Remembering preeminent Holocaust historian, Raul Hilberg

[Poll_Blind]

There Went a Man: Remembering Raul Hilberg

by Norman Finkelstein

  Raul Hilberg died on August 4. A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust studies.

--snip--

  In his often acrid memoir The Politics of Memory Hilberg tells the story that when he first proposed studying the Jewish genocide to his advisor at Columbia University, the great German-Jewish sociologist Franz Neumann (author of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, a classic study of the organization of the Nazi state), Neumann warned him that "this will be your funeral."

  It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn't tire of remembering the crimes of the West German "revanchists." The major American Jewish organizations rushed to make their peace with Konrad Adenauer's government (the Anti-Defamation League took the lead) while those holding commemorations for the Jewish dead were tagged as Communists, which as a rule they were.

--snip--

  Hilberg's reputation for mastery of the primary sources was such that my former coauthor (and an authority in her own right on the Nazi holocaust) Ruth Bettina Birn feared their first meeting: no mortal being, she thought, could have stored so many Nuremberg Tribunal documents in his brain. The magnitude of Hilberg's achievement is hard to appreciate today because the scholarly breakthrough has passed into commonplace. His sequential-chronological account of the steps pressing ineluctably from the Nazi definition of Jews to their expropriation, massacre, deportation and assembly-line extermination has been assimilated into the infrastructure of all subsequent scholarship.

--snip--

  The relationship between Finkelstein and Hilberg was an unusual one- Finkelstein was a Liberal, Hilberg a life-long Republican. Finkelstein's work courted notoriety and publicity while Hilberg sought very little publicity and was only known to the Holocaust community. But both, in their own way, worked together to continue to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive with Hilberg documenting the Holocaust itself and Finkelstein (backed by Hilberg) documenting the horrible swindle of Holocaust survivors (another, final, insult).

  The story of the theft of billions from Holocaust survivors by self-appointed organizations is, in my opinion, the "other half" of the Holocaust. It is little known and will probably be glossed over once the last survivor dies.

  If you're curious, "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" by Finkelstein, is the most respected, though extremely controversial, document on this theft.

PB

[Poll_Blind]

1. kick... n/t

PB