In addition to prominent supporters, such as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn, the Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg is on record as praising Finkelstein's book:

*" It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There " -- World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure ( Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim speak in support of Norman Finkelstein's scholarship and " The Holocaust Industry " specifically.

Raul Hilberg gave a figure of 550, 000.

Lanzmann also interviews Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who discusses the historical significance of Nazi propaganda against the European Jews and the Nazi invention of the Final Solution.

It was also through Shoah that many viewers were first introduced to the work of American Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg.

In 1961, Raul Hilberg estimated the number of the Jewish victims at 50, 000, though at the time other sources, including the camp museum, officially estimated 100, 000 Jewish victims and up to 200, 000 non-Jews killed.

* Raul Hilberg, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1999, ISBN 1-56663-230-7.

In The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg writes, " There were ... instances when the Germans actually had to step in to restrain and slow down the pace of the Romanian measures.

* Hilberg, Raul.

The book was a " publishing phenomenon ", achieving fame in both the United States and Germany, despite its " mostly scathing " reception among historians, who were unusually vocal in condemning it as ahistorical and, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, " totally wrong about everything " and " worthless ".

Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and the SS killed more than 1. 3 million Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet political commissars in open-air shootings.

Thus, an interval passed between the " first sweep " of Einsatzgruppen massacres in summer and fall, and what American historian Raul Hilberg called the " second sweep ", which started in December 1941 and lasted into the summer of 1942.

* Hilberg, Raul ( 2003 ).

* Raul Hilberg.

According to Raul Hilberg, this camp was where " one the first instances that reference was made to the ' soap-making rumor '.

The Destruction of the European Jews is a book published in 1961 by historian Raul Hilberg.

Professor Raul Hilberg

Speaking against what he terms " quasi mystical association ," historian Nicolas Kinloch writes that " with the publication of Raul Hilberg ’ s monumental book ," the subject had risen to be considered " an event requiring more, rather than less, stringent historical analysis.

) Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in honor of Raul Hilberg ( Westview Press, Boulder, 1995 ).

Raul Hilberg ( June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007 ) was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian.

In 2006, the university established the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professorship of Holocaust Studies.

Following his death, the Museum established the Raul Hilberg Fellowship, intended to support the development of new generations of Holocaust scholars.

Raul Hilberg, widely considered to be one of the world's preeminent Holocaust scholars, published his three-volume, 1, 273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961 ; this work is regarded today as a seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution.

* Hilberg, Raul.

Discussing the writing of Destruction in his autobiography, Hilberg wrote: " No literature could serve me as an example.

Hilberg began his study of the Holocaust leading to The Destruction while stationed in Munich in 1948 for the U. S. Army's War Documentation Project.

In his autobiography, Hilberg reveals learning that Hannah Arendt advised Princeton University Press against publishing The Destruction on the grounds that it was not a sufficiently important contribution to the subject.

Hilberg strongly criticized Arendt's " banality of evil " thesis which appeared shortly after The Destruction, to be published with her articles for the New Yorker with respect to Adolf Eichmann's trial ( Eichmann in Jerusalem ).

Hilberg also goes on to claim that Nora Levin heavily borrowed from The Destruction without acknowledgment in her 1968 The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, and that historian Lucy Davidowicz not only ignored The Destructions findings in her 1975 The War against the Jews, 1933 – 1945 but also went on to exclude mention of him, along with a galaxy of other leading Holocaust scholars, in her 1981 historiographic work, The Holocaust and the Historians.

In The Destruction, Hilberg established what today has become orthodoxy in Holocaust historiography: the increasingly intensifying historical stages leading to genocide.

While firmly intentionalist, unlike many intentionalists and functionalists alike, The Destruction does not emphasize and focus on the role of Hitler, though on this, Hilberg has shifted more towards the centre, with the third edition pointing at a less direct and systemic, more erratic and sporadic, but nonetheless pivotal, involvement by Hitler in his support for the destruction process.

While monographic studies of particular aspects of the Final Solution, utilizing archival sources and court records not available to Hilberg before 1961, have extended our knowledge in many areas, The Destruction of the European Jews still stands as the preeminent synthesis, the book that put it all together in the framework of an overarching and unified analysis.

Hilberg is best known for his influential study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews.

Since Hilberg was an Austrian Jew who had fled to the United States to escape the Nazis, he obviously had no Nazi sympathies, which helps to explain the vehemence of the attacks by intentionalist historians that greeted the revised edition of The Destruction of the European Jews in 1985.

* Hilberg, Raul The Destruction of the European Jews Yale University Press, 2003, c1961.

The final stage, Hilberg concluded, was the destruction itself, the continental annihilation of European Jews ( 1941 – 45 ).

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 '.

" Hilberg was amazed by this highly educated, German-Jewish emigrant passing over the genocide of European Jews in order to expound on Napoleon and the occupation of Spain.

Hilberg argued that " The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance ... he documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight ..." Hilberg attributed this lack of resistance to the Jewish experience as a minority: " In exile, the Jews ... had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies ...

Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to restrain from resistance ..." Yad Vashem's scholars, including Josef Melkman and Nathan Eck, did not feel that Hilberg's characterizations of Jewish history were correct, but they also felt that by using Jewish history to explain the reaction of the Jewish community to the Holocaust, Hilberg was suggesting that some responsibility for the extent of the destruction fell on the Jews themselves, a position that they found unacceptable.

Another important factor for this hostility by many in the Jewish community ( including some Holocaust survivors ) is that Hilberg refused to view the vast majority of Jewish victims ' " passivity " as a form of heroism or resistance ( in contrast to those Jews who actively resisted, waging armed struggle against the Nazis ).

The Jews, Hilberg argued, were convinced " the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit.

" Hilberg calculated the economic value of Jewish slave labor to the Nazis as being several times the entire value of confiscated Jewish assets and used this as evidence that the Nazis valued killing Jews above all economic considerations.

Additionally, Hilberg estimated the total number of Germans killed by Jews during World War II as less than 300, an estimate that is not conducive to an image of heroic struggle.

" According to Hilberg, his own approach was crucial for grasping the Nazi genocide of Jews as a process.

Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews, Hilberg argued, began relatively mildly through political-legal discrimination and the appropriation of Jewish assets ( 1933 – 39 ).

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.

The young Hilberg interrupted the lecture to ask why the recent murder of 6 million Jews did not figure in Rosenberg's assessment.

Hilberg demurred on the grounds that his interest lay in the perpetrators, and thus he would not begin with the Jews who were their victims, but rather with what was done to them.