In an interview on The Holocaust

Your first book is The Destruction of the European Jews, the landmark study of the Holocaust by Raul Hilberg, first published half a century ago, that now runs to three volumes.

What happened is that there had been prior books about the Holocaust, for example by a Frenchman named Léon Poliakov, and they were important first steps. But the real professionalisation of the discipline, a tremendous change in the recognition of the importance of the Holocaust, came from the publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1960-1. He had great difficulty getting it published, but, once it did get published, people saw that it was a subject of enormous historic importance. Also, the way he carried it out – Hilberg, as a young man, had helped do some of the research for the trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere. So, his close knowledge of the huge collection of German documents that had been brought together for those trials just changed the whole landscape. And Raul continued to work on this book for the next 50 years – he only passed away two years ago – and it grew and grew into the present three-volume edition.

And why did he have trouble getting it published?

At that time people did not seem to feel that the Holocaust was a subject that would have a readership, that there was a lot of interest in it. Today we’re so well aware, it’s so much part of the public discourse and the public conversation, but at that time it was a subject that was little talked about in public. The survivors didn’t talk, and the victimisers didn’t talk, so there was a general agreement to push it to the side – both in scholarship and in general conversation.

Is there anything you would point to in the book as being of special significance?

Yes, his method. He was a student at Columbia University, of political science. So his method is that of a political scientist. Also, more importantly, what Raul did was emphasise the German side of the Holocaust. He didn’t study Jewish documents that closely, or look at the behaviour of the victims, at resistance, or anything like that. He went right to the documents he knew from the war trials, and he concentrated on the way the mass murder was organised by the German state, by the Nazis. And he had an eye especially for the issues of bureaucracy and technology, which he thought were the decisive factors that made this a new kind of major crime. What was special here was the use of modern organisational techniques, of which he was a student, to carry out this mass murder.

And no one had focused on that before?

Not the way he did. He traced how an order would start in one central location, and how it would be passed to another location, and the order would then be activated by a third group somewhere else, and how the bureaucrats were crucial to organising logistics, supplies, the whole logic of the enterprise. That was really his focus and he did it with great genius.