Raul Hilberg’s THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS is arguably the most important book ever published on the Holocaust. A controversy over the German edition of Destruction lies at the assertion that historians at the Institute for Zeitgeschichte for Contemporary History (IFZ) repeatedly advised German publishers against publishing a German edition in order to present a sanitised version for German readership. Fear of the entire truth, mesmerised the elite regarding the extent of German society’s involvement in the Holocaust and that antisemitism would be reanimated. It took till 2003 for a publication with a German translation to appear. This book published in 1961 and revised in 1985 is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. Until then, 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, only passed off as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war”. This was a primordial act unimagined before it burst forth, the Germans having no model for their deed, as the author not have for his narrative. Hilbert was against overstating the heroism of Jewish victims, because their narrative were not central to a systematic, social-scientific construction of the destructive process. He refused to view the victims passivity as a form of heroism for resistance. From documents, the book proceeds to outline the treatment of the Jews by the Nazi State through a succession of very different stages, each one more extreme, more dehumanising than that which preceded it, eventually leading to the final stage: the physical destruction of the European Jews. Nazi Germany’s prosecution of Jews began relatively mildly through political-legal discrimination and the appropriation of Jewish assets. Ghettozisation followed: the isolation of Jews in their confinement to ghettos in 1931- 41. Nazi policies targeted Jews, whether directly or through aryanization , treating them as sub-human, but with a right to live under such conditions. In 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 murder of Jews in in Germany and German-annexed and occupied countries and 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 organised, 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 labled productive were also murdered. Eventually the Nazi compulsion for the eradication of the Jews became total and absolute with any potentially available Jews actively sought solely for the purpose of destruction. The seamless transformation of the dehumanisation and slaughter is a dynamic that never existed before. Hitler was a crucial impetus for the genocide, but the role played by the organs of State and Nazi Party should not be understated. Reviewing the book after publication, Guggenheim Fellow Andreas Dorpalen wrote that Hilberg had covered his topic with such thoroughness that the book will remain a basic source of information on the tragic subject. Though Destruction had reached a highly distinguished level of prestige it has been criticised throughout four decades. The controversies surrounding the book was the main reason why the Polush translation was only released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, five decades after original publication. It was 2013 when Poland’s sordid annihilation was publicly revealed. The first Jewish victims of the genocide were Jewish hospital patients murdered inside the borders of the Third Reich. Death could not be postponed to the next generation. Solving the Jewish problem had to be done right now and there. Mobile killing units managed to murder faster than the concentration camps.( Einsatzgruppen) After burdening compliant countries, the Foreign Office thought to empty the Reich and Poland’s of their Jewish population by sending them to Madagascar, a plan for millions which didn’t pan out. Throughout Poland the great bulk of Jews presented themselves voluntarily at the collection points and boarded the trains for transport to the killing centres. Hilberg’s predominant concern in 1961 and 1985 was to fully disentangle the labyrinth of the intricate Nazi bureaucracy, which remains for him the clue to understand how the mass murder of six million was possible. The prism of the German bureaucracy served Hilberg to view the evolution of the destruction process. As such, Hilberg looms as the functionalist par excellence.
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