Book Review - The Destruction of the European Jews: student edition by Raul Hilberg

The Destruction of the European Jews: student edition by Raul Hilberg

New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985                                  ISBN 0841909105

The publication of Raul Hilberg's three volume work The Destruction of the European Jews was a pivotal event in Holocaust studies. It has been the basis for much greater study of this moment in history, and has formed the base for many further publications to do with the killing of Jewish populations by the Nazis. Hilberg's exhaustive study has, in this book, been reduced in size but not scope - "These, then, are excerpts, pure and simple, tied together to form a smaller coherent whole."

Hilberg systematically outlays the structure and execution of the Final Solution, showing how not only the Nazis, but ordinary Germans, Romanians, Poles, Balts, Ukrainians and Russians participated as perpetrators, but also how the Jews of Europe responded to their situation.

Early in the book Hilberg outlines how the Holocaust developed: first when the Nazis defined who the Jews were, then concentrating them in ghettos, before the final act of their murder. He shows how the Jews responded, by their age-old methods of obedience and appeasement, which, in this case, were disastrously inadequate.

What comes across strongly in this abridged edition is the speed of the killings once they got underway. The efficient bureaucracy that had developed the definitions of and concentrated the victims meant that once the decision to murder the Jews was taken, they could be killed at the rate of ten thousand per day. The numbers of Germans required to ensure the extermination took place was surprisingly small, even Adolf Eichmann was not working full-time on the "Jewish Question".

The reason this was so was because to a great extent the Jews themselves assisted in the process of concentration and trans-shipment to the death camps. Hilberg clearly shows the terrible choices that those that ran the Jewish Councils had to make - "to sacrifice 100 to save 1,000, 1,000 to save 10,000". They couldn't conceive, until it was too late, that they were unable to save anyone. The Jews were trapped by history, trying strategies to weather the storm that had worked in the past. They couldn't grasp that the only value they had to the Nazi hierarchy was as corpses.

The speed of the exterminations were a crucial part of the success of the Holocaust in killing so many - the Einsatzkommandos  closely followed the front-line troops and quickly rounded up and shot their victims, before they had a chance to flee. Those trans-shipped to the death camps from the ghettos were similarly collected and moved very quickly, to minimize the chance of rebellion. Rebellion was difficult if not impossible, and the few attempts to do so failed miserably.

What also failed was the attempt by Jews outside Europe to get the Allies to do anything about the killings, whether by bombing camps and railway lines, threats of reprisals on those who ran the operations, or even paying the Germans off to save Jews. The reluctance of the Allies to consider these avenues of action was not their finest hour, with mealy-mouthed excuses such as lack of shipping, or being able to re-house such numbers of refugees falling way short of the moral standard they were claiming to uphold.

For those that might find the three-volume work a bit daunting, this abridged edition of The Destruction of the European Jews still packs a sickening punch, and really is a must-read.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell