raul Hilberg - 08/15/07 - by Norman G. Finkelstein
Excerpts:
Raul Hilberg passed away on August 4. A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust studies. …
Hilberg was not pleased with the first edition [of The Destruction of the European Jews] - a vital table he pored over many weeks to get just right was botched in the cramped composition - but he couldn’t do better: no major publishing house expressed interest in his groundbreaking study, and he only managed to find any publisher due to a private benefactor who agreed to defray indirectly some of the costs. (The Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem had also rejected the manuscript and initially even barred him from its archive.)
In his melancholy memoir The Politics of Memory Hilberg tells the story that when he first proposed studying the Jewish genocide to his advisor at Columbia University, the great German-Jewish sociologist Franz Neumann (author of Behemoth, a classic study of the organization of the Nazi state), he was warned that “this will be your funeral.”
It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn’t tire of remembering the crimes of the West German “revanchists.” The major American Jewish organizations rushed to make their peace with Konrad Adenauer’s government (the Anti-Defamation League took the lead) while those holding commemorations for the Jewish dead were tagged communists, which as a rule they were.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in the mid-1960s, Hannah Arendt could draw on only one other scholarly study apart from Hilberg’s on the Nazi holocaust in the English language. Nowadays there are enough studies to fill a good-sized library, although it is perhaps not accurate to grace all these publications with the descriptive “scholarly.”
Arendt borrowed extensively from Hilberg’s work with less-than-generous attribution. He never forgave her this oversight and - what truly is unforgivable - her condescending references to his study in private correspondence and her recommending against its publication by Princeton University Press. In his memoir Hilberg parries the insult, asserting, wrongly in my opinion, that Arendt’s study The Origins of Totalitarianism lacked originality. It is true that Arendt could be lazy about facts, which might account for Hilberg’s harsh judgment, but the first part of Origins contains many shrewd insights on the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation and paradoxes of the nation-state.
Hilberg reserved even greater contempt (and loathing) for Lucy Dawidowicz, author of the highly touted The War Against the Jews. Here it can be said that his verdict was faultless. During the heyday of the Holocaust religion in the 1970s-1980s, Dawidowicz was its designated high priestess. The problem was that, as Hilberg brutally demonstrates in his memoir, she got the most elementary facts wrong. I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek concentration camp, about Dawidowicz’s depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps into the gas chambers. “When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the women inmates had dyed-blond hair,” my mother laughed. “They had been trying to pass as Gentiles.” The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein’s The Stars Bear Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz’s fantasy. …
Stylistically Hilberg’s study might be said to be the opposite of current Holocaust fare: short on adjectives and adverbs such that when he reaches for one it packs unusual intensity. Apart from professional discipline his dry-as-dust rendering was perhaps also meant to capture the desiccated esprit of the bureaucratic - dare I say banal? - process through which millions of Jews were shoved along to their deaths.
Hilberg didn’t truck in the pieties of what became the Holocaust industry that exploited the colossal suffering of Jews for political and financial gain. He rejected the notion that the Nazi holocaust sprang uniquely from virulent anti-Semitism and concomitantly maintained that “Jews were only the first victims” of the German bureaucracy’s genocidal juggernaut, which also targeted Gypsies and Poles, among others. He reckoned Jewish resistance to be negligible but Jewish cooperation (which however he distinguished from collaboration) to be significant, while he reckoned the total number of Jewish victims at closer to 5.1 million. The third volume contains a 20-page appendix detailing his complex calculations of Jewish dead. In contrast Dawidowicz gives a figure for each country and then totals the number, as if this calculation were simply an addition problem whereas, as Hilberg notes, “the raw data are seldom self-explanatory, and…their interpretation often requires the use of voluminous background materials that have to be analyzed in turn.”
It should go without saying that whether the figure is closer to five than six million is of zero moral significance - except for a moral cretin, who could utter “only five million”? - although Hilberg believed it was of historical significance. Even if it weren’t he almost certainly would still have insisted on the 5.1 million figure if his research showed it was closer to the truth. “Always in my life,” Hilberg wrote unaffectedly in his memoir, “I had wanted the truth about myself.” This was also how he approached the study of the Nazi holocaust.
His confident knowledge of the field no doubt accounted for Hilberg’s easygoing tolerance of Holocaust deniers. Those who want to suppress them do so not only in disgust at what they might say but also in dread of the inability to answer them. (The hysterical allegation of Holocaust deniers lurking in every corner is apparently also contrived to justify the endless proliferation of Holo-trash.) Hilberg recently made the provocative statement that whereas the Nazi holocaust is an irrefutable fact this was “more easily said than demonstrated.”
It is indeed easy for the non-expert to be tripped up on the details especially when on crucial matters like the gas chambers (a favorite target of the deniers), there exist, as historian Arno Mayer noted, “many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources,” none of which however “put in question the use of gas chambers in the mass murder.” …
Mention of Irving’s name didn’t evoke howls of indignation or torrents of abuse from Hilberg. Instead he recognized Irving’s impressive apprehension of some of the subject matter, although qualifying it - with a touch of snobbery - as “self-taught,” and speculated that his preposterous statements sprung less from anti-Semitism than love of the spotlight. Of Holocaust denial in the Arab world Hilberg observed that “they are as confused about the West as we are about them,” while he casually dismissed the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran as “needless difficulty and trouble,” and said he was “not terribly worried about it.” Echoing John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Hilberg even declared that Holocaust deniers served the useful purpose of posing questions that everyone else assumed were already settled.
Hilberg was equally derisive of another of the Holocaust industry’s shibboleths, the “New anti-Semitism.” The much-ballyhooed resurgence of anti-Semitism, he said, amounted to “picking up a few pebbles from the past and throwing them at windows.” In his last interview Hilberg also sharply criticized Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians, which, I suspect, couldn’t have been easy for him. (His daughter lives in Jerusalem.)
Although Hilberg suffered professionally because he chose to study the Nazi holocaust when it was politically imprudent and because he later resisted the orthodoxies of the Holocaust industry, those wanting truly to understand the unfolding horror have benefited from his independence of spirit. Like the best memoirs of the Nazi holocaust (many of which are out of print), his study was written before ideological exigencies deformed and debased much of the scholarship on the subject. In recent years Hilberg was given to observing that most serious scholarship on the Nazi holocaust was coming out of Germany while “there are not many Holocaust researchers worth mentioning in this country.” It is hard to conceive a more withering indictment of the Holocaust industry’s multibillion-dollar operation.
posted by willtotruth @ 11:23 AM
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