Who is Raul Hilberg? Why does it matter?
Quoth Yakov:
tell me im wrong please.
im refering to two events that took place in august
the death of raul hilberg
and the defeat of norman finkelsteinthese two events have far ranging consequences to our future
dismal as it may seem .
So, I read this, and asked myself: "Hey. Who's Raul Hilberg?"
It's an amazing story, and touches the heart of the Aminajihad controversy.
From Wikipedia
"Born in Vienna, Hilberg fled Austria, aged 13, with his family on April 1, 1939, a year after the Anschluss, for France…"
"He had intended to make a career in Chemistry, but found it did not suit him, and left his studies to work in a factory. He was then called up for the draft. He served first in the 45th Infantry Division (United States) in World War II, but, given his native fluency and academic interests, was soon attached to the War Documentation Department charged with examining archives throughout Europe.
"It was his discovery of part of Hitler's crated private library in Munich… that prompted his research into the Holocaust, a term for the genocidal destruction of the Jews which Hilberg personally disliked, though in later years he himself used it. On returning to civilian life, he chose to study Political Science and took his B.A, at Brooklyn College (1948), where he was deeply impressed by the importance of elites and bureaucracies while following Hans Rosenberg's lectures on the Prussian Civil Service. At one particular point in Rosenberg's course, Hilberg was taken aback by a remark his teacher dropped.
'The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain.'
The young Hilberg was prompted to interrupt the lecture and ask why the recent murder of 6 million Jews didnt figure. Rosenberg replied that it was a complicated matter, but that the lectures only dealt with history down to 1930. History doesnt reach down into the present age, Rosenberg added. Hilberg was amazed by the terrible oddness of a German Jewish emigrant, highly educated and by no means a fool, passing over the genocide of European Jews in order to expatiate on Napoleon and Spain. The episode served to strengthen his curiosity in a subject that, to gather from this example, risked suffering the pained disattentions of studious neglect."
"Hilberg was undecided under whom he should carry out his doctoral research. Since he had also followed a course on International Law, he was also attracted to the lectures of Salo Baron, the most important authority on Jewish historiography at the time, with particular expertise in the field of laws pertaining to the Jewish people.
In Hilberg's own words, to attend Baron's lectures was to enjoy the rare opportunity of observing 'a walking library, a monument of incredible erudition' active before his student class.
Baron asked Hilberg whether he was interested in working under him on the annihilation of Europe's Jewish population.
Hilberg demurred
on the grounds that his interests lay in the perpetrators,
and thus he could not begin with the Jews who were their victims,
but rather with what was done to them.
He thus decided to write the greater part of his Ph.D. under the supervision of Franz Neumann, the author of an influential wartime analysis of the German totalitarian state. Neumann was initially reluctant to take Hilberg on as his doctoral student. He had already read Hilberg's Master's thesis, and found, as a deeply patriotic German, and a Jew, that certain themes sketched there were unbearably painful.
In particular he had asked that the section of Jewish cooperation be removed,
to no avail. Neumann nonetheless relented, warning his student however that such a dissertation might well prove to be his academic funeral. Undeterred by the prospect, Hilberg pressed on regardless of consequences."
What did he find? to be continued—
–yo
Judaism.com