With a Penetrating Gaze from the Sidelines: Raul Hilberg, the Destruction of European Jews, and the History of Holocaust Historiography

Raul Hilberg (1926-2007) was a pioneer of Holocaust historiography. After sifting through tens of thousands of perpetrators documents, he published The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, with two revised editions to follow in 1985 and 2003. Hilberg’s magnum opus describes the persecution as a complex bureaucratic process involving the entire German society. The book has served as a foundational text and intellectual companion to the field of Holocaust historiography since its first publication.

The contributions in this volume explore the origins of Hilberg’s pioneering study, map out the debates in which it was implicated, highlight its unprecedented accomplishments as well as disturbing blind spots, and use ＂The Destruction＂ as a prism for an appraisal of eight decades of Holocaust research.

René Schlott is a freelance historian and associated researcher at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. He received his PhD in 2001 at the University of Giessen and is working on a biography of Raul Hilberg. He was awarded scholarships from the German Historical Institutes in Paris, Rome, and Washington, from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. He published numerous papers about life, work, and legacy of Raul Hilberg and is coeditor, with Walter H. Pehle, of Raul Hilbergs The Anatomy of the Holocaust. Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship (2020).