The University fo Vermont CAROLYN & LEONARD MILLER CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST STUDIES The 2017 Annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture Getting it Right, Getting it Wrong: Recent Holocaust Scholarship in Light of the Work of Raul Hilberg Dan Michman Yad Vashem and Bar-IIan University Tuesday, October 24, 2017 THE RAUL HILBERG MEMORIAL LECTURE OCTOBER 2017 A Personal Introduction Ladies and Gentleman, good evening. Allow me to start by quoting the following exchange of letters: August 24th, 1958 Dear Professor Hilberg, Your manuscript on the extermination of the Jews has been read in the course of the last two months by several of our staff, each of whom is an expert in one of the aspects involved. At a meeting of the editorial board which took place on the 15.8.1958, a joint readers’ report was considered. In this report it was stated that while the manuscript possessed numerous merits, it has also certain deficiencies: 1. Your book rests almost entirely on the authority of German sources and does Joseph Melkman not utilize primary sources in the languages of the occupied states, or in Yiddish and Hebrew. 2. The Jewish historians here make reservations concerning the historical conclusions which you draw, both in respect of the comparison with former periods, and in respect of your appraisal of the Jewish resistance (active and passive) during the Nazi occupation. On the basis of what has been said, our foundation cannot appear as one of the publishers without running the risk that expert critics who know the history of the Nazi catastrophe thoroughly and possess a command of the languages of the occupied states in question might express hostile criticism of the book. On the other hand we are prepared to act as mediators between the University of Columbia and the printer here, in order to make possible the book’s appearance under the auspices of the Columbia University. Yours faithfully, Dr. J. Melkman General Manager [Yad Washem] On September 29, 1958 Raul Hilberg responded: Dear Dr. Melkman: Thank you for the bluntness of your letter. I understand why your staff has rejected my book. It does not exalt in Israel’s glories. I am deeply sorry. But this was not martyrdom. It was not heroism. It was a pure disaster. The specific objections which your readers have raised cannot be easily answered. Undoubtedly you realize yourself that one is irrelevant and the other is false. Of course, I have not gathered masses of documents in the archives of France and Italy, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Roumania and Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece. Neither has the YIVO and neither has Yad Washem. I am only one researcher, without assistants, without translators, and without any secretarial help. I set out to look at the Raul Hilberg German documents. I have done so to a greater extent than anyone and I stopped only at the point of diminishing returns. Although my work is about the Germans and their deeds, I have had to deal with the Jewish reactions. I have had to accept compelling evidence that five million Jews were killed after they had failed to resist, actively or passively, in all the areas of Axis Europe. If one cannot absorb this fact, one will not admit of any explanations. But once the truth is recognized, there is no escape from the conclusion that centuries of historical conditioning had produced this catastrophic response. So much for polemics. […] Sincerely yours, Raul Hilberg 2 THE RAUL HILBERG MEMORIAL LECTURE OCTOBER 2017 On the same day, September 29, 1958, Hilberg wrote another letter; it was written on the University of Vermont letterhead and sent to his mentor, Dr. Philip Friedman, at his YIVO address: Dear Dr. Friedman: Please forgive me for taking so long in my reply to Dr. Melkman. I have at last brought myself to write to him, and I am sorry that a feeling of tiredness has not permitted me to express myself in more apologetic tones. If anything can still be done, I shall of course be happy. Finally, Melkman responded in a letter dated February 12, 1959: Dear Professor Hilberg, Philip Friedman […] I understand very well that you are upset by our decision. But I would like to emphasize that this decision was not influenced by those motives you supposed in your letter. We are not such fervent chauvinists that we would discard a serious work on such grounds. By the way, I didn’t see anything in your book that runs counter [to] accepted Zionist theories. But the real reason was that our readers contended that various chapters were not based on the available material. In our institution some experts are now working on Rumania and Poland and they found the chapters on these countries interesting but in many respects in contradiction to their findings. And as many of our compatriots are conversant with the intimate history of the destruction of the Jews in those countries we are liable to severe criticism if we would publish the work in his [sic] present form. Nevertheless your book makes interesting reading and I am sure that its publication in the United States would be welcomed as an important contribution to the history of the period. Sincerely yours, Dr. J. Melkman Director General1 The publication history of Hilberg’s monumental of Greek and Latin in a secondary school in the study, The Destruction of the European Jews—and especially Netherlands, and during the German occupation the Yad Vashem episode—has been quite accurately his Zionist connections enabled him and his wife recounted in several studies,2 most recently in a PhD to hold on to a precarious privileged position, thesis,3 and inaccurately in many more, especially in Israel first in Amsterdam, then in the transit camp of during the so-called “Post-Zionist” debate of the 1990s.4 Westerbork, and finally in Bergen-Belsen.6 One mistake, which is repeated in most of the descriptions, Hilberg did not mention that after the war Melkman is that the exchange with Yad Vashem related to a Hebrew had written a PhD thesis in Jewish history and literature version of the book, which is wrong. The idea was that Yad at the University of Amsterdam. He was also wrong Vashem would co-publish the original English version with about Melkman having “a precarious privileged position.” Columbia University Press. In any case, I will not retell Melkman had no special, privileged position—not in the whole story, but will limit myself to one aspect—the Amsterdam, Westerbork, or Bergen-Belsen (at the time, a personal one. Hilberg himself described the story from his “privileged position” meant being part of the Judenrat, the perspective in his memoir, The Politics of Memory, published Jewish Council7). However, as a Zionist who had applied in 1996; of the correspondence with Melkman, only for an immigration certificate for Palestine before the Melkman’s first letter in which he conveys Yad Vashem’s war, he succeeded in getting on thePalästina-List that was decision to decline co-publication was published.5 His drawn up by the Germans; it included several hundreds of grudge against Melkman was still apparent in his 1990s Jews who could potentially be exchanged for Germans in memoir: he stated that he had learned “later” that Palestine. Consequently, he was deported via Westerbork before the war he [Melkman] had been a teacher to Bergen-Belsen, and not to Auschwitz or Sobibor, as 3 THE RAUL HILBERG MEMORIAL LECTURE OCTOBER 2017 was most of his family. Hilberg could, of course, have Second, not only did Hilberg write a memoir, but my verified these details when he wrote his memoir in the father also wrote one, in Hebrew, which was published a beginning of the 1990s. But how do I know these details? decade after Hilberg’s memoir.He dedicated a page to the Because I am the son of the late Dr. Jozeph Melkman, who affair in which he explained: Hebraized his name to Michman in 1965 (I did so two years later). Therefore, the fact that I am here today to deliver the prestigious Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Hilberg’s passing away is in a certain sense the closing of a personal circle in the field of Holocaust historiography. That this could occur—and I am most grateful and honored that it did happen—is due to the initiative of my friend and colleague, Prof. Alan Steinweis, the Miller Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at this university and a fine scholar with whom I have cooperated now for quite a number of years. We first corresponded regarding a Nazi scholar, Peter-Heinz Seraphim, whose research has been described and analyzed by Prof. Steinweis in his important study on scholarly antisemitism in Nazi Germany;8 I too dealt with Seraphim in my study on the emergence of the Holocaust-era ghettos, a process in which Seraphim played a pivotal role in transforming the Nazi understanding of the “ghetto” into a dangerous phenomenon at the heart of the so-called Jewish peril.9 In recent years, we both were members of an ad-hoc advisory committee of the publication of the scholarly edition of Mein Kampf convened by the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich,10 and are currently members of the editorial board of the English version of the important 16-volume project of documents on the Holocaust, Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by “A Dangerous Book” National–Socialist Germany.11 Indeed, I assume that more people were involved in the decision to invite me to deliver The manuscript was comprehensive, based this lecture, which is supported by Jerold D.