Raul Hilberg, 81, Historian Who Wrote of the Holocaust as ..

>From the New York Times: isn't Hilberg the Holocaust historian that
Kubrick admired? Also, Chris Schwarz, the photographer died. He did
work honoring Polish Jews ~ Gen

August 7, 2007
Raul Hilberg, 81, Historian Who Wrote of the Holocaust as a
Bureaucracy, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
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.

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.

On Aug 8, 1:23 pm, portia_m....DeleteThis@yahoo.com wrote:
> >From the New York Times: isn't Hilberg the Holocaust historian that
>
> Kubrick admired? Also, Chris Schwarz, the photographer died. He did
> work honoring Polish Jews ~ Gen
>
> August 7, 2007
> Raul Hilberg, 81, Historian Who Wrote of the Holocaust as a
> Bureaucracy, Dies
>
> By DOUGLAS MARTIN
> 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.
>
> 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."

That part there is a direct quote from the preface of Perpetrators
Victims Bystanders, not an interview.