Raul Hilberg - Biography

Biography

Hilberg was born to a Polish-Romanian Jewish family in Vienna, Austria.

Hilberg was very much a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting. Though his parents attended synagogue on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellant. He did however attend a Zionist school in Vienna, which had inculcated in him the necessity of defending oneself, rather than surrendering to, the rising menace of Nazism. Following the March 1938 Anschluss, the family were evicted at gunpoint from their home and his father was arrested by the Nazis, but was released because of his service record as a combatant in World War I. One year later, on April 1, 1939, at age 13, Hilberg fled Austria with his family; after reaching France, they embarked on a ship bound for Cuba. Following a four-month stay in Cuba, his family arrived in the United States on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out in Europe. During the ensuing war in Europe, Hilberg's family was to lose 26 members in the Holocaust.

The Hilbergs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where Raul attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College. He intended to make a career in chemistry, but found that it did not suit him, and left his studies to work in a factory. Having reached draft age, he was then called up for military service. As early as 1942, Hilberg, after reading scattered reports of the Nazi genocide, went so far as to ring Stephen Wise and ask him what he planned to do with regard to 'the complete annihilation of European Jewry'. According to Hilberg, Wise hung up.

Hilberg served first in the 45th Infantry Division (United States) in World War II, but, given his native fluency and academic interests, was soon attached to the War Documentation Department, charged with examining archives throughout Europe. It was his discovery of part of Hitler's crated private library in Munich, which he stumbled across while quartered in the Braunes Haus, that prompted his research into the Holocaust, a term for the genocidal destruction of the Jews which Hilberg personally disliked, though in later years he himself used it.