Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg
Tim Murphy
Logos Journal
www.logosjournal.com
Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg
Q: You have famously argued that there were three solutions to the Jewish
problem; conversion, expulsion, and finally extermination. Could you explain
what you mean by that?
Raul Hilberg: This is an underlying pattern to which I came to early on in
my research. Looking through the sweep of history it is clear that
conversion was an object of the Christian world. The expulsions began in the
late Middle Ages when it would appear that the Jews were not willing to
become Christians. That pattern existed for several hundred years in Europe.
You could take it back to Oxford and then go to Spain in 1492 and Portugal a
few years later. So we are really talking about the later Middle Ages and
the beginning of modern times for the expulsions.
Now, the business of a final solution, that permanent solution, is a Nazi
idea. You go back even to the beginnings of the Nazi party and find that
they are still thinking in terms of the emigration of the Jews \there was a
plan called the Madagascar plan, which was actually a thought in Poland and
even in France (Madagascar was a French possession), maybe all of the Jews
could be shipped there. So this idea was still floating in the German
foreign office and all the way up to Hitler as late as 1940, especially 1940
when France surrendered. However, when the War did not end as the Germans
had hoped it would with the West (they were already making preparations to
attack the Soviet Union), the serious thought of annihilating the Jews
emerged. The earliest indication of this is a meeting Hitler had with a
bunch of party members early in February of 1941. He had by then not quite
formed the decision, but it was on the way.
Q: There was the revisionist conference in Iran several months ago. How
worried should scholars and the general public be about the capacity of this
kind of revisionism to engender anti-Semitism?
Hilberg: This revisionism began in the 1960s. It is not new. I boycotted
Germany for quite a while, but when I passed through a while back Munich I
went to a kiosk and bought a local right wing paper, a German paper, I found
to my great astonishment that I was mentioned on the title page as a Zionist
leader. Now, that was a big surprise to me, but the headline was: The Lie
of the Holocaust. So, Germany in the sixties had adherence to this belief,
even though there they should have known better than anywhere else. There
was a Frenchman who was already in print in the 1960s. Half of his book was
devoted to me. It was a neo-Nazi publication. As soon as my book, The
Destruction of the European Jews, was out in 1961, I became a target of
these groups.
To me, the later developments in Holocaust denial were just a very slow
spread, not even a growth, but a spread from France/Germany to the United
States to Canada and ultimately picked up by the Arab world. The Arab world
is very disoriented when it comes to Europe anyway. They are as confused
about the West as we are about them. Even so, the conference in Iran did not
even succeed in Iran - it was needless difficulty and trouble. There were
Iranians who publicly denounced this conference. So, I am not terribly
worried about it even though at the time that that conference took place
last December I was asked by the German government to take part in a
counter-conference as the keynote speaker that was held the same day in
Berlin. I ordinarily do not engage in debates with Holocaust revisionists. I
did not do so at the Berlin conference either, but the essence of my talk
was that, yes, there was a Holocaust, which is, by the way, more easily said
than demonstrated. I demonstrated this and people did come to it.
Nevertheless, the German papers did not publicize the counter-conference in
Berlin because they could not resist publishing the faces of the Rabbis who
had gone to Iran.
I have come to the conclusion, not once but several times, that, as far as I
am concerned, I do not agree with legislation that makes it illegal to utter
pronouncements claiming that there was no Holocaust. I do not want to muzzle
any of this because it is a sign of weakness not of strength when you try to
shut somebody up. Yes, there is always a risk. Nothing in life is without
risk, but you have to make rational decisions about everything.
Q: Many of the recent anti-Semitic incidents in Europe have led people to
talk of a new anti-Semitism. Is this really something we should take
seriously or is this simply a continuance of the older anti-Semitism?
Hilberg: It is not even that. It is picking up a few pebbles from the past
and throwing them at windows. I am old enough to remember what the effects
of an anti-Jewish attitude are. Here, at the University of Vermont it was
unthinkable, even in this liberal state, to have a Jew as a dean as late as
the seventies, let alone president. In other words, there was still a lot of
segregation in the United States. If you go back and you pick up any New
York Times in the thirties or even the forties you will see ads for
apartments in New York City and the word restricted. This is a Jewish
owned newspaper and they printed ads barring Jews. And this was an embedded
anti-Jewish regime, which the society itself supported and its gone. Its
simply gone.
We cannot even talk about restrictions on Jews in the Islamic world because
the Jews have left the Islamic world. They are not there anymore except in
Morocco and maybe some tens of thousands still here and there, but that is a
remnant of the two hundred thousand that were still there when the state of
Israel was created. So the anti-Semitism of the past belongs to the past,
and particularly the word anti-Semitism. There was an anti-Semitic party
in Germany and there was an anti-Semitic party in Austria. The leader of the
Hungarian regime, Admiral Horthy, who, when some extreme right wing guys
were trying to take over Jewish businesses shouted them down. He said, and I
am paraphrasing, you are not going to take over these businesses because
the Jews at least know how to run them and who are you? And dont you talk
to me because I was an anti-Semite before you were born. Adolf Hitler
himself, and nobody reads Mein Kampf, makes a statement that his father
would not be an anti-Semite because it would degrade him socially.
Nietzsches sister married an anti-Semitic leader and he referred in letters
to his sister in the whole correspondence to your anti-Semitic husband.
Now, you can see that anti-Semitism was somewhat correlated with some
backward glance. It belongs to the nineteenth century with its other
-isms, with imperialism, with colonialism, with racism. It sounds bizarre
if I tell you that the Nazis did not call themselves anti-Semites. You do
not even find the word.
Q: Really?
Hilberg: Yes, there was a sense that Nazism was something new. The
anti-Semite had stopped at a certain point; the anti-Semite could talk about
eliminating Jews, but did not know how to do it. The anti-Semite did not
have the power, the anti-Semite was a propagandist. The Nazis were serious
and this was a far different proposition. When you see the actual
legislation in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere that states that it is
criminal to deny that there was a Holocaust, it is because these governments
have to distance themselves from Nazism. Nowadays of course Nazism and
anti-Semitism are conflated into one kind of ideology, but it is a different
phenomenon. There was an extreme anti-Semitic newspaper in Germany, Der
St|rmer, which was published by Julius Streicher. I do not remember now
whether it was Hvss, the Auschwitz commander, or somebody else who was
asked, Did you read Der St|rmer? He said, basically, Look, Im a
lieutenant colonel of the SS, I wouldnt be caught dead reading Der
St|rmer. It was like reading the lowest of the low gossip rags in the
United States. There was an issue of social standing.
Q: What are your thoughts on the rhetorical and symbolic usage of the word
Holocaust?
Hilberg: I resisted the use of the word Holocaust to begin with because of
its religious underpinnings. In the end, it is like anything that becomes
usage; you do not escape from it. But, Holocaust becomes problematic in a
number of ways, and the one which is least discussed, because its
politically incorrect to do so, is that everything is becoming a Holocaust.
I will give you one example: I was walking in Berlin one day and I see a
sign Holocaust and saw some street demonstrators with signs reading
Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust. I could not figure out what they were
demonstrating about until I saw a cage and realized they were talking about
cruelty to animals. The word genocide is also being bandied about, and of
course the Genocide Convention has a definition which goes beyond what they
call a Holocaust. So if you kidnap children in order to make them do
something thats genocide, if you use opium thats genocide, etc. Because
its an international convention, the Greeks put something in there, the
Chinese put something in there and so on and so forth.
Holocaust is a misused word again and again because it means, especially
when it is capitalized, the Jewish catastrophe and once you pin it on all
sorts of things it loses its effectiveness. There are now books being
written that state the Armenians were not really subjected to genocide or
the Gypsies were not really subjected to genocide - even though in my
opinion both were - but it results in these arguments and its an
unavoidable situation. As soon as the Presidents Commission on the
Holocaust was set-upthats the same President Carter who is now being
called an anti-Semite who created the Commissioneverybody showed up: the
Armenians, of course, showed up, the Poles showed up, the Ukrainians showed
up, the Czechs showed up. There are all of these definitional problems and
arguments that emerge when using words like Holocaust or genocide.
Q: Moving beyond the way these words are symbolically and rhetorically
employed, what do you see as the kind of relation of the Holocaust to other
historical and current genocides? How can we use the lessons of it to
confront the kind of violence and persecution of groups which are occurring
today, whether or not sociologically we consider them genocides?
Hilberg: I did not know what to do with Cambodia or other events like that,
but Rwanda convinced me. That is why in the third edition of my book I got
Rwanda in there. Why I put it there is the answer to your question. In
Buchenwald and possibly some other camps as the war ended, the inmates put
up big signs that said never again. I think it was really the Communists
who were behind that, but I am not sure. The signs said never again in
various languages because there was a Babel of languages in these camps.
Millions of people, men, women and children killed only because they were
classified as Jews. Now, that should not happen again and that is the
responsibility of the world. The result was, in fact, the Genocide
Convention. The word genocide was a made up word by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish
lawyer from Poland whose previous speciality was terrorism. When the
Holocaust happened he published a book in 1944, Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe. In that book he invented the word genocide because he argued that
the law has to have that concept as a crime. Of course the United States did
not want to sign the Genocide Convention because the State Department and
other representatives had their doubts. One major doubt was that if we had a
Genocide Convention, then the blacks in this country would challenge all the
segregation laws. The Genocide Convention is a treaty, and if its a treaty
under Article six of the Constitution we cannot sign this convention because
it would override our sacred state laws which discriminated against blacks.
That was their argument. Eventually that argument collapsed.
What remains today, however, is that the never again is implicit. Yet,
come Rwanda and President Clinton refused to call it genocide when it really
was! We said that we will never tolerate this sort of thing again, but allow
half a million people plus to be killed in three or four months in Rwanda.
After ten Belgians were killed withdrawals began of the international
peacekeeping force. It was the same thing as in Germany, the Hutu decided
now we are going to solve the Tutsi problem like the Germans did with the
Jews. It is even clear that they decided it months before they started
killing because they imported machetes and made preparations like the
Germans. So here we were, the whole world, theres no World War II going on,
there is no excuse that we need all the aircraft we have, so we cannot bomb
Auschwitz because we need them on the Western Front, and nothing is done.
Its peace, its the nineties, and nothing is done. So much for never
again. So the problem has obviously not disappeared.
You have to make decisions. When you are sitting in the Defense Department
or the State Department in the White House you never can predict exactly
what configurations some happening will show you. You have to think it
through and these people havent got any time to think. They have to do all
their thinking before they took office. This is a major problem.
Nevertheless, this is the first time in history that we take a sort of
global responsibility. I am not saying we are alone, we have our partners
doing this and the notion of a gloabl responsibility is really brand new, it
is post-World War II.
Q: What are your thoughts on the current debates over how to interpret the
Holocaust and its legacy in the work of people like Norman Finkelstein or
Daniel Goldhagen?
Hilberg: Well Finkelstein is now maligned all over the place. There were
obviously lobbies who tried to dislodge him from his position. Finkelstein
is a political scientist. I believe he has a PhD degree from Princeton and,
whatever you may think of Princeton, this is a pretty strong preparation to
be a professional political scientist. He wrote to me a couple of times. He
was the first one to take Goldhagen seriously. He attacked Goldhagen in a
very long essay which I could never have written because I would have never
had the patience. Goldhagen is part of an academic group that in my kind of
research is a disaster...
Q: Why is that?
Hilberg: Because [Goldhagen] was totally wrong about everything. Totally
wrong. Exceptionally wrong. In other words, this whole fury of his
anti-Semitism was, at the root, that it was especially eliminationist
anti-Semitism, was totally absurd. He talks about anti-Semitism among
Germans, Estonians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, but where did
this unique eliminationist anti-Semitism come from? It is just totally
absurd. I mean, totally off the wall, you know, and factually without any
basis. Finkelstein took this seriously. I took it less seriously, but I was
a latecomer in attacking this Goldhagen fellow.
Now Finkelstein had a second point, which, in my opinion, was one hundred
percent correct and that is that the response to the issue of the Swiss
banks and German industry, which had coincided during the War, was not only
coercive on the part of the Jews who mobilized, but also on the part of all
the insurance commissioners, the Senate, the House, and the critical
committees. The only thing they could not break through was to the courts,
which still have independence. So they lost at court, but they threatened
people like Alan Hevesi in New York. They could make threats because Swiss
banks wanted to expand here. For Finkelstein, this was naked extortion and
Im not sure who agreed with him except for me and I said so openly. In
fact, I said so to the press in maybe seven countries.
The press did not expect my answer. The World Jewish Congress was led by a
man who was appeared to be from his own autobiographical statements to be
totally, not even average, but like a child almost. What this tycoon, who
took over the World Jewish Congress, was saying was totally preposterous.
The claims lawyers, joined by the World Jewish Congress, made an incredible
display of totally inappropriate behavior.
Now when he talks about the Arabs, some Jews feel that he is also
anti-Zionist, that he is anti-Israel; that he seems to always emphasize the
suffering of the Arabs. I do not join him in this particular venture because
I have my own view, but you cannot say he is altogether wrong either. Would
you like to be an Arab citizen in Israel? Think of the doors that are
closed. You may eat better and have a better income than if you lived in a
slum in Cairo. The great irony is that the economic condition of Israeli
Arabs is considerably better than the proletariat in some other Arab
countries, but a person needs something more. A person needs a feeling of
dignity. Think of the security check points. It is a life that certainly
something ought to be done about it in one way or another. This particular
battle cannot be fought forever. It cannot be. The Israelis will tire of it.
The Israelis will simply tire of mistrusting people. It is not possible to
go on this way forever. Finkelstein has the corner on the germ of correct
vision in these matters because he is pretty sharp. More often than not,
especially with regard to these other matters like Goldhagen and the Swiss
banks he has been right.
Q: One last question, as time goes on in the twenty-first century what
direction should research on the Holocaust take now?
Hilberg: Well, if you had asked that question first, it would have needed a
half hour. Rightfully so, the research today is oriented towards finding out
details and especially what happened at the local level. This research has
already started. It is not very well developed in this country, but it is
very much in progress in Europe. The principle researchers of the Holocaust
today are Germans and Austrians. There are also some French and Italians.
There are not many Holocaust researchers worth mentioning in this country.
The second thing that we should and must do is look at those aspects of what
happened which are still taboo. What is taboo is the life of a terminal
Jewish community in some ghetto and the notion that some people died first,
then other people died next, still other people died last, and then, better
yet, some of them survived. What accounts for these very discernible
developments? Example: the first to die were the poorest of the poor. We
have got to face this issue. We have got to realize that it will not do in
the academic world to call all of the Jewish dead as I have heard one
Rabbi call them, Kedoshim, which means holy people. This is not my language.
We cannot do that. We have to see them as they were and we have not done
this. We have had the lectures. This is one aspect in which I do not agree
with Elie Wiesel although I have known him for a long time. He says listen
to the survivors and listen even to their children. I say, yes, we will
listen to the survivors. We have listened for quite a long time, but it is
not enough. It will not tell us what happened to the people that did not
survive. You are not a random sample. This requires a lot of assiduous
research through a lot records that have been buried and have not been
examined.
The third thing that needs to be done is: you have to identify more clearly
who the neighbors of the Jews were. How they were impacted if at all? How
their reactions were motivated, be it to join the perpetrator or help the
victim or, in most cases, remain neutral. Neutrality does not mean ignoring
something. It means a decision not to do anything. We have to examine that
as well. So we have to examine the Holocaust in all ways and it boils down
to doing a lot of local research because at the local level are the records
that tell us something. For example, if I read in local records that the
Byelorussians are not delivering enough grain to the Germans because they
secretly steal it to make vodka and in such huge quantities under the German
occupation, you would have to begin to ask the question what percentage of
that population was perpetually drunk? Now these are very, very important
questions and that is the direction the research needs to go in. It is not
for amateurs, it is not for untrained people, it is not for philosophers, it
is for people who know languages, who know history, who know political
science, who know economics, etc. At the root they must be well trained. The
Holocaust is not today, as it might have been in the beginning, a subject
for the laymen.
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