The Destruction of the European Jews is a 1961 book by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus (The Holocaust in History), until the book appeared, little information about the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany had "reached the wider public" in both the West and the East, and even in pertinent scholarly studies it was "scarcely mentioned or only mentioned in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war".
Hilberg's "landmark synthesis, based on a masterful reading of German documents", soon led to a massive array of writings and debates, both scholarly and popular, on the Holocaust. Two works which preceded Hilberg's by a decade, but remained little known in their time, were Léon Poliakov's Bréviaire de la haine (Harvest of Hate), published in 1951, and Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution, published in 1953.Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History (University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 4–7.
Discussing the writing of Destruction in his autobiography, Hilberg wrote: "No literature could serve me as an example. The destruction of the Jews was an unprecedented occurrence, a primordial act that had not been imagined before it burst forth. The Germans had no model for their deed, and I did not have one for my narrative."
Background Hilberg began his study of the Holocaust, leading to The Destruction while stationed in Munich in 1948 for the U.S. Army's War Documentation Project. He proposed the idea for the work as a PhD. dissertation and was supported in this by his doctoral advisor, Columbia University professor Franz Neumann.
Summary
Hilberg challenges the view that since the Nazis destroyed massive sets of sensitive documents pertaining to the Holocaust upon the arrival of Soviet and Western Allied troops, no truly comprehensive, verifiable historical reconstruction could be achieved. This, however, argues Hilberg, demonstrates an ignorance as to the structure and scope of the Nazi bureaucracy. While it is true that many sensitive documents were destroyed, the bureaucracy nonetheless was so immense and so dispersed, that most pertinent materials could be reconstructed either from copies or from a vast array of more peripheral ones.
From these documents, The Destruction proceeds to outline the treatment of the Jews by the Nazi State through a succession of very different stages, each one more extreme, more dehumanizing than that which preceded it, eventually leading to the final stage: the physical destruction of the European Jews.
In The Destruction, Hilberg established what today has become orthodoxy in Holocaust historiography: the increasingly intensifying historical stages leading to genocide. Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews, Hilberg argued, began relatively mildly through political-legal discrimination and the appropriation of Jewish assets (1933–1939). Ghettoization followed: the isolation of Jews in and their confinement to Ghettoes (1939–1941). The final stage, Hilberg concluded, was the destruction itself, the continental annihilation of European Jews (1941–1945).
In the early stages, Nazi policies targeting Jews (whether directly or through aryanization) treated them as sub-human, but with a right to live under such conditions that this status affords. In the later stages, policy was formulated to define the Jews as anti-human, with extermination being viewed as an increasingly urgent necessity. The growing Nazi momentum of destruction, began with the murdering of Jews in German and German-annexed and occupied countries, and then intensified into a search for Jews to either exterminate or use as forced labour from countries allied with Nazi Germany as well as neutral countries.
The more sophisticated and organized, less clandestine part of the Nazi machinery of destruction tended to murder Jews not fit for intense manual labour immediately; later in the destruction process, more and more Jews initially labelled productive were also murdered. Eventually, Nazi compulsion for the eradication of the Jews became total and absolute, with any potentially available Jews being actively sought solely for the purpose of destruction.
While these stages remained distinct, they transitioned fluidly into one another because of an escalating process of dehumanization. As demonized as the Jews were, it seems highly unlikely that the destruction process of the later stage could have taken place during the timeline of the stage which preceded it.
This dynamic reveals a spontaneity which many historians belonging to the functionalist school, following Hilberg's elaborate description, relied upon. These historians point to the more clandestine mass murder of Jews (principally in the East) and, as stated by notable functionalist, Martin Broszat, because "no general all encompassing directive for the extermination had existed."
Unlike many later scholars, The Destruction does not emphasize and focus on the role of Hitler. However, on this, Hilberg has shifted more towards the centre, with the third edition pointing at a less direct and systematic, more erratic and sporadic, but nonetheless pivotal, involvement by Hitler in his support for the destruction process.
Hitler was a crucial impetus for the genocide, Hilberg claims, but the role played by the organs of the State and the Nazi Party should not be understated. Hitler, therefore, intended to eradicate the Jews, an intent he sometimes phrased in concrete terms, but often this intent on the part of Hitler was interpreted by, rather than dictated to, those at the helm of the bureaucratic machinery of destruction which administered and carried out the genocide of the Jews.
Within a death toll often viewed as ranging from a low estimate of five million to a high estimate of seven million, Hilberg's own detailed breakdown in The Destruction reveals a total estimated death toll of 5.1 million Jews. Only for the death toll at Belzec does Hilberg provide a precise figure; all the others are rounded. When these rounding factors are taken into account, a range of 4.9 million to 5.4 million deaths emerges. In her 1975 book The War Against the Jews 1933–1945, Lucy Dawidowicz researched birth and death records in many cities of prewar Europe to come up with a death toll of 5,933,900 Jews.
It is instructive to note that the discrepancy in total figures among Holocaust researchers is often overshadowed by that between Soviet and Western scholarship. One striking example can be seen in the Auschwitz State Museum's significant reduction of the estimated death toll in Auschwitz. On May 12, 1945, a few months after the liberation of Auschwitz, a Soviet State Commission reported that no fewer than four million people were murdered there.Reitlinger, G. (1968). The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945. South Brunswick: T. Yoseloff. Although few scholars west of the Iron Curtain accepted this report, this number was displayed on a plaque at the Auschwitz State Museum until the fall of communism in 1991, when it could be revised to 1.1 million.Cattani, A. (May 11, 1991). News Weekly. p. 19 Hilberg's own original estimate for the death toll in Auschwitz was examined, although, Piper noted, this estimate fails to account for those not appearing in the records, especially those murdered immediately upon arrival. This extreme example does not, however, mean that the total death toll should be lowered by three million. Rather, the four million figure should be regarded as Soviet propaganda; following a correct distribution, the total death toll still amounts to conventionally held figures.Brian Harmon, "The Auschwitz gambit: the four million variant" , from Deceit and misrepresentation: the techniques of Holocaust denial (The Nizkor Project) The role played by The Destruction in shaping widely held views as to the distribution of and evidence for these, has for decades been, and arguably remains, almost canonical in Holocaust historiography.
Publication While the dissertation won a prize, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Oklahoma University Press, as well as Yad Vashem all declined to publish it. It was eventually published by a small publishing company, Quadrangle Books. This first edition was published in an unusually small type. Much of the page count increase of later versions is due to being published in a conventional type size. This was not the end of Hilberg's publishing woes. It was not translated until 1982, when Ulf Wolter of the small leftist publishers Olle & Wolter in Berlin published a German translation. For this purpose the work was enlarged by about 15%, so that Hilberg spoke of a "second edition", "solid enough for the next century".
Reception Wide acclamation as seminal Reviewing the book just after publication, Guggenheim Fellow Andreas Dorpalen wrote that Hilberg had "covered his topic with such thoroughness that his book will long remain a basic source of information on this tragic subject." Today, The Destruction has achieved a highly distinguished level of prestige amongst Holocaust historians. While its ideas have been modified (including by Hilberg himself) and criticized throughout four decades, few in the field dispute its being a monumental work, in both originality and scope. Reviewing the appreciably expanded 1,440-page second edition, Holocaust historian Christopher Browning noted that Hilberg "has improved a classic, not an easy task." And while Browning maintains that, with the exception of Hitler's role, there are no fundamental changes to the work's principal findings, he nevertheless states that:
The controversies surrounding Hilberg's book were perhaps the main reason why its Polish translation was released only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, five decades after its original publication. The year Hilberg died, he refused an offer to have a shortened version published in translation, insisting that particularly in Poland, where so much of the Holocaust took place, only the full text of his work would suffice. The complete three-volume edition translated by Jerzy Giebułtowski was released in Poland in 2013. Dariusz Libionka from IPN, who led the book launch seminars in various cities, noted that the stories of defiance so prevalent in Poland can no longer be told without his perspective which includes the viewpoint of Holocaust bureaucracy. Reportedly, the last document Hilberg signed before his death was the release form allowing for the use of the word annihilation (as opposed to destruction) in the Polish title.Staff writer, "Zagłada Żydów Europejskich" Hilberga na wiosnę w Polsce. Rzeczpospolita 14-11-2012. Jerzy Kochanowski (19 lutego 2013), Historyka Zagłady podróż pod prąd. Tygodnik Polityka.
Opposition from Hannah Arendt