Robert L. Hilliard

Robert L. Hilliard (born June 25, 1925, New York City) is an American World War II veteran, activist, and academic of communication studies. During and directly after World War II, he informed American citizens and politicians of the plight of concentration camp survivors, and of those survivors taken to an unequipped hospital which was formerly St. Ottillien Monastery in the district of Landsberg, Oberbayern Germany.

After WWII, Hilliard received his bachelor's degree from the University of Delaware in 1948. He earned two master's degree at Case Western Reserve University: a Masters of Arts (1949) and a Masters of Fine Arts (1950). Hoping only to research a good story for a serviceman's newspaper he founded to provide news for allied troops, in May, 1945, he drove a jeep for miles to attend a concert put on by the newly liberated concentration camp survivors at the hospital at St. Ottillien. He found himself driven to tears by the emaciated and sick survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau, still on stretchers, without food, and wearing the cold, threadbare and inadequate striped uniforms they had formerly been issued as camp inmates. Hilliard and his partner Edward Herman, both Privates in the U.S. Army tried to buy food from the black market to supply the inmates, but the supply was inadequate, and they lacked funds to make a significant improvement in the lives of the survivors. German citizens and American officers judged Hilliard and his compatriots for buying food on the black market, despite their having few, if any other sources. Hilliard and his colleague discovered that significant quantities of the food being sent to the camps by the U.S. Military were often sold to the black market by American servicemen in charge of the camps.

Writing letters Risking a court martial, and acting against the stated military policy of refraining from political activities while in the service, Hilliard and a few compatriots wrote and printed hundreds of letters which they hoped would be read by American citizens, and Congressmen informing them of the absence of food, medicine, and clothing available to the surviving concentration camp survivors. To escape the risk of an immediate court martial, the letters had to be sent in bulk to Edward Herman's brother Leonard Herman who had political connections, and a few other Americans who had consented to distribute them to those in power. The letters were all addressed "Dear Friend" as letters from servicemen could only be sent to family and friends. President Truman somehow was given one of the letters, but was initially skeptical of their authenticity. Harrison later confirmed in the Harrison Report of August 1945, four months after their liberation, that "displaced Jews are being held in unsanitary, barbed-wire camps, wearing hideous concentration camp garb or discarded German SS uniforms, with nothing being done for them by way of rehabilitation." The report continued, "One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we (Americans) are not following or at least condoning Nazi policy." Convinced of the need to act decisively and quickly, Truman spoke immediately to General Eisenhower. Eisenhower sent a full Colonel to inform Hilliard and Edward Herman that the military would address the situation, but that he and Herman should refrain from writing any more letters, as they might end up assigned to a highly undesirable location like the frigid Aleutian Islands. Hilliard, with good reason, took the advice primarily as a threat, rather than a promise to help Holocaust survivors which would require a complete reversal of a few American policies regarding the displaced person camps. He and Herman continued to push their cause of informing the American public and providing food to St. Ottilien. On September 30, 1945, a New York Times headline announced "President Orders Eisenhower to End New Abuse of Jews . . . Likens Our Treatment to that of the Nazis". among other objectives, intended to set the United States as an example to the World by vastly increasing and expediting the admission of displaced persons to the United States, and to open U.S. immigration to full use. It also requested that Great Britain allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine. Great Britain never acted on this request. On October 21, 1945, 1,500 packages containing food, clothes and medicine arrived at St. Ottillien. The failure of supplies to be delivered prior to October had been partly the result of a U.S. Military and State Department policy to withhold the delivery of the supplies.

Academic and broadcasting career From 1943 - 1964, Hilliard worked as a professional in theatre, radio and television, while serving in a variety of full-time academic roles. From 1950 to 1956, he was an instructor at Brooklyn College, and from 1956 - 1960, served as an assistant professor at Adelphi University. From 1960 - 1964, he was an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served for several decades at Emerson College in Boston, first as a Dean of Graduate studies beginning in 1980 and then as a professor at Emerson beginning in 1984. Simultaneously, he served from 1965 - 1978 as a Chairman of the Federal Interagency Media Committee.

Extremism studies While serving as a professor at Emerson College in Boston, he collaborated with Boston College Professor Michael Keith, in writing Waves of Rancor: Tuning in the Radical Right. He taught a class at Emerson known as "hate.com", which examined how hate groups target impressionable youth through websites, how they grow, and how they spread rage. Hilliard observed that hate groups on websites build interest slowly with rock music and games, and initially avoid inflammatory rhetoric and epithets. The book was well-received and was read by Bill Clinton during his presidency. In 1993, there were more than 300 extremist websites, though many scholars, including Holocaust author Eli Wiesel, considered their number to be closer to 800. Hilliard both taught at Emerson and served as a Dean.

Hilliard has said that there is "open fascism" in the modern American political right, citing Project 2025 as an example.

Honors While with the U.S. military, Hilliard's decorations included but were not limited to the Purple Heart, Combat Infantry Badge, and Commendation Ribbon.

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