JAMES S WERTHEIMER ALAN PACY - Perspectives On The Holocaust : essays in honor of raul hilberg.

Perspectives on the Holocaust

Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg

Edited by
James S. Pacy
and
Alan P. Wertheimer

First published 1995 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1995 by Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perspectives on the Holocaust: essays in honor of Raul Hilberg /
edited by James S. Pacy, Alan P. Wertheimer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8133-2034-8
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)Congresses. 2. Holocaust,
Jewish (1939-1945)Moral and ethical aspectsCongresses.
3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literatureCongresses.
4. Literature, Modern20th centuryHistory and criticismCongresses.
5. Jewish literature20th centuryHistory and
criticismCongresses. 6. Hilberg, Raul, 1926- Congresses.
I. Hilberg, Raul, 1926- . II. Pacy, James S. III. Wertheimer,
Alan.
D804.3.P487 1995
940.53'18dc20 94-24851
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-28276-9 (hbk)

This volume had its origins in an international conference on the Holocaust honoring Raul Hilberg, "The Hilberg Symposium: Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders." The conference took place on the University of Vermont campus, April 1416, 1991. Approximately 1,000 people attended. The editors, who were co-chairs of the Hilberg Symposium, wish to thank all the members of the University of Vermont community who worked to make the symposium possible. In particular, we wish to thank David A. Scrase and the late Samuel N. Bogorad, who served on the organizing committee, and Candace L. Smith, who served as the symposium coordinator. We also thank the alumni and friends of the University of Vermont, without whose support none of this would have succeeded.

James S. Pacy
Alan P. Wertheimer

James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer

This volume has its origins in an international conference on the Holocaust honoring Raul Hilberg's retirement from the University of Vermont in April 1991. The volume contains all seven of the presentations delivered at the conference by Yehuda Bauer, Christopher R. Browning, Claude Lanzmann, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Richard L. Rubenstein, George Steiner, and Herman Wouk and an additional four essays that have since been prepared by Peter Hayes, Eberhard Jckel, John K. Roth, and Robert Wolfe.

Both editors of this volume were fortunate to have been colleagues of Raul Hilberg for some twenty-five years. We provide below some brief biographical information about Raul Hilberg and a few observations about his contributions to the University of Vermont.

Raul Hilberg has spent his entire scholarly life studying the Holocaust. His first edition of The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) was regarded as the definitive study of the Holocaust until he published a three-volume revised version in 1985. The (London) Times Literary Supplement described the book as "one of the great historical works of our time." Hilberg is also the author of Sonderzge nach Auschwitz (Special trains to Auschwitz; 1981, 1987) and Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (1992). He edited Documents of Destruction (1971,1972) and, with Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakw (1979). He has produced numerous articles in journals and encyclopedias and has presented papers at various fora around the world, including New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Nrnberg, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Lublin. His works have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish. He was a member of the President's Commission on the Holocaust from 1978 to 1979 and a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980 to 1988. He has also served as an expert witness for the United States in denaturalization and deportation cases and for other legal proceedings in Canada, Australia, and Scotland.

Born in Vienna, Hilberg came to the United States via Cuba. He served in the United States Army in 1944-1946, graduated from Brooklyn College, was a research specialist in the War Documentation Project at Alexandria, Virginia, in 1951 and 1952, earned his Ph.D. in public law and government at Columbia University in 1955, and in 1956 arrived at the University of Vermont, where he served for thirty-five years.

In 1978 Hilberg was appointed the John G. McCullough Professor of Political Science. In 1988 he received the university's highest teaching award, the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award, and, most fittingly, the University Scholar Award as well. The University of Vermont awarded him an honorary degree in 1991.

Raul Hilberg may be the most important scholar to have served on the faculty of the University of Vermont. He was also one of its greatest teachers. As some 10,000 students can attest, Hilberg was an awe-inspiring instructor, sometimes intimidating, always fascinating. His students were motivated and enthralled by his spellbinding lecturesshaped by a matchless sense of timing and climaxand challenged to the hilt by his demanding examinations. We know we speak for our colleagues and for our students in thanking Raul for the years he spent in our midst in Vermont. Mentor and dear friend, it was our great pleasure to have shared that time with you.

Robert Wolfe

Some peopleso-called revisionistssay that the Holocaust is a myth, a hoax, even a political instrument wielded by Jews in general and the state of Israel in particular. But most of us know that the Holocaustdubbed Endlsung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution to the Jewish question) by its Nazi perpetratorsregrettably and terribly almost accomplished its fanatic project to murder all European Jews.

How do we know this? Survivors, Allied soldiers who liberated concentration camps late in the war, bystanders, and perpetrators themselves have told us so in courtroom testimony, oral history, memoirs, articles, books, and plays; in still and motion pictures, including documentaries, docudramas, and fictional works; and, most trustworthy, in scholarly monographs derived from the most direct contemporaneous sources, that genre in which Raul Hilberg excels.