The Destruction of the European Jews

''The Destruction of the European Jews'' is a 1961 book by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus (''The Holocaust in History''), until the book appeared, 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 or only mentioned in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war".

Hilberg's "landmark synthesis, based on a masterful reading of German documents", soon led to a massive array of writings and debates, both scholarly and popular, on the Holocaust. Two works which preceded Hilberg's by a decade, but remained little known in their time, were Léon Poliakov's ''Bréviaire de la haine'' (Harvest of Hate), published in 1951, and Gerald Reitlinger's ''The Final Solution'', published in 1953.

Discussing the writing of ''Destruction'' in his autobiography, Hilberg wrote: "No literature could serve me as an example. The destruction of the Jews was an unprecedented occurrence, a primordial act that had not been imagined before it burst forth. The Germans had no model for their deed, and I did not have one for my narrative."

Written with support, published with difficulties

Hilberg began his study of the Holocaust leading to ''The Destruction'' while stationed in Munich in 1948 for the U.S. Army's War Documentation Project. He proposed the idea for the work as a PhD. dissertation and was supported in this by his doctoral advisor, Columbia University professor Franz Neumann.

While the dissertation won a prize, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Oklahoma University Press, as well as Yad Vashem all declined to publish it. It was eventually published by a small publishing company, Quadrangle Books. This first edition was published in an unusually small type. Much of the page count increase of later versions is due to being published in a conventional type size. This was not the end of Hilberg's publishing woes. It was not translated until 1982, when Ulf Wolter of the small leftist publishers Olle & Wolter in Berlin published a German translation. For this purpose the work was enlarged by about 15%, so that Hilberg spoke of a "second edition", "solid enough for the next century".

Opposition from Hannah Arendt

In his autobiography, Hilberg reveals learning that Hannah Arendt advised Princeton University Press against publishing ''The Destruction''. This may have been due to the first chapter, which she later described as "very terrible" and betraying little understanding of German history. She did, however, base her account of the Final Solution (in ''Eichmann in Jerusalem'') on Hilberg's history, as well as sharing his controversial characterisation of the Judenrat. Hilberg strongly criticized Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis which appeared shortly after ''The Destruction'', to be published with her articles for ''The New Yorker'' with respect to Adolf Eichmann's trial (''Eichmann in Jerusalem''). He still defended Arendt's right to have her views aired upon being condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. In fact, David Cesarani writes that Hilberg "defended her several arguments at a bitter debate organised by ''Dissent'' magazine which drew an audience of hundreds". In a letter to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Arendt went on to write that:

Hilberg also goes on to claim that Nora Levin heavily borrowed from ''The Destruction'' without acknowledgment in her 1968 ''The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry'', and that historian Lucy Davidowicz not only ignored ''The Destructions findings in her 1975 ''The War against the Jews, 1933–1945'' but also went on to exclude mention of him, along with a galaxy of other leading Holocaust scholars, in her 1981 historiographic work, ''The Holocaust and the Historians''. "She wanted preeminence", Hilberg writes.

Opposition from Yad Vashem

Hilberg's work received a hostile reception from Yad Vashem, particularly over his treatment of Jewish resistance to the perpetrators of the Holocaust in the book's concluding chapter. Hilberg argued that "The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance... e documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight". Hilberg attributed this lack of resistance to the Jewish experience as a minority: "In exile, the Jews... had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies...Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to restrain from resistance". Yad Vashem's scholars, including Josef Melkman and Nathan Eck, did not feel that Hilberg's characterizations of Jewish history were correct, but they also felt that by using Jewish history to explain the reaction of the Jewish community to the Holocaust, Hilberg was suggesting that some responsibility for the extent of the destruction fell on the Jews themselves, a position that they found unacceptable. The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann

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