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

" After his second wife's autonomous decision, 12 years into their marriage, to convert from Episcopalianism to Judaism, in 1993, Hilberg began quietly to attend services at Ohavi Zedek, a Conservative synagogue in Burlington.

After returning to civilian life, Hilberg chose to study political science, earning his B. A.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 ".

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.

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.

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 ).

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.

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

Reviewing the appreciably expanded 1, 440-page third edition, Holocaust historian Christopher Browning notes in his The Revised Hilberg that Hilberg " has improved a classic, not an easy task.

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

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.

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

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

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

A strong supporter of Norman Finkelstein during the latter's controversial tenure battle and of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry, Hilberg also made a posthumous appearance in the 2009 film, American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein.

Hilberg, a lifelong Republican voter, seemed to be somewhat bemused by the prospect of being published under such an imprint, and asked its director, Ulf Wolter, what on earth his massive treatise on the Holocaust had in common with some of the firm's staple themes, Socialism and Women's rights.

* Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003, revised hardcover edition, ISBN 0-300-09557-0

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.

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

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

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 ).

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.

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 Crown adduced evidence from Professor Hilberg that while some camps had labour facilities annexed to them, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Chelmno were exclusively " killing factories " and that gas chambers were in operation at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.

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

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

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.

Only for the death toll at Belzec does Hilberg provide a precise figure, all the others are rounded.

One year later, on April 1, 1939, at age 13, Hilberg fled Austria with his family ; after reaching France, they embarked on a ship bound for Cuba.

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

Hilberg was the only scholar interviewed for Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, and according to Guy Austin was " a key influence on Lanzmann " in depicting the logistics of the genocide.

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

The task Hilberg set for himself was to analyse the way the overall policies of genocide were engineered within the otherwise conflictual politics of Nazi factions.