Raul Hilberg
Jewish
writer, June 2, 1926 - August 4, 2007
H. was born to a Polish-Romanian Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. In 1939,
the Hilberg family fled to the United States. H. attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College.
During WW II, H. was attached to the War Documentation Department, charged with examining archives throughout Europe.
After the war, H. studied political science. While attending Hans Rosenberg's lectures on the Prussian civil
service, who said: "The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain."
In 1951,
H. obtained an appointment to work on the War Documentation Project. From leading
authorities on Jewish historiography, H. was asked whether he was interested in working
on the annihilation of Europe's Jewish population. H. decided to write his
Ph.D. on this subject under the supervision of Franz Neumann, the author of an
wartime analysis of the German totalitarian state. Neumann contacted Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor
directly, to facilitate Hilberg's access to the appropriate archives.
Since 1955, H. started a teaching career at the University of Vermont, where he
became a member of the Department of Political Science; he retired in 1991.
H. was appointed to the Commission on the Holocaust by Jimmy Carter in 1979,
and served for many years on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the governing body for the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
H.'s Ph.D. dissertation 'The Destruction of the European Jews', was
fragmentarily published by Columbia University Press in a press run of 850
copies. Desiring that the whole work be published, two opinions in favor of full publication were
required, but both judgments were negative, viewing Hilberg's work as
polemical. After successive rejections from prominent publishers, the book finally went to press in 1961
with financial aid of a Jewish refugee, Frank Petschek, who had suffered from
German expropriation. The book finally came out in a German edition in 1982.
In earlier editions of his book, Hilberg postulated an order given by Hitler to have
the Jews killed. In more recent editions, H. wrote that Hitler was hardly involved in the
Holocaust, it came from lower ranks within the bureaucracy. According to H.,
there was a law in Germany saying, there shall be no laws: "There were no orders at
all, everybody knew what he had to do". The Israeli authorities
denied H. access to the Yad Vashem's archives.
Letzte Änderung / Last update: 02.03.2010
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