René Schlott

Senior Fellow (03/2025 – 08/2025)

Raul Hilberg (1926-2007). Biographical Studies on His Life, Work, and Impact

Shortly after the end of the war, Raul Hilberg, Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont from 1956 to 1991, was one of the first academics worldwide to deal with the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. Hilberg, a Jewish exile who was born in Vienna in 1926 and fled to the USA in 1939, had returned to Europe as a young US soldier during the Second World War. After the end of the war, as a native German speaker, he spent years sifting through and evaluating the confiscated Nazi file material on behalf of the US government and thus gained the guiding idea for his scientific qualification work, in which he interpreted the Holocaust as a huge bureaucratic process.

This biographical study aims not only to trace the life of this extraordinary scientist, but also to follow the history of the reception of his early opus magnum The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). It was not translated into German (1982) and French (1985) until more than twenty years after its first publication. Each of these editions faced publication problems and triggered a variety of academic debates, not least because Hilberg relied entirely on the perpetrators' files and largely dispensed with testimonies from the victims.

Hilberg also had to put up with harsh criticism from other historians due to his critical portrayal of the Jewish councils in the ghettos and his skeptical assessment of the Jewish resistance. The task of the project will be to historise these disputes and to contrast them with Hilberg's memoirs (The Politics of Memory, published in 1996).

René Schlott initially completed a diploma in business administration alongside his commercial training. He then studied history, politics and journalism at the Free University and the Humboldt University Berlin and at the University of Geneva. From 2007, he was a scholarship holder at the graduate school “Transnational Media Events” at the University of Giessen, where he received his doctorate in 2011. From 2014 to 2022, he was a research associate at the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam. In 2013, he examined the estate of Raul Hilberg at the University of Vermont with a scholarship from the German Historical Institute Washington. Since 2008, Schlott has worked as a freelance author and book critic, e.g., for Spiegel Online, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

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