The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian

In his writings, eminent Holocaust historian Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews) has argued that the Nazi genocide was a bureaucratic, decentralized process, and that the ""Final Solution,"" the plan for total annihilation of European Jewry, was not formulated until 1941. By highlighting the role of the Jewish councils, which he views as agents of accommodation with the German apparatus, and by investigating what he perceives as Jewish victims' lack of resistance, Hilberg has drawn the wrath of scholarly critics. In this defensive, dryly written, sometimes acrimonious memoir, he settles scores with his opponents, notably Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, and sharply distances himself from Hannah Arendt and her notion of the ""banality of evil."" Professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, Hilberg relives personal moments of intense drama, as when he escaped Austria with his family in 1939 at the age of 13 or when he arrived in Munich as an American soldier at war's end. There, in the former Nazi party headquarters, he discovered Hitler's private library packed in crates. (Aug.)