Yehuda Bauer, a lifelong adversary and friend of Hilberg, who often clashed polemically with the man he considered ' without fault ' over what Bauer saw as the latter's failure to deal with the complex dilemmas of Jews caught up in this machinery, recalls often prodding Hilberg on his exclusive focus on the how of the Holocaust rather than the why.

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 ).

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.

Hitler was a crucial impetus for the genocide, Hilberg claimed, but the role played by the organs of the State and the Nazi Party should not be understated.

However, Hilberg was firm in desiring that the whole work be published, not just the doctoral version.

According to Bauer, Hilberg " did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little.

Hilberg came to be considered as the foremost representative of what a later generation has called the functionalist school of Holocaust historiography, of which Christopher Browning, whose own life was changed by reading Hilberg's book, is a prominent member.

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.

* Edition of both romance and riddles by Isidor Hilberg ( 1876 ), who fixes the date of Eustathius between 850 and 988, with critical apparatus and prolegomena, including the solutions ;

Hilberg summarised the debates, " by the end of 1996, it was clear that in sharp distinction from lay readers, much of the academic world had wiped Goldhagen off the map.

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

For this purpose the work was enlarged by about 15 %, so that Hilberg spoke of a " second edition ", " solid enough for the next century ".

In fact, David Cesarani writes that Hilberg ' defended several arguments at a bitter debate organised by Dissent magazine which drew an audience of hundreds.

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.

The 1961 trial of Adolph Eichman, and the subsequent publication by Hannah Arendt and Bruno Bettelheim of works that were more critical of Jewish actions during the Holocaust than Hilberg had been, inflamed the controversy.

Hilberg eventually reached a reconciliation with Yad Vashem, and participated in international conferences organized by the institution in 1977 and 2004.

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 ).

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.

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 its ideas have been modified ( including by Hilberg himself ) and criticized throughout four decades, few in the field dispute its being a monumental work, in both originality and scope.

At one particular point in Rosenberg's course, Hilberg was taken aback by a remark his teacher dropped:

" 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.

Undeterred by the prospect, Hilberg pressed on without regard for the possible consequences.

Hilberg was appointed to the President's Commission on the Holocaust by Jimmy Carter in 1979.

Hilberg had two children, David and Deborah, by his first wife, Christine Hemenway.

With a terse lucidity that ranged, with unsparing meticulousness, over the huge archives of Nazism, Hilberg delineated the history of the mechanisms, political, legal, administrative and organizational, whereby the Holocaust was perpetrated, as it was seen through German eyes, often by the anonymous clerks whose unquestioning dedication to their duties was central to the efficacy of the industrial project of genocide.

" or, as Hilberg himself says interviewed in Lanzmann's film, " I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers.

" 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.

He has published interviews with Bahro and Hilberg when their books were published.

Hilberg was undecided under whom he should carry out his doctoral research.

Baron asked Hilberg whether he was interested in working under him on the annihilation of Europe's Jewish population.

Hilberg decided to write the greater part of his Ph. D. under the supervision of Franz Neumann, the author of an influential wartime analysis of the German totalitarian state.

After Neumann's death in a traffic accident in 1954, Hilberg completed his doctoral requirement under the supervision of a Quaker, Professor Fox.

This clashed with the lesson Hilberg had absorbed under Neumann, whose Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism ( 1942 ) described the Nazi regime as a virtually stateless political order characterised by chronic bureaucratic infighting and turf disputes.

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:

Hilberg, therefore, disagreed with what he termed a " campaign of exaltation ", explains historian Mitchell Hart, and with Holocaust historians such as Martin Gilbert who argued that " ven passivity was a form of resistance to die with dignity was a form of resistance.

Reviewing the book just after publication, Guggenheim Fellow Andreas Dorpalen wrote that Hilberg had " covered his topic with such thoroughness that his book will long remain a basic source of information on this tragic subject.

Hilberg was very much a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting.

Hilberg made it clear, however, that such functionaries were quite aware of their involvement in what was a process of destruction.

For Hilberg there was deep irony in the judgment since Arendt, asked to give an opinion of his manuscript in 1959, had advised against publication, arguing that it dealt with things one no longer spoke about.