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Anatomie des Holocaust: Essays und Erinnerungen (Die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus – »Schwarze Reihe«)
Der große Historiker Raul Hilberg hat mit seinem Werk ›Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden‹ die Erforschung des Holocaust maßgeblich geprägt. Auch sein Buch ›Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer‹ ist in der Debatte um die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus bis heute zentral.Der 2007 verstorbene Doyen der Holocaust-Forschung hat einen reichhaltigen Fundus an wichtigen Texten hinterlassen, die bislang nicht ins Deutsche übersetzt wurden. Im Band ›Anatomie des Holocaust‹ liegt nun erstmals eine Auswahl dieser Texte auf Deutsch vor. Es geht darin um bis heute kontroverse Fragen zur Geschichte des Holocaust, etwa die Rolle der Judenräte, die Motive der Deutschen für die Verfolgung und Ermordung der Juden und die Frage der moralischen Verantwortung.Zugleich runden sehr persönliche Texte das Bild ab: So beschreibt Raul Hilberg seine bewegende Reise nach Auschwitz als Mitglied der Holocaust-Kommission 1979 und erzählt, wie er seine Arbeit als Holocaust-Forscher empfunden hat. Ein Band, der uns den Menschen und Historiker Raul Hilberg neu entdecken lässt.
437 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 25, 2016
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About the author
Raul Hilberg
29 books55 followersRaul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution.
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January 20, 2026
It is striking that what we now call “Holocaust studies” did not truly cohere as a field until the 1970s. Hilberg himself wondered whether this had something to do with the Vietnam War, a moment when Americans were being forced to confront bureaucratic mass violence in real time. That suggestion feels revealing, if incomplete. It is hard not to notice that this scholarly consolidation also follows 1967, when Israel emerged as a strategic asset to U.S. power in the Middle East. Reading Anatomy of the Holocaust today, one senses that Hilberg was working at the edge of something not yet fully articulable, constrained by Cold War politics and by a conceptual framework that was still taking shape. His work is earnest, monumental, and often brilliant, but it is also marked by a kind of political and historical naïveté, something Bayard Rustin perceptively captured when he gently chastised Hilberg in Kiev: “I hope you don’t mind, my friend, my telling you that you are naïve.”
Hilberg’s foundational move is to organize his sources around a triad of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. While analytically useful, this framework immediately strains under the weight of the evidence. Where do the Judenräte belong? Where do American corporations like IBM, whose punch-card technology helped Nazis classify and track Jewish populations, fit into this moral geometry? Hilberg deserves credit for pioneering archival work no one else was doing at the time, and given the overwhelming volume of documents he faced, his classificatory impulse is understandable. Still, the triad flattens moral complexity and leaves crucial actors suspended between categories.
One of the most puzzling features of Anatomy of the Holocaust is that Hilberg directly confronts the question of why the Holocaust occurred only once. This is remarkable. What question could matter more? His answer is unsatisfying. He insists on the Holocaust’s uniqueness while largely ignoring obvious antecedents: the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the transatlantic slave system, and the long normalization of ethnic cleansing in nation-state formation since 1492. This omission is especially glaring given what followed the war. Immediately after 1945, Europe witnessed the forced expulsion of roughly 12–14 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, with between 500,000 and 2 million deaths. Germans were loaded onto the same trains, held in the same camps, and processed by the same administrative logic that had just been used against Jews. This was not genocide, but it was ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, revealing how quickly population removal had become a normalized tool of modern statecraft. That Hilberg could maintain the Holocaust’s absolute uniqueness in the face of this continuity is striking.
Hilberg is also controversial for his skepticism about Jewish resistance and his harsh assessment of the Judenräte, whom he sometimes presents as instruments of Jewish destruction. This is an excruciating subject. Resistance was systematically foreclosed by deception, terror, and false promises of survival through compliance. Judging such behavior from the safety of hindsight risks moral arrogance. Yet Hilberg’s discomfort here points to a deeper problem: his framework cannot comfortably accommodate actors who are neither clear perpetrators nor passive victims.
This limitation becomes especially apparent in Hilberg’s discussion of bureaucracy. He famously describes the “all-encompassing readiness for action” of German institutions, arguing that entire professions underwent “complete reversals of time-honored roles,” with psychiatrists running euthanasia programs and architects designing concentration camps. But this framing only works if one ignores the pervasive ideology of eugenics. Nazi racial doctrine recast Jews as a biological disease. Under that logic, doctors, engineers, and administrators were not reversing their roles but fulfilling them as they understood them: protecting the health of the social body. Without eugenics, bureaucratic enthusiasm appears enigmatic; with it, the machine becomes horrifyingly coherent.
Hilberg gestures toward this when he notes the absence of written extermination orders. As he observes, by the final stages “not even orders were needed.” But instead of asking why a bureaucracy was so ready to act in this particular direction, he attributes the phenomenon to administrative momentum rather than to the ideological saturation that made extermination feel like professional duty. The result is an unresolved mystery: ordinary people who claimed they “did not hate Jews” participated in mass murder. This paradox dissolves once we understand that hatred was unnecessary. Just as one does not hate bacteria when disinfecting a wound, Nazi functionaries believed they were performing racial hygiene.
Hilberg’s narrow focus on German bureaucracy also obscures broader continuities. The postwar expulsion of Germans demonstrates that ethnic cleansing was not a Nazi aberration but a widely accepted solution to the “minority problem.” This continuity is reinforced by contrasting denazification programs. The Soviet Union treated Nazism as a systemic and class-based phenomenon, dismantling estates, nationalizing industries, and restructuring institutions. The Western Allies, by contrast, quickly narrowed guilt to a small criminal elite and reintegrated former Nazis into civil society, prioritizing Cold War stability over structural transformation. Fascism’s soil was left largely intact.
Reading Hilberg alongside Norman Finkelstein and Mahmood Mamdani sharpens these critiques. Finkelstein’s analysis of the “Holocaust Industry” helps explain why Holocaust memory surged in the U.S. after 1967, coinciding with Israel’s emergence as a key American ally. Mamdani’s framework, meanwhile, allows us to see the Holocaust not as a collection of individual crimes but as a political project rooted in modern state formation. From this perspective, perpetrators, victims, and collaborators all become survivors of a system that assigned roles with little room for escape. A bureaucratic formula decided who was Jewish; another decided who was a Nazi. These identities were imposed, not chosen.
Hilberg himself came closer to this view than he sometimes acknowledged. He later defended Finkelstein and recognized the political uses of Holocaust memory. Still, Anatomy of the Holocaust remains constrained by its moment. Its most revealing sections may be those recounting Hilberg’s visit to the Soviet Union, where historians like Alexander Samsonov and V.A. Kumanyov challenged the isolation of Jewish suffering from the broader fascist project. Their insistence that Nazism targeted entire peoples, and that focusing exclusively on Jewish victims risked weakening the struggle against fascism itself, was dismissed by Hilberg’s delegation. Yet their warning feels prescient.
Anatomy of the Holocaust is a foundational text, but foundations are not the same as finished structures. Hilberg mapped the machinery of destruction with unmatched rigor, but he stopped short of fully interrogating the political, colonial, and ideological traditions that made that machinery intelligible and repeatable. The lesson that emerges, especially when read alongside Mamdani, is not that the Holocaust was incomprehensible, but that it was terrifyingly legible. Ethnic cleansing is not an exception to modernity; it is one of its recurring techniques. If there is a path forward, it lies not in moralizing individuals but in dismantling the systems that assign humans to roles of perpetrator, victim, and bystander in the first place.
Hilberg’s foundational move is to organize his sources around a triad of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. While analytically useful, this framework immediately strains under the weight of the evidence. Where do the Judenräte belong? Where do American corporations like IBM, whose punch-card technology helped Nazis classify and track Jewish populations, fit into this moral geometry? Hilberg deserves credit for pioneering archival work no one else was doing at the time, and given the overwhelming volume of documents he faced, his classificatory impulse is understandable. Still, the triad flattens moral complexity and leaves crucial actors suspended between categories.
One of the most puzzling features of Anatomy of the Holocaust is that Hilberg directly confronts the question of why the Holocaust occurred only once. This is remarkable. What question could matter more? His answer is unsatisfying. He insists on the Holocaust’s uniqueness while largely ignoring obvious antecedents: the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the transatlantic slave system, and the long normalization of ethnic cleansing in nation-state formation since 1492. This omission is especially glaring given what followed the war. Immediately after 1945, Europe witnessed the forced expulsion of roughly 12–14 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, with between 500,000 and 2 million deaths. Germans were loaded onto the same trains, held in the same camps, and processed by the same administrative logic that had just been used against Jews. This was not genocide, but it was ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, revealing how quickly population removal had become a normalized tool of modern statecraft. That Hilberg could maintain the Holocaust’s absolute uniqueness in the face of this continuity is striking.
Hilberg is also controversial for his skepticism about Jewish resistance and his harsh assessment of the Judenräte, whom he sometimes presents as instruments of Jewish destruction. This is an excruciating subject. Resistance was systematically foreclosed by deception, terror, and false promises of survival through compliance. Judging such behavior from the safety of hindsight risks moral arrogance. Yet Hilberg’s discomfort here points to a deeper problem: his framework cannot comfortably accommodate actors who are neither clear perpetrators nor passive victims.
This limitation becomes especially apparent in Hilberg’s discussion of bureaucracy. He famously describes the “all-encompassing readiness for action” of German institutions, arguing that entire professions underwent “complete reversals of time-honored roles,” with psychiatrists running euthanasia programs and architects designing concentration camps. But this framing only works if one ignores the pervasive ideology of eugenics. Nazi racial doctrine recast Jews as a biological disease. Under that logic, doctors, engineers, and administrators were not reversing their roles but fulfilling them as they understood them: protecting the health of the social body. Without eugenics, bureaucratic enthusiasm appears enigmatic; with it, the machine becomes horrifyingly coherent.
Hilberg gestures toward this when he notes the absence of written extermination orders. As he observes, by the final stages “not even orders were needed.” But instead of asking why a bureaucracy was so ready to act in this particular direction, he attributes the phenomenon to administrative momentum rather than to the ideological saturation that made extermination feel like professional duty. The result is an unresolved mystery: ordinary people who claimed they “did not hate Jews” participated in mass murder. This paradox dissolves once we understand that hatred was unnecessary. Just as one does not hate bacteria when disinfecting a wound, Nazi functionaries believed they were performing racial hygiene.
Hilberg’s narrow focus on German bureaucracy also obscures broader continuities. The postwar expulsion of Germans demonstrates that ethnic cleansing was not a Nazi aberration but a widely accepted solution to the “minority problem.” This continuity is reinforced by contrasting denazification programs. The Soviet Union treated Nazism as a systemic and class-based phenomenon, dismantling estates, nationalizing industries, and restructuring institutions. The Western Allies, by contrast, quickly narrowed guilt to a small criminal elite and reintegrated former Nazis into civil society, prioritizing Cold War stability over structural transformation. Fascism’s soil was left largely intact.
Reading Hilberg alongside Norman Finkelstein and Mahmood Mamdani sharpens these critiques. Finkelstein’s analysis of the “Holocaust Industry” helps explain why Holocaust memory surged in the U.S. after 1967, coinciding with Israel’s emergence as a key American ally. Mamdani’s framework, meanwhile, allows us to see the Holocaust not as a collection of individual crimes but as a political project rooted in modern state formation. From this perspective, perpetrators, victims, and collaborators all become survivors of a system that assigned roles with little room for escape. A bureaucratic formula decided who was Jewish; another decided who was a Nazi. These identities were imposed, not chosen.
Hilberg himself came closer to this view than he sometimes acknowledged. He later defended Finkelstein and recognized the political uses of Holocaust memory. Still, Anatomy of the Holocaust remains constrained by its moment. Its most revealing sections may be those recounting Hilberg’s visit to the Soviet Union, where historians like Alexander Samsonov and V.A. Kumanyov challenged the isolation of Jewish suffering from the broader fascist project. Their insistence that Nazism targeted entire peoples, and that focusing exclusively on Jewish victims risked weakening the struggle against fascism itself, was dismissed by Hilberg’s delegation. Yet their warning feels prescient.
Anatomy of the Holocaust is a foundational text, but foundations are not the same as finished structures. Hilberg mapped the machinery of destruction with unmatched rigor, but he stopped short of fully interrogating the political, colonial, and ideological traditions that made that machinery intelligible and repeatable. The lesson that emerges, especially when read alongside Mamdani, is not that the Holocaust was incomprehensible, but that it was terrifyingly legible. Ethnic cleansing is not an exception to modernity; it is one of its recurring techniques. If there is a path forward, it lies not in moralizing individuals but in dismantling the systems that assign humans to roles of perpetrator, victim, and bystander in the first place.
November 21, 2024
A deep, intense read; an overview of one of the most prominent holocaust researchers of all time; after reading his German Railroads, Jewish Souls: The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution, in which he lays out, literally, the nuts-and-bolts of the actual transportations of mainly Jews to the concentration- and death camps of The Third Reich; this volume did not disappoint; Hilberg dedicated his life and work to getting the facts right about the annihilation of the European Jews; staying dispassionate in all this horror is a remarkable feat, but oh so necessary and perhaps that is my biggest takeaway from his works; he demistifies the holocaust and shows it for what it really entailed; just the facts, which tell the story by themselves for anyone interested to acknowledge them.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews