The annihilation of the European Jews

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Auschwitz concentration camp , high-voltage barbed wire (2002)

The book The Destruction of the European Jews - in the original English version The Destruction of the European Jews  - is the 1961 dissertation of the American historian Raul Hilberg . For the book, Hilberg evaluated numerous sources of the German National Socialist leadership from 1933 until the immediate post-war period . His aim was to analyze the entire history of the extermination of the Jews in the sphere of influence of the German Reich , which is known today as the Shoah (in Israel, in the vicinity of the victims, in the French-speaking area) or the Holocaust (mostly in the Anglo-Saxon area). His work was an essential contribution to their scientific research . Until then, no historian had dared to take such a comprehensive view of the German Nazi persecution and extermination . This work remained Hilberg's most important work.

Hilberg's Austrian origins and knowledge of German made the research project easier for him. He supplemented and expanded his book, which was often referred to as a standard work, until 2002. His research approach was the search for the functioning of the perpetrators and their organization of mass murder in files they had created themselves and not an explanation of the history of Jews in European countries States. Because of the role of the Jewish councils appointed and used by the Germans in the extermination phases prior to their transport to the extermination camps, his work inevitably led to this (controversial) aspect of the Nazi persecution of Jews.

construction

Hilberg was the first contemporary historian to use the files to describe in detail how the annihilation process took place in successive phases:

Exclusion

concentration

  • then they were in Jewish houses , or in newly built ghettos "in the East" deported , concentrated to leave them there to separate from the rest of the population and starve. 1939-1941. And finally

Factory mass murder

Conclusions

From this he draws the conclusion in Volume 3 that the perpetrators involved (e.g. Einsatzgruppen , police / Gestapo , RSHA , Totenkopf-SS, etc.) each have only a small cog in this difficult to understand, but at the same time all of the goals understandable destruction mechanism.

central message

Hilberg's comprehensive account of the extermination of the Jews has since been considered the standard work on the subject and has been updated repeatedly by the author. Hilberg referred to the many people and National Socialist organizations who contributed to the decision on the " final solution " through demands and initiatives .

“The extermination process unfolds according to a fixed scheme. However, it did not spring from any fundamental plan. In 1933, no bureaucrat could have predicted what kind of action would be taken in 1938, nor was it possible in 1938 to predict what would happen in 1942. The extermination process was a step-by-step operation and the officer involved could rarely miss more than the next step. "

- Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews . Frankfurt / Main 1990, ISBN 3-596-24417-X , Vol, 1, p. 56

Later intentionalist historians of Nazi research such as Eberhard Jäckel , Helmut Krausnick or Klaus Hildebrand , who then claimed that Hitler had consistently implemented the plans he had drawn up long beforehand with the Final Solution, diverged from Hilberg's account . Like the later following Functionalists among historians as Martin Broszat , Hans Mommsen and Christopher Browning , Raul Hilberg interpreted the decision to Shoah / Holocaust as process-like process of radicalization, which, however, without the person of Hitler and his pronounced hatred of Jews (anti-Semitism) unthinkable would:

“Hitler was the chief architect of the Jewish catastrophe. It was he who transformed the flowing ideas of 1940 into the harsh reality of 1941. Hitler made this last step the inexorable result of all anti-Jewish measures [...] and he forged Germany's decentralized administrative apparatus into a network of organizations that worked together smoothly so that the shootings, deportations and gassings could be carried out side by side and at the same time. "

- Raul Hilberg : perpetrator, victim, spectator. the extermination of the Jews 1933-1945 , Frankfurt / M. 1996, ISBN 3-596-13216-9 , p. 30.

Hilberg was of the opinion that the strict division of labor in the “final solution” had enabled the perpetrators to feel like a “little cog in the machine” and to absolve themselves of personal responsibility. This interpretation is partly controversial. According to the criticism, she disregards the fact that a significant proportion was directly involved in the killing process as eyewitnesses or perpetrators.

Later authors on this complex topic often describe its influence on their work: Götz Aly , Saul Friedländer , Eberhard Jäckel, Wolfgang Benz , Ian Kershaw , Leni Yahil.

Edition history

It was difficult to find a publisher for the book. In the 1950s, an overall history of the extermination of the Jews was not a popular topic in the USA. There was also a critical assessment of the work. Yad Vashem declined to support the publication. In addition, the publication of such a book was a difficult editorial task because of the expected low sales figures and the extraordinarily large volume. Hilberg's dissertation was only published in 1961 by the small publishing house Quadrangle Books (Chicago) after more than six years of searching for a publisher through the editing of five publishers . A wealthy patron, the expelled Jewish entrepreneur Frank Petschek, indirectly financed an initial print run of 5,500 copies through a guaranteed purchase of at least 1,200 copies. They were made available to libraries.

Yad Vashem historians criticized Hilberg's critical assessment of active and passive Jewish resistance. Hans Mommsen results for this defense following reason: "At the beginning of the 50s tended most of the survivors, the Jewish organizations in the US, and the international historical research to downplay the memory of the Holocaust, even to displace." Even with Hannah Arendt , who wrote an expert opinion on Hilberg's dissertation in 1959, initially met with rejection of his meticulous investigation, while two years later she used it for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem on the Eichmann trial . Hilberg's main work was not relocated in Israel.

The German publisher Droemer Knaur , which had acquired the rights to Hilberg's work in 1963, decided against publication of the book in 1965 after a negative opinion from the Institute for Contemporary History, chief editor Fritz Bolle . Hilberg's “thesis of the Jewish 'collaboration'” could encourage anti-Semites to ask malicious questions. The publishers Rowohlt and Beck and many other German publishers also declined publication, others remained silent on Hilberg's inquiries. In 1979, Der Spiegel spoke of a "broken word" and of a "long overdue translation".

It was not until the small publishing house Olle & Wolter from Berlin published the book in 1982 in a hardcover edition in a German translation. The book was also published in coproduction in 1983 by the Gutenberg Book Guild . The German edition (the second edition) of Hilberg was a revised and significantly expanded edition of the first version from 1961. The publishing house Olle & Wolter acquired the world rights at that time, except for editions in English. The first French translation was published by Gallimard in 1985 .

Hilberg, who had to wait twenty years for a German-language edition - in the land of the perpetrators - wrote on July 14, 1982, happy about the "joint venture" to Ulf Wolter from Olle & Wolter; “ I am glad that you are my publisher in Germany. ”(German:“… I am pleased that you are my publisher in D… ”) Sales of the book were very sluggish because of the high retail price of 128  DM . So the publisher got into trouble, which meant that it had to close shortly after the book was published. This is by Götz Aly doubted. After him, the publisher closed the publishing house for illness reasons and not because of the distribution of the book.

In 1990 Walter Pehle , editor for contemporary history at Fischer Verlag, succeeded in bringing out a paperback edition of Hilberg's three-volume work at an attractive price. Before that, the publisher had tried several times since the end of 1985 to acquire a license for a paperback edition from Ulf Wolter. It was not until December 1987 that the preparations for a revised new edition could begin, which, due to numerous corrections, insertions, changes and deletions by Hilberg, caused the cost calculation to get out of hand. Even a grant for translation costs promised by Ignatz Bubis was far from sufficient. The private scholar and historian Dr. Dr. Dieter Dirk Hartmann from southern Germany made it possible to lower the retail price with a donation - a high five-figure amount.

The response to the new book was mostly positive. The FAZ spoke of an "important book", the Spiegel of an "unsurpassed standard work". At that time in Germany, dealing with the Holocaust issue was largely taboo in public . In 1982 the Federal Agency for Civic Education did not yet have a book on the Holocaust in its program. The central office of the state justice administration in Ludwigsburg had been waiting for the work for a long time in order to be able to use it in trials against Nazi criminals . The Nazi historian Hans Mommsen ruled that “a piece of scandalous restriction on freedom of publication in the Federal Republic has now been ended”.

A translation is said to have been agreed in Israel for 2009. In 2007 in the obituary of the Frankfurter Rundschau it was pointed out that no "publication history for Raul Hilberg's main work [...] had been written".

Expenses (selection)

Editions by Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews .

  • English language editions:
    • The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago, Quadrangle, 1961, OCLC 408733 (First Edition); 2nd ed. 1967; 3rd ed. In Holmes & Meier, New York 1973; 4th ed. 1985
    • Publisher Franklin Watts; 1st New Viewpoints ed edition, 1973, OCLC 44105927 .
    • Harpercollins College, 1979, ISBN 0-06-131959-7 .
    • Revised edition, 3 vols. continuously paginated. New York, Holmes and Meier, 1985. xii + 1274 pages, ISBN 0-06-131959-7 (and a student edition 1986; 360 pages. ISBN 0-8419-0910-5 ).
    • New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2003. 3 volumes, xvi + 1388 pages, ISBN 0-300-09585-6 .

German editions:

  • German first edition: Raul Hilberg: The annihilation of the European Jews: the complete history of the Holocaust , edited by Ulf Wolter, translated by Christian Seeger a. a., Olle & Wolter, Berlin 1982, 840 pp. ISBN 3-88395-431-4 .
    • Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main / Olten / Vienna, 1982/83, 840 pp. ISBN 3-7632-2763-6 . (License issue)
  • Reviewed and expanded paperback edition in three volumes, translated from the English by Christian Seeger, Harry Maòr , Walle Bengs, Wilfried Szepoan, Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main, 1990 and subsequent years. 1352 pp. ISBN 3-596-24417-X (grants from a named individual and the Central Council of Jews in Germany ).
    • Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main, November 1999, 1352 pages. ISBN 978-3-596-24417-1 (= Fischer-TB 10611-10613, History: The time of National Socialism ).

Further translations:

  • La destruction des Juifs d'Europe . Gallimard, Paris 1985 (Collection folio 38/39 [Reprints: 1988, 1991; troisième édition, trois volumes, Gallimard, 2006]) ISBN 2-07-032710-8 .
  • La distruzione degli ebrei d'Europa. Torino: Einaudi, 1999. 1479 pp. A cura di Frediano Sessi. [Trad. di Frediano Sessi e Giuliana Guastalla] - 1999, Nuova ed. riv. e ampliata ISBN 88-06-13900-2 . (Italian)
  • La Destruccion De Los Judios Europeos (Cuestiones De Antagonismo) . Akal Ediciones, 2005. 1456 pages. ISBN 84-460-1809-8 . (Spanish)
  • Kioku: Horokosuto no shinjitsu o motomete , ISBN 4-7601-1693-1 . (jap.)
  • Hebrew / Ivrit: Edited by David Bankier and Bella Gutterman . Published by Yad Vashem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2012.
  • into Polish: Zagłada Żydów europejskich. 2014. Translation by Piotr Stefaniuk, tłum. Jerzy Giebułtowski. 1680 pages, ISBN 978-83-935789-0-0 .

Effect and reception

From the beginning, the work was mainly confronted with criticism that Hilberg rated the role of the Jewish councils too negatively and marginalized the importance of the Jewish resistance . Delivering “positive” was not one of Hilberg's concerns. He turned against a “victim-oriented” historiography and instead took the position that the extermination process must be analyzed from the perpetrator's side. Hilberg received criticism for his book because he was the first non- revisionist to attempt to determine the number of murdered Jews with some accuracy. Until then, the number of victims was only the result of very rough estimates made shortly after the end of the war . One of Hilberg's merits is to have initiated this scientific discussion and made it possible. Right-wing extremists and revisionists also referred to Hilberg's research.

Reviews of the book

For the 1st edition:

  • Andreas Dorpalen: Review of Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews. In: Journal of Modern History 34, 1962, issue 2, p. 226f.

For later editions:

About the author

Raul Hilberg (born June 2, 1926 in Vienna ; † August 4, 2007 in Williston , Vermont , USA ) was an American historian who, at the age of 13, left Austria and thus the sphere of influence of the National Socialists just in time in 1939. He is considered one of the most important Holocaust researchers. From 1944 he served in the US Army , also in Germany, in the 45th Infantry Division and in the War Documentation Department, which sifted through the files of the Nazis and their collaborators in preparation for the Nuremberg Trials . He started his master’s thesis in 1948 and has already discussed his planned dissertation The Destruction of European Jewry with Franz Neumann . At first Neumann did not want to accept him as a doctoral student and declared that the planned work would be his "academic funeral". Hilberg's doctoral supervisor was particularly offended by the part of the investigation that dealt with the involvement of Jewish authorities in the extermination process.

In 1951 Hilberg received a temporary position in the War Documentation Project in Munich under the direction of Fritz T. Epstein (see Eastern European History). Until his doctorate he taught political science at various universities after his doctoral supervisor and supporter Neumann died as a result of an accident in 1954. At the University of Vermont (UVM) he worked in his further scientific career (1956–1991).

literature

  • Raul Hilberg: Unsolicited Memory - The Path of a Holocaust Researcher. From the American by Hans Günter Holl. 2nd Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-10-033621-6 .
  • Ian Kershaw : Improvised Genocide? The emergence of the 'Final Solution' in the 'Wharthegau' . In: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 6th ser., 2 (1992), pp. 51-78.
  • Eugen Kogon : The SS State - The System of the German Concentration Camps . Alber, Munich 1946, last: 44th edition, Heyne, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-453-02978-1 .
  • Wolfgang Mieder (Ed.): Reflections on the Holocaust. Festschrift for Raul Hilberg on his seventy-fifth birthday . Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Vermont 2001, X, 240 pp.
  • Alexander Osang : Hitler wasn't stupid . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 2002, pp. 191–194 ( online - Raul Hilberg is one of the most important Holocaust researchers - in Munich he is now receiving the Geschwister Scholl Prize).
  • James S. Pacy, Alan P. Wertheimer (Eds.): Perspectives on the Holocaust. Essays in honor of Raul Hilberg , Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford / Westview Press 1995, VII, 195 pp. (English)
  • Harald Welzer : On the ruins of history. Conversations with Raul Hilberg, Hans Mommsen, Zygmunt Bauman , Tübingen, Edition Diskord 1999
  • Dan Stone (Ed.): The Historiography of the Holocaust. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004 (English)
  • René Schlott (Ed.): Raul Hilberg and the Holocaust Historiography. Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-8353-3530-1 (Contributions to the History of National Socialism, Volume 35).
  • Ulf Wolter, Ursula Wolte: The decreed democracy. How much injustice in the past can the present take? In: perspektiven ds , issue 2/06, Schüren, Marburg 2007. ISBN 978-3-89472-576-1 , ISSN  0939-3013 .

Interviews

Web links

items

Obituaries

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See in particular the various obituaries under web links.
  2. ↑ Hilberg: Perpetrator, victim, spectator , p. 9.
  3. ↑ Michael Kißener: The Third Reich. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2005, ISBN 3-534-14726-X , p. 39.
  4. ↑ SF in an interview, 2007
  5. ↑ Death of someone deeply touchable . Spiegel Online , August 6, 2007
  6. ↑ On Petschek, see Heavy moral guilt. In: Die Zeit , No. 9/1995
  7. ↑ History reaches into the present . In: NZZ , December 10, 2002
  8. ↑ Hans Mommsen in the laudation 2002 ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Götz Aly : Logic of horror . In: Die Zeit , No. 23/2006
  10. ↑ a b Heinz Höhne : Seldom scruples . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1979 ( online ).
  11. ^ Alan Posener : "German contemporary historians defended interpretative sovereignty". In: Welt.de . October 26, 2017. Retrieved October 28, 2017 .
  12. ^ Walter H. Pehle: Raul Hilbergs 'Die Vernichtung der Europäische Juden' - documents on the publication history of the work in Germany. In: René Schlott (Ed.): Raul Hilberg and the Holocaust Historiography. Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-8353-3530-1 , pp. 230 and 236.
  13. ↑ see Wolfgang Wippermann : “Doesn't fit into the program” , in Literaturkritik.de , August 8, 2007
  14. ↑ see Götz Aly : perlentaucher.de October 18, 2017 / correspondingly also in: Raul Hilberg: Unbeared memory - The path of a Holocaust researcher. Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 978-3-596-18004-2 , p. 151.
  15. ^ Walter H. Pehle: Raul Hilbergs 'Die Vernichtung der Europäische Juden' - documents on the publication history of the work in Germany. In: René Schlott (Ed.): Raul Hilberg and the Holocaust Historiography. Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-8353-3530-1 , pp. 232-233.
  16. ↑ Hans Mommsen: Laudation
  17. ↑ Arno Widmann: The annihilation of the European Jews. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . August 7, 2007, accessed February 23, 2016 .
  18. ↑ Publisher's information - the tenth, one reviewed and expanded and the current German edition.
  19. ↑ See Knut Mellenthin : Raul Hilberg 1926–2007: He-whistled-on-the-mainstream in analysis & criticism October 2007
  20. ↑ Holocaust: "We only know 20 percent" . In: Der Standard , September 1, 2006
  21. ↑ Nicolas Berg: Review. In: Newsletter - Information from the Fritz Bauer Institute , No. 18, 2000