Eminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg has spent the past 53 years working backwards from “never again,” the first words uttered by the liberated inmates of a concentration camp. Years unearthing history has engraved details, specific railroad schedules, deportation statistics and dates in his memory. “Taking a course with someone who has spent their entire life working on the subject is a unique experience. Hilberg has an intimacy with the material which allows him to see connections that others would miss,” Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Abe Socher said.
First-year Wilson Skinner commented that “Hilberg’s command of the material is amazing. He knows everything, or it seems like everything.”
Working for the US Army, a 22 year old Hilberg began literally and figuratively unpacking the enormous quantity of information held in the estimated 40,000 pieces of Nazi paperwork after the war. Even at the age of 22, he knew better than to look for an explanation for the Holocaust. “I am very different from most other researchers who start out with questions. I approach documents in an almost random manner. I was considered a novice [when, at an archive] I was asked what I wanted to see and I said anything.” In her introduction of Hilberg on Sunday, Jewish Studies department chair Shulamit Magnus deemed him “a pioneer of systematic scholarly study [of the Holocaust]” and praised his ability to “interpret the facts without flinching” while keeping up a “frenetic pace of scholarly work.”
In his first lecture, Hilberg mentioned the pervasive question “always asked, never answered” in the study of the Holocaust: “How could this have happened?” Later, he noted that “things just don’t happen. There are occasions. There are possibilities that open the door.”
Hilberg’s 50-plus years of careful research in Holocaust documentation have distilled his view of the events into a story and transformed himself into its principal storyteller. Wry, incredulous and even sarcastic, Hilberg makes sure his audience can’t forget the “incredible normalcy” of Hitler’s life nor the absolute significance of specific knowledge in the study of the Holocaust. From Hitler, the art school-reject (“he couldn’t draw faces”), to the transportation of millions of people to concentration camps at a per-capita cost of “about two cents per track kilometer for adults, children half off, and kids under six travel free...to Auschwitz, that is.” Listeners heard a detailed, but memorable story emphasizing the step-by-step nature of annihilation.
Under his exacting gaze, the notion of Nazi Germany as a well-oiled machine crumbled. “They had no goals; they only had a direction....This is very remarkable....They are moving without knowing where they will end up, but that’s the way it was ladies and gentlemen....That’s the only way it could be....You don’t verbalize it [the decision to murder all the Jews] to yourself, you don’t use vocabulary to describe it to yourself in ordinary language.” He concluded matter-of-factly, “There are some things you do, but don’t say.”
Because the Holocaust is a story that, to borrow the words of Magnus, “has been politicized in ways that are illegitimate,” many felt that Hilberg’s detail-heavy presentation offered a valuable lesson as to how genocide happens. Critical of those uninterested in detail, he said, “They don’t ask how people get from here to there, Auschwitz! That’s what’s important! [They say], well, how do they get there?...trains?...Who sends the trains? How does it happen?” Hilberg emphasized the collaboration of bystanders from priests to accountants. “Name a profession and I’ll tell you what that profession contributed [to the Holocaust].”
In a final lecture entitled “Moral Problems in Hitler’s Europe: Perpetrators and Victims,” Hilberg discussed the mentality of Nazi killers, “Somebody has to do it, they were all saying to themselves. ‘Why does somebody have to do it?’ These are very difficult questions. I am not going to answer them.” Later, he concluded that “the issue is if intelligent, normal functioning, stable human beings can accomplish a holocaust,” adding that “one thing they were not — they were not crazy.”