Early Reactions to Raul Hilberg’s History of the Holocaust,1961–7

The early 1960s was a pivotal moment in the history of American Holocaust memory. In May 1960, David Ben-Gurion announced that the Israeli secret services had captured Adolf Eichmann, a key administrator of the ‘Final Solution’, and brought him to Jerusalem where he would be prosecuted for his crimes. The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker during the spring of 1963. In Arendt’s view, Eichmann was the quintessential totalitarian bureaucrat, seemingly unaware of the consequences of his actions. She also claimed that the genocide would have been far less devastating if it had not been for the actions of Jewish leaders who cooperated in the deportation of Jews to the ghettos, camps and killing sites of Eastern Europe. ¹ These views were widely seen as exonerating Eichmann and unfairly blaming the Jewish community’s leadership.

To construct her narrative, Arendt relied on the work of a professor of political science at the University of Vermont by the name of Raul Hilberg. His The Destruction of the European Jews was published in the summer of 1961. It was the first American study of the Holocaust but it did not garner as much attention as Arendt’s articles. However, a scholarly tome of this kind constituted a more formidable challenge for those seeking to shape the history of the Holocaust. Historians have argued that Hilberg’s work received little attention when it was first published. ² They reached this conclusion after reading Hilberg’s autobiography, published in 1996. That book, written on a day when the author was in ‘a somewhat melancholy mood’, stresses the struggle and disappointments rather than the success of its author. ³

In his seminal work on American Holocaust memory, Peter Novick claimed that Hilberg’s book was acknowledged because its publication coincided with the Eichmann trial. Lending further weight to Hilberg’s own assessment of the reception of his work, Novick argued that there was little interest in the Holocaust within American Jewry and in American public life in general before 1967. Subsequent research, however, has shown that what would later be called the Holocaust was in fact present during the 1940s and 1950s in popular culture, in Jewish life and in discussions about antisemitism and totalitarianism. ⁴ Yet, these were often oblique references in texts dealing with other topics. By and large, these seeds did not fall on fertile ground. They did not herald the understanding of the Holocaust as a significant historical event and a political reference for the present. It would take the confluence of the Eichmann trial and the impact of Hilberg’s book – directly and indirectly through the work of Arendt – and the ensuing debate to bring that about.

This article argues that the reception of Hilberg’s book constitutes a landmark in the formation of the history and memory of the Holocaust in the public sphere. By drawing on a new archival and published source base, it explores the manifold ways in which scholars, journalists and intellectuals interpreted the Holocaust before the Six-Day War. The reactions in the popular and Jewish press reflected contemporary debates on the alliance with West Germany and brought unresolved questions concerning Jewish resistance to the Nazis and the legacy of the diaspora to the surface. Reviews in scholarly journals exposed barriers between the writing of Jewish history, the history of Nazi Germany and the history of the Holocaust. As a whole, Hilberg’s work and the reactions to it situated this event between the past and the present, at the intersection between history and politics which is historical consciousness. The process whereby certain events become recognized as historical is a matter of reception, much like the creation of classics of fiction or of historiography. In this sense, the reception of Hilberg’s work illustrates the reception of the Holocaust itself.

Born in Vienna in 1926, Hilberg fled with his parents to the USA in 1939. He developed his approach to the study of the Holocaust in the American academia of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Influenced by the émigré scholar Hans Rosenberg who taught history at Brooklyn College, and more broadly by the Weberian trend in the American social sciences, Hilberg became fascinated by the phenomenon of bureaucracy. As a student of political science at Columbia University, he wrote his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation on the administrative dimension of the genocide of the European Jews. His supervisor was Franz Neumann, another émigré who had published a structural analysis of Nazi German society during the war. ⁵ At first, the main source material of Hilberg’s work consisted of the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials. Later, as a member of the War Documentation Project, he gained access to German documents captured by the Allies and brought to the USA.

Unlike the first books on the Holocaust published in the early 1950s by the French historian Léon Poliakov and the British art historian Gerald Reitlinger, Hilberg focused on the role of German bureaucrats. Contrary to these more historical accounts, Hilberg’s work appeared at the margins of the attempt by American sociologists, many of whom were affiliated with or influenced by Frankfurt school, to analyse the Nazi era in universalistic terms and for contemporary purposes. Countering the notion that Nazi killers were fanatical deviants, he argued that the perpetrators were not an abnormal group of people, either politically or psychologically. This understanding of the proverbial ‘desk killer’ was related to research on totalitarianism during the 1950s as well as the experiments on everyday brutality carried out by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. ⁶ The genocide – what Hilberg called, ‘the destruction process’ – involved the entire German state apparatus. It did not proceed from a preconceived plan but evolved according to its own logic, involving four steps: definition, concentration, expropriation and annihilation. ⁷ Influenced by the understanding of bureaucracy as an almost unstoppable force, Hilberg’s study of the Holocaust had a deterministic slant, as if the process was impossible to stop once it had been put in motion.

Hilberg made his focus on the perpetrators very clear, explaining that his was not ‘a book about the Jews’. ⁸ However, he also took an interest in the reactions of the Jewish victims. He argued not only that they failed to resist to any significant degree but that they enabled the perpetrators. Hilberg claimed that Jews during their history of dispersion had learned to avoid provocation in order to limit the ravages of oppression. In their own state, by contrast, in ancient or modern times, Jews had no qualms about taking to arms. For Hilberg, the tradition of Jewish accommodation to persecution produced what a later generation of political scientists would have called path dependence. As long as their persecutors had the limited goal of inflicting some bodily or material harm, killing a few Jews and expelling the rest, this strategy had worked. Faced with the modern German bureaucratic machinery, however, it facilitated the perpetrators’ task. ⁹

Despite Hilberg’s particularized understanding of the victims’ response to the destruction process, his work had a strong universalist impetus. Instead of enclosing this story within a German or Jewish context, he sought to elevate it to world history and make it relevant for contemporary political debates concerning state bureaucracy and race relations. Hilberg’s work was historical insofar as it dealt with past events and their historical background, but his analysis was geared toward the present. Coming of age during a time when the US government took the first steps toward desegregation, he shaped his analysis into an object lesson on the most extreme consequences of discrimination. ¹⁰ Moreover, he intended his conclusions on the Jewish response to serve as a warning for minorities everywhere.

In early 1955, Hilberg obtained his doctoral degree. Later that year he received the Ansley award for the best dissertation in the social sciences, which included a promise of publication. Despite years of additional work, several university presses – including that of his alma mater – and the Israeli research and commemoration institute Yad Vashem, rejected his manuscript. The motivations ranged from its polemical tone, its criticism of Church leaders, and, in the Israeli case, his conclusions on Jewish reactions. Some of the same response would resurface during the reception of the published book. In the end, Quadrangle, a small publishing house based in Chicago, published Hilberg’s book in the summer of 1961. It was printed with double paragraphs in an edition of a few thousand copies, numbered close to 800 pages and was sold at a prohibitive price.

The Destruction of the European Jews was published at a time when the Cold War between East and West was heating up. Tensions had been mounting since 1955 when the USA and its allies allowed West Germany to became a member of NATO and to remilitarize. References to the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust played a role for those attempting to undermine this alliance. A wave of Swastika paintings and antisemitic graffiti starting in West Germany in 1959 – some of it orchestrated by East German agents – spread to other countries and engulfed the USA. ¹¹ Moreover, East Germany supplied the British and American press with information about the Nazi past of members of Konrad Adenauer’s government. ¹² In 1960, a former American correspondent to Berlin published a three-volume work on Nazi Germany that quickly became a bestseller. ¹³

The reception of Hilberg’s book played out at the intersection of these debates on West Germany and scholarly interpretations of Nazi Germany, on one hand, and the memory of groups affected by the Holocaust on the other. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, survivors published literary accounts of survival and psychological analyses of the concentration camp experience. ¹⁴ Since the war years, Jewish communities had incorporated the memory of the victims into communal life and groups of survivors and scholars sought to chronicle the catastrophe in view of research and commemoration. ¹⁵

The popular press and scholarly journals reviewed Hilberg’s book, with many recognizing it as a groundbreaking study. However, some scholars did not recognize the history presented by Hilberg. They expected to see Nazi evil as opposed to bureaucratic processes. After a general endorsement of Hilberg’s thesis on the Jewish response, Jewish writers, historians and survivors became increasingly critical. Unsurprisingly, members of the German and Eastern European Jewish diasporas took a dim view of the notion that they and their communities had failed to counter the German onslaught or even brought their fate upon themselves. To them, the Jewish catastrophe constituted a past that had to be understood on its own terms. Whatever was distinctively Jewish about the response of the victims to persecution mattered less than the conditions under which their oppressors made them suffer and die. ¹⁶ At the same time, experts on Jewish history defended their turf. In their view, Hilberg might have written the most authoritative account of the Jewish genocide but he lacked understanding of their experiences and of Jewish history.

The reception of Hilberg’s book attests to the manner in which the Holocaust was construed as a historical event during the first half of the 1960s. It shows that his work created a struggle for the definition of the history and significance of the Holocaust, which started before the Arendt controversy and involved scholars, refugees, survivors and intellectuals representing different backgrounds and academic disciplines. It was certainly the case, as Peter Novick has argued, that the Holocaust could not serve as a unifying symbol at this point, for Jews or for non-Jews. However, the fact that the meaning of the Holocaust was very much up for debate prompted rather than inhibited discussions of the topic.

The promotion of The Destruction of the European Jews took place in Chicago where journalists were quick to recognize Hilberg’s work as a major, ‘monumental’ achievement. Simultaneous reviews appeared in Washington DC and New York. The critic Alfred Kazin mentioned it favourably in Harper’s Magazine. ¹⁷ Although Hilberg later presented the reception of his book as muted at best, at the time he was overwhelmed by the response. His colleagues at the University of Vermont congratulated him for a book that, according to an article in the Vermont Cynic, was being ‘showered with praise’. ¹⁸

What was the tenor of this positive press reception? Several reviewers highlighted the role of bureaucrats as the major conclusion of the book and created a new symbol of Nazi evil. As one of the first headlines put it: ‘Killer bureaucrats of Hitler regime’. ¹⁹ Most headlines featured ‘Nazi’, ‘Hitler’ and ‘bureaucrats’ more often than ‘Germans’ but several reviewers noticed Hilberg’s emphasis on the involvement of all sectors of German society in anti-Jewish persecution. The sociologist Jacob Cohen, for example, called the Holocaust a ‘destructive community effort’, implicating ‘nearly everyone’. ²⁰ Hilberg’s focus on ordinary bureaucrats was suggestive for journalists and scholars who had been accustomed to regard the Nazi regime and its crimes as the workings of a small clique.

The only discordant voice was that of Eugene Davidson, the editor of the conservative Modern Age. Davidson decried Hilberg’s ‘anti-Germanism’. He claimed that Hilberg held a whole people responsible for ‘factories and operations of destruction run by a relatively small group of killers’. In Davidson’s view, the secrecy of the operation and, more implausibly, the ‘interchangeability of one bureaucrat for another in the exterminations’, militated against any notion of collective responsibility. ²¹ Davidson’s review shows that Hilberg’s structural interpretation could be used for apologetic purposes, since it appeared to make everybody and no one guilty. As one of the press headlines put it: ‘Anonymous Genocide: No one to Blame’. ²²

It was perhaps inevitable that the reception of Hilberg’s work touched upon the West German republic, since a large share of its officials had served under the Nazi regime. ²³ American newspapers published the first reviews as East German soldiers, police and construction workers erected a barrier of concrete and barbed wire between East and West Berlin. Observers in the USA and the United Kingdom were asking themselves what kind of ally that they were defending in West Germany. In November 1961, The New York Times published a joint review of The Destruction and a book about Nazi era officials in the West German government. ²⁴ Max Lerner, a columnist writing for the New York Post, questioned the pedigree of the West German political establishment. He placed particular emphasis on Hans Globke, a civil servant who played an important role in the legal path to the Holocaust and later became Adenauer’s closest collaborator. ²⁵

Reflections on German collective guilt were common in the United Kingdom where Hilberg’s book was published simultaneously. One reviewer, writing in The New Daily London, criticized British policy towards West Germany under the title ‘Germany Judged and Found Guilty’. Reviewing Hilberg’s work in the left-leaning periodical New Statesman – which had been a forum for critique of British foreign policy since its founding in 1913 – Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper asserted that ‘the Germans were involved in it as a nation’. ²⁶ British observers were more apprehensive about the new Germany than their American colleagues and anti-German sentiment remained rife in a country that had felt the brunt of bombing on its cities. One British reviewer with an altogether different focus was Gerald Reitlinger. Visibly distraught by the fact that his work had been surpassed, he criticized Hilberg for offering ‘no new conclusions’ and being ‘obsessed with staff organization’. ²⁷

The bulk of the scholarly reviews were published during the spring and summer of 1962 in prestigious journals in history and the social sciences, in many cases written by young scholars with a refugee background. These reviews reflected the general endorsement of Hilberg’s work by his peers. They also showed that it did not quite match their expectations. Hilberg’s universalist approach to what was still a political experience was very much in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s, when it was first conceived. By the early 1960s, the same approach was somewhat outdated concerning what was increasingly regarded as a historical event. His work displayed no real interest in Nazi ideology and gave little sense of what went on in the heads of those who conceived and implemented the Holocaust. The difference between political science and historical research played an important role in this regard, and so did the influence of the Nuremberg trials. The conclusion that all of Germany was involved in the genocide had stirred the imagination of journalists and editors in the press reception. Among scholars and particularly historians, however, it was perceived as a lack of historical contextualization.

The Chicago philosopher Charles Wegener penned the most critical review. Wegener could not make sense of Hilberg’s analysis of the destruction process. He faulted Hilberg for having written ‘an administrative history, not a political one’, and being interested in the motivations of the perpetrators ‘only as stages in an organizational operation’. He argued that presenting the Nazi genocide as a problem of bureaucracy had the effect of rendering it incomprehensible. The preceding year, one of the press reviewers saw this not as a problem in Hilberg’s work but as the distinguishing feature of the genocide, which he labelled ‘the most incomprehensible act of national madness in all history’. ²⁸ For someone like Wegener, however, Hilberg’s ‘administrative history’ divorced the genocide from its political context. In his view, the point was not that these perpetrators were bureaucrats but that they were serving the Nazi dictatorship. He even went so far as to argue that anti-Jewish massacres had no inherent significance beyond that context:

The ‘enormity’ of a crime is not a simple function of its physical magnitude or of its consequences for its victims. The proximate Nazi crime lay not in killing Jews, but in killing Jews on principle, and their basic crime lay in creating a tyranny within which such actions were purposefully incarnated into the fabric of political organization and action. ²⁹

In Wegener’s view, the genocide was contingent upon Nazi German dictatorship and not significant in itself, as if focusing on the Holocaust detracted from the condemnation of Nazism. This response was atypical in the reception of Hilberg’s work but it was reminiscent of the war years when massacres and war crimes – ‘atrocities’ – were subordinated to the condemnation of Nazi violence and tyranny. Today, the Holocaust is one of the most common symbols of Nazi evil. In 1962, however, not everyone was ready to accept that it was more than an episode in the history of Nazi Germany, let alone a world historical event.

Going further in his critique, Wegener remarked that Hilberg’s tone was ‘bitter, and consistently so: it seems almost that everyone failed to react effectively or to appreciate the enormity of the crime’. This remark echoed the rejection of Hilberg’s manuscript for its polemical tone, a few years prior. It was well taken in the sense that his account presented no one involved in a favourable light. He had written in reaction to the perpetrators who had killed the Jews, the victims who did not react in an appropriate manner, and a world that had stood by.

Yet, even individuals who shared Hilberg’s interest in the genocide of the Jews expressed criticism of his work. In their view, Hilberg’s social science terminology and his focus on bureaucracy failed to do justice to what had transpired. Jacob Robinson, a Latvian Jewish expert on international law involved in both the Nuremberg and the Eichmann trials, faulted Hilberg for describing a ‘crime’ carried out by ‘fiery dynamist, limitless fanaticism and mostly with ferocious enthusiasm’ as a problem of bureaucracy. ³⁰ For Robinson, Hilberg underplayed the ideological fervour of the perpetrators and presented a sanitized version of the genocide. This was no anonymous process carried out by faceless bureaucrats.

If some scholars found that Hilberg let the Nazis off the hook, others perceived him as being too hard on the Germans. Gerhard L. Weinberg, a German Jewish refugee and a former colleague of Hilberg’s at the War Documentation Project, lauded The Destruction in the American Historical Review. However, he objected to what he perceived as the deterministic tenor of Hilberg’s analysis. The concept of the destruction process implied that the gas chambers and shooting pits of Eastern Europe were inscribed in the very first legal steps directed against the German Jewish community in 1933. Weinberg remarked that this was not proven by fact. ³¹ Weinberg also criticized Hilberg’s interpretation of Nazi German policies against half- and one quarter Jews, the so-called Mischlinge. In Weinberg’s view, these individuals survived not because some Germans had failed to kill them but because other Germans had struggled to help them.

Weinberg accepted Hilberg’s thesis on the involvement of the entire German society in the process, but there were limits as to how far he would expand the circle of culpability. What Hilberg had portrayed as tacit consent, Weinberg perceived as attempts to avert the worst. ³² Hilberg pointed out that General Johannes Blaskowitz complained about early SS anti-Jewish ‘excesses’ in occupied Poland but had nothing to say about anti-Jewish persecution as such. To Weinberg, this was a one-sided assessment of a man who had tried to protest ‘in language attuned to the times’. In a similar vein, Andreas Dorpalen, another refugee turned scholar, reviewed Hilberg’s work in The Journal of Modern History. Like Weinberg, Dorpalen rode to the defence of ‘courageous officials who did what they could to alleviate the lot of the Jews’. ³³ In their view, that form of historical context which implies a fair hearing to the other side was lacking in Hilberg’s study. Although couched in neutral terminology, it departed from notions of historical objectivity prevalent at the time.

While praising Hilberg’s work, these reviewers reacted to the fact that he did not present the familiar picture of ideologically motivated anti-Jewish violence. He was interested in bureaucracy, not Nazi fanaticism like Jacob Robinson. He implicated German military men whose actions could be construed differently and placed the supposedly apolitical bureaucrats at the centre of his work. Hilberg’s focus on bureaucracy came at the cost of those customarily held responsible for Nazi crimes: Hitler, the SS and the Nazi party. From this perspective, the Jewish genocide gained universal significance by losing some of its specificity.

In West Germany, a reviewer of Hilberg’s work for the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) echoed Wegener’s criticism of what the latter called an ‘administrative history’. The German reviewer adduced Hilberg’s focus on ‘technical organizational’ aspects as an argument against a German translation. He or she argued that research on the topic by German historians was in the making. Contrary to Hilberg’s ‘merely documentary depiction’ these historians would supposedly take the relevant political context into consideration. The historians at the IfZ wanted research on the Nazi period to be conducted from a specific outlook that effectively excluded foreigners and individuals who had left Nazi Germany. In short: they preferred to keep German history in the hands of German historians, and in particular those who had lived through the 12 years of Nazi rule. ³⁴ The few reviews of Hilberg’s book in the West German press were however very positive. ³⁵

In the United States, apart from Wegener’s rejection of his work, the criticisms concerning Hilberg’s approach to the perpetrators were minor remarks in reviews attesting to a positive response to his work among other scholars. There was no real debate about Hilberg’s emphasis on the importance of bureaucracy or his argument that the entire German society was involved in the process of destruction. The former was presented as a revelation in the popular press and the latter played a role in the debate about West Germany’s role as a Western ally, but neither created controversy. The main cause for debate in the reception of Hilberg’s book had to do with his portrayal of the Jewish victims.

Unlike his way of describing German bureaucrats as any other bureaucrats, Hilberg’s thesis on the Jewish reaction pattern set Jews and their history apart from the rest of humanity. During the first round of reviews, his conclusions in this regard were met with almost universal acceptance. Reviewers in the press and scholarly journals confirmed Hilberg’s argument, which they presented as an interesting but not controversial disclosure. ³⁶ The initial response to Hilberg’s book in Jewish journals and newspapers was even more positive than the general reception. For example, the German Jewish lawyer and former assistant US chief counsel at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg Robert M.W. Kempner, published an enthusiastic review in Aufbau, the New York based weekly newspaper of the German Jewish diaspora. Judge Michael A. Musmanno, who had also worked for the US prosecution at Nuremberg and was a witness at the Eichmann trial, greeted The Destruction in a Chicago-based Jewish publication. ³⁷

There was an element of self-recognition in the initial Jewish response to Hilberg’s claim regarding Jewish traditions in the diaspora. Jewish intellectuals accepted the connection between these traditions and Jewish behaviour during the twentieth century as valid. The Polish poet Aaron Zeitlin, writing in the New York Yiddish-language daily The Day, approved of Hilberg’s thesis on the Jewish reaction pattern which he read as a description of traditional Jewish optimism. ³⁸ The rabbi and Zionist leader David Polish mentioned ‘the virtually total submissiveness of European Jewry’ when reviewing Hilberg’s book in August 1961. ³⁹ He returned to this question the following year in the independent monthly The Jewish Spectator. In his view, American Jews were

the heirs of the bankrupt philosophy of our European counterparts. Although the techniques have been up-dated, the philosophy on which they are based is not markedly different from that which helped prepare the doom of the European Jews.

Confronting Jewish optimism based on the current waning of antisemitism, Polish regarded it as ‘dangerous to make light of what is sarcastically referred to as the ‘lachrymose’ interpretation of Jewish fate in the Diaspora’. ⁴⁰ Although conceding a point to the programmatic concept coined by Salo Baron, the doyen of Jewish historical research in the USA who had reacted in the late 1920s against too grim a view of the Jewish past, Polish emphasized that the catastrophes affecting the Jewish people throughout history needed to be taken seriously. Polish’s point was that the Holocaust ought not to be regarded as a ‘historical event’, but as ‘an existential reality which summons us to reckoning’.

Two months later, the writer Maurice Rosenthal published a review of Hilberg’s work – which was considerably more positive than suggested by its title (‘The Murdered Are Not Guilty!’) – in the same journal. Contrary to Polish, Rosenthal rejected the notion that there was anything specifically Jewish about the reactions of the victims. Furthermore, he claimed that there was in any case little that they could have done to influence their ultimate fate. In his view, they ‘reacted as human beings caught in a trap devised by men who deceived them into believing that death was not inevitable’. ⁴¹ Yet, the wealth of reactions to Hilberg’s work suggests that many regarded the question of victim reactions more along Polish’s line, as a specifically Jewish issue of utmost importance for the present.

In Ireland, the publication of the local chapter of the Revisionist Zionist organization Kol Herut, representing the far right of the Zionist movement, affirmed what the reviewer perceived as Hilberg’s Revisionist reading of the Jewish catastrophe. In private, a representative of that organization commended Hilberg for his ‘emphasis on the suicidal nature of Jewry’s reactions’. ⁴² These Zionists welcomed his argument as an ideological statement in support of their cause.

Others took issue with Hilberg’s separation between the fighting Jews of Israel and the meek diaspora Jews. The British psychologist Abraham A. Roback rejected it as a staple of Zionist ideology, perhaps permissible for Israeli youth and Zionist propagandists but not for a serious historian. ⁴³ Ben Zion Goldberg, a journalist from the Soviet Union, included a reference to Hilberg’s work in an article on the ghettos published in The Day. According to Goldberg, Hilberg lacked understanding of Jewish life and adopted a privileged ‘Sabra interpretation’, referring to native Israelis, which did not include enough information about Jewish armed resistance. ⁴⁴

The legacy of diaspora Jewry mattered also for Israeli historians, many of whom were survivors or former refugees living in a state claiming to represent the culmination of Jewish history. There was a divide between their generation and Israeli youth imbibed with notions of traditional Jewish meekness and victims of the Holocaust going like ‘sheep to the slaughter’. This divide became acute during the trial of Adolf Eichmann when survivors were asked in court why they had not escaped or resisted. Israeli historians responded to this political context while setting the groundwork for an Israeli historiography of the Holocaust. ⁴⁵ Nathan Eck, a Polish Holocaust survivor and researcher at Yad Vashem wrote at length about the question of resistance in The Jewish Spectator. The historian Shaul Esh was born in Germany in the early 1920s and had been involved in Yad Vashem’s rejection of Hilberg’s manuscript a decade earlier. In his review of Hilberg’s work, Esh questioned the dichotomy of Jews in and outside of Israel by pointing out that survivors of the Holocaust later fought for Israel. As historian David Engel observes, for these historians ‘the very notion of a unified Jewish people was at stake’. ⁴⁶

American left-wing Jewish writers found that Hilberg banished the Jewish people from a world that had fought fascism. The editor of Jewish Currents, Morris U. Schappes, had been a member of the American Communist Party. He was jailed in 1941 for refusing to denounce his colleagues at the City College of New York. During the spring of 1962, Schappes, who had written a book about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, initiated a debate concerning Hilberg’s work and the progressive legacy of the Jewish people. He described Jewish history in terms of an opposition between the ‘reactionary tradition of submission to social evil and the progressive tradition of resistance to it’. ⁴⁷ He criticized Hilberg’s definition of resistance for being too narrow and pointed to subversive aspects of Jewish life in the ghettos.

In Hilberg’s only published contribution to the debate triggered by his book, he responded that he did not regard ‘elemental struggle for life under starvation conditions’, as resistance, since it ‘did not stem the Nazi advance’. ⁴⁸ Schappes retorted that ‘resistance is a stance and a process that includes a great variety of acts’, and claimed that Hilberg had ‘not systematically explored the subject of Jewish resistance either in his own or any definition of resistance’. ⁴⁹ For Schappes, Hilberg might have established himself as an authority on the German destruction process, but he was ignorant about the Jewish response. From the onset, this was a dialogue de sourds. Schappes and others perceived a pattern of Jewish resistance where Hilberg saw atypical incidents.

A psychologist from Nebraska, S.D. Kaplan, sought to find a way out of the impasse by arguing that the Jewish response had less to do with Jewish traditions than with normal psychological reactions. ⁵⁰ Although donning the universalist garb of psychological analysis, Kaplan insisted that the contemporary world ought to learn by criticizing ‘the errors of those who perished’. In his day, the threat on everybody’s minds was not new genocides but atomic war. In the fall of 1961, the US government launched the Community Fallout Shelters Program. Some criticized this effort as unrealistic given the difficulty of supplying shelters with clean air, food and water in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. ⁵¹ A few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kaplan joined the debate by describing the prevailing American mindset in the following way:

Just as the Frank family tried to hide in their secret chamber, so today many an American family is making plans for a fallout shelter. The lesson of the Frank family can only make us regard such a futile procedure with horror. ⁵²

Hilberg’s thesis on Jewish reactions prompted a response among representatives of Eastern European Jewry and in the Yiddish press. In May 1962, the author Jacob Glatstein published a rebuke of Hilberg entitled ‘Holy resistance’ in the left-wing Zionist periodical Der Yidisher Kempfer. Glatstein could see no common ground with the debate raised by Hilberg and Trevor-Roper. In his view, the question of why the Jews did not resist was ‘vile’ and ‘barbaric’. ⁵³ The poet Yuri Suhl, keeping the debate in Jewish Currents going, pointed to instances of Jewish resistance ignored by Hilberg, but at the same time argued that it was inappropriate to measure these efforts based on the number of slain enemies. In Suhl’s reading, Hilberg had evaluated Jewish resistance as if two armies had faced off against each other in conventional warfare. Writing in the era of new social history which questioned a state-centred and top-down perspective on history, Suhl rephrased Jewish acts of heroism not in terms of the results of individual acts but as expressions of the mettle of the Jewish people as a whole. ⁵⁴

Although the reception of Hilberg’s book was a primarily western affair, it also elicited reactions on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Bernard Mark was a Polish Jewish historian and the director of the Warsaw Jewish Historical Institute. In 1962, he denounced Hilberg in a series of articles in the Yiddish press of Warsaw and New York, calling his book a ‘desecration of the Jewish resistance’. ⁵⁵ Mark championed the anti-fascist credentials of the Jewish masses. Instead of Hilberg’s thesis on a uniform and compliant Jewish response, he presented a Jewish community riddled by class divisions, fighting against both German persecution and the corruption of Jewish leaders. ⁵⁶ To Mark, the battle lines between friend or foe were drawn between those who acknowledged Jewish resistance and those who aimed to misrepresent it. Hilberg (‘an American ‘learned Jew’’ ⁵⁷ ) had provided the latter camp with grist to the mill in form of a scholarly volume in an accessible language. From Mark’s perspective, the situation recalled the history of Jacob Brafman, the nineteenth-century Russian Jewish convert to Christianity who published tracts on the alleged threat posed by Jewry to Orthodox Christianity and vitriolic attacks on the Russian Jewish community. ⁵⁸ Comparing Hilberg to this notorious renegade, Mark regarded his argument as one of ‘various slanderous legends about the Jews’. ‘Can one’, he asked rhetorically, ‘keep quiet about and tolerate such a lie, such a falsification, such a desecration?’ ⁵⁹ From his perspective, this was a matter of siding with the oppressor or the oppressed, of closing ranks in the aftermath of catastrophe.

The debate on Hilberg’s claims concerning Jewish victim reactions was a limited affair until Trevor-Roper’s endorsement of his book. In two reviews published during the spring of 1962, first in the New Statesman and then in the American Jewish Commentary, the British historian presented the Jewish victims as diligent laborers in their own destruction. Comparing Jews to other persecuted minorities in history, Trevor-Roper noted that descendants of Muslims forced to convert to Christianity had struggled against the Spanish Crown during the sixteenth century and that protestant Huguenots had fought French Catholic oppression in the eighteenth century. By contrast, he concluded that ‘the Jews’ had been ‘willing agents of the Final Solution’, who ‘played their complementary role until, at the end, they meekly dug their own graves and lined themselves up to be shot down into them, or herded themselves, by categories, into the gas chambers’. ⁶⁰ This image of Jewish submissiveness presented by a prominent historian triggered reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.

In July 1962, the British Jewish Quarterly organized a panel on ‘Resistance and Survival’, with four young survivors at the National Book League in London, a recording of which was later broadcast on New York radio. ⁶¹ Simcha Unsdorfer, a survivor of Auschwitz (where his parents were killed) and Buchenwald regarded the debate on Jewish resistance to be ‘an insult to the millions of Jews who lost their lives’. ⁶² In his view, taking up arms against the oppressor was impossible and would in any case not have helped. Two of Unsdorfer’s co-panelists, by contrast, made sense of their experiences by deriving a militaristic lesson not unlike that on offer by Hilberg. Ezra Jurman was a native of Dresden who fought for Israel in 1948 after surviving the Riga Ghetto and two forced labour camps. Based on these experiences, Jurman claimed that ‘the next time, they would not find us so convenient’. ⁶³ Similarly, the Hungarian Eugene Heimler – like Unsdorfer a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald – recalled that, prior to deportation, his friends had contemplated setting fire to their ghetto but were dissuaded from doing so by the Jewish Council. ⁶⁴ These survivors were of the same age as Hilberg and expressed frustration with having been unable to influence the Jewish response in a more assertive direction.

In the USA, the following month, Commentary published a number of responses to Trevor-Roper. The Polish Jewish historian Isaiah Trunk claimed that the victims’ reactions reflected their objective powerlessness and presented their attitude prior to death as an ethical act in a hopeless situation instead of a sign of impotence. ⁶⁵ Others interpreted the Jewish response as a form of non-violent resistance. Max Gruenewald was a German rabbi and the director of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, an organization founded in 1955 and devoted to research on German Jewish history and culture. ⁶⁶ Gruenewald rebuked Hilberg in a New Jersey Jewish weekly for judging the German Jewish leaders, most of whom had been killed, so harshly. In his opinion, Hilberg devoted too little attention to the official representation of the Jewish community during the Nazi period, the Reichsvertretung (an organization that Hilberg called ‘a tool for the destruction of the Jews’ ⁶⁷ ), which Gruenewald had been part of. In Commentary, Gruenewald championed non-violence as a survival strategy that had led the Jewish people through a history of persecution. ⁶⁸ He vindicated the very idea that Hilberg presented as outdated. Unlike fields of historical inquiry of the more distant past, the dramatis personae of contemporary history are often still alive and sometimes they talk back when being talked about.

Gruenewald was part of a group of seasoned representatives of the German Jewish exile whose sense of outrage increased during the course of 1962, as if waking up to a challenge. These individuals saw themselves accused of having acquiesced during their darkest hour and they could not remain silent now. Behind the scenes, they were scrambling to make a response against what they perceived as an affront to their honour. In May, the historian Hanns Reissner urged Hilberg to ‘restrain any tendency towards self-righteousness from hindsight’. ⁶⁹ Later that year, in a private letter, Reissner decried the notion that he and his former colleagues in the Reichsvertretung were ‘sissies without courage’. He proposed that the Council of Jews from Germany – the largest organization representing the German Jewish exile – publish a pamphlet that would show how the Reichsvertretung ‘waged resistance’, and how ‘the will to live of the hounded and incarcerated Jews’ was in itself a form of resistance. ⁷⁰

Meanwhile, a group living in Israel and affiliated with the Leo Baeck Institute discussed how to respond to Hilberg. They were aghast at the prospect that his book would become the source of their history and suggested publishing a statement of refutation, an ‘exposure of a historical lie’, as one of them put it. ⁷¹ Yet, not everyone was satisfied with such a course of action. Max Kreutzberg, the first director of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, argued that a refutation might easily be met with a counter refutation. Instead, Kreutzberg argued, they had to continue with their planned history of the Reichsvertretung and be open about questions concerning German Jewish cooperation with German officials. ⁷²

Following the reactions by Trunk, Gruenewald and others, Oscar Handlin, the Harvard professor and pioneer of American immigration history, entered the fray. Handlin had reviewed Hilberg’s book for the Journal of Sociology and faulted him for lacking in understanding of the Jewish victims. Writing in Commentary four months later, Handlin wanted to do justice to the legacy of the Jewish people of Eastern Europe and their way of life. He argued that German oppression conditioned the Jewish response, that Jews had resisted to the same extent as others and that resistance was in any case futile. For him, the image of the submissive Jew was a figment of Nazi imagination that Hilberg presented as historical truth. Handlin treated the injunction that Jews should have resorted to violence as a demand that they debase themselves by emulating their killers, and ‘leap like a beast at the beast who were about to shoot [them]’. ⁷³ He went so far as to describe Hilberg’s work as a threat comparable to the historical event itself:

By defaming the dead and their culture, this interpretation completes the process of destruction begun by the Nazis, reducing two thousand years of experience to ashes and adding Jewish history itself to the list of the destroyed and forgotten. ⁷⁴

What Germans had done to Jewish lives, so Handlin suggested, Hilberg had accomplished for Jewish history – a historiographical incineration of sorts. After the Jewish people had been murdered, their legacy was at stake and Hilberg had, in Handlin’s view, made himself the handmaiden of the destructive forces of history. For historians such as Handlin and Isaiah Trunk, the recounting of the deaths of the victims of the Holocaust carried an important ethical and perhaps also aesthetical dimension.

Handlin’s response did not stand uncontested. Léon Poliakov dismissed the assertion that Jews had put up as much resistance as non-Jews as ‘simply fallacious, since these other peoples were not doomed to physical extermination’. ⁷⁵ He claimed that non-Jews faced with the same threat would probably have resisted more strongly than Jews, given:

the tradition of the Jewish galut, which accounts for so many things: for the horror of physical violence; for the faith in God’s wisdom and benevolence…and also for a sui generis submissiveness toward gentile powers, which one might fight with ruse, with bribes, with “influence,” but not with arms. ⁷⁶

This description was more or less identical to what Hilberg had claimed and offered by a more authoritative voice in the field of Jewish history, but it mattered little against the tide of critical reactions to his work.

After Hannah Arendt's articles appeared in the spring of 1963, intellectuals and journalists read Hilberg’s book with new eyes. The German Jews who had laboured to come up with a response to it now issued a statement against him and Arendt. In their view, Arendt’s own work had demonstrated the impossibility of resistance against totalitarian systems. ⁷⁷ Michael Musmanno had had nothing but praise for Hilberg in 1961. After Arendt’s book appeared, he credited her and Hilberg with a position ‘so blatantly foolish that it could not possibly convince even the most unlettered person’. ⁷⁸

Because of Arendt, the debate on Hilberg’s book reached the intellectual circles of New York. In the fall of 1963, the left-wing journal Dissent organized a panel in Manhattan on the topic of Eichmann in Jerusalem and asked Hilberg to participate after Arendt had declined. Included in the panel were left-wing Zionist writer Marie Syrkin, literary critic Lionel Abel, sociologist Daniel Bell and Alfred Kazin. The debate took place during a time when the condemnation of Arendt was at its zenith. Hilberg’s intervention elicited boos and denouncements by members of the audience, accompanied by Abel pounding a copy of The Destruction on the table. ⁷⁹

Alongside these emphatic rejections of Hilberg’s work, scholars of Jewish history reacted against what they seemed to have perceived as his encroachment on their area of expertise. Joshua Rothenberg, for example, a Yiddish teacher at Brandeis and a specialist on Soviet Jewry, argued that whereas Hilberg’s analysis of the German destruction machinery constituted solid scholarship, his work ‘should not become an authoritative work on the behavior of the victims themselves’. ⁸⁰ These historians spent decades studying Jewish history. In the light of the acclaim of Hilberg’s work, they experienced a form of historiographical disempowerment. A young political scientist with little knowledge of Jewish history had overstepped scholarly boundaries and usurped their historical domain. While praising his account of the German side of the story, they rejected his take on Jewish history. ⁸¹ Moreover, Hilberg’s claim that his was ‘not a book about the Jews’ rubbed many the wrong way. Jacob Robinson, for example, queried: ‘if the story of the “administration” of the greatest mass murder in history is not the history of the victims (at least as much as the history of the “people who destroyed the Jews”), what is?’ ⁸² Thus, Hilberg’s interest in the perpetrators, and his separation between Jewish history seemed to suggest that the history of this event did not belong to its victims.

In 1967, Quadrangle published a paperback edition which still managed to elicit some reactions. Nathan Eck suggested that Hilberg had produced ‘slander' instead of historical research. In a reflection of the different stakes of Holocaust historiography during the 1960s, Eck branded him ‘a fanatical devotee of the truth, who, suppressing his own feelings, would not shrink from denouncing the murdered millions of his own people – always for the sake of the truth’. In the USA, the Russian American rabbi Charles E. Shulman called Hilberg’s book an ‘Exploded Canard’. ⁸³ Yet, compared to the debate of 1962 and 1963 these were lone voices which could not detract from Hilberg’s standing as the preeminent expert on the German side of the Jewish catastrophe.

The publication of Hilberg’s opus in 1961 signalled that the Holocaust was more than a concern for the affected communities or those interested in the upcoming trial of Adolf Eichmann. His book was recognized as a major achievement and widely acknowledged in the general, scholarly and Jewish press. The wealth of reviews and responses disproves the claim, made by both Hilberg and scholars of American Holocaust memory, that The Destruction received little attention after publication. Contrary to the occasional references to the Holocaust during the preceding decades, the political, scholarly and Jewish interest in this work made a permanent mark.

Apart from accolades and recognition, reviewers and commentators in scholarly and Jewish journals criticized Hilberg’s approach to the perpetrators and his analysis of the Jewish response. Some scholars took Hilberg to task for treating Germans who in their view had tried to avert the worst as perpetrators, whereas others argued that his interest in bureaucrats disregarded the significance of Nazi ideology and dictatorship. Yet, compared to the debate concerning Hilberg’s thesis on the Jewish reaction pattern, these remarks as well as the critique of the determinism of the ‘destruction process’ were minor quibbles set against a general endorsement of his work by other scholars.

In responding to Hilberg’s work, Jewish historians, refugees and survivors in the USA, Europe and Israel were involved in a struggle concerning the meaning of the Holocaust. The significance of this process went far beyond both Cold War politics and the public relations affair that the memory of the Holocaust is sometimes reduced to: it reflected the working through of catastrophe and the emergence of a historical event. In this context, it was precisely the impact of Hilberg’s book that made it controversial. Although some Jewish intellectuals interpreted his thesis on the Jewish reaction pattern as a wake-up call for Jews to change their ways, others, primarily historians, refugees and survivors, saw it as a distortion of their history, an attempt to underplay Jewish resistance and put the blame for the genocide on its victims.

Hilberg’s analysis of the bureaucratic administration of genocide and his particularized understanding of the victims’ reactions lend new meaning to the Jewish genocide at a crucial juncture in the development of Holocaust memory. Compared to the concluding decades of the twentieth century, there was in the early 1960s no shared understanding of how the Holocaust ought to be depicted or in what sense it was a concern for posterity. This fact spawned debate concerning Hilberg’s interpretations of victims and perpetrators, which in turn contributed to making the Holocaust part of historical consciousness. Although the debate about The Destruction subsided, Hilberg’s work and the questions it raised continued to inform the creation of the memory and historiography of the Holocaust.