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.

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.

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 ).

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

Hilberg was born to a Polish-Romanian Jewish family in Vienna, Austria.

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

Although Jewish, Hilberg was not religious, and considered himself an atheist.

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.

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.

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.

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, unwilling to compromise, submitted the complete manuscript to several major publishing houses over the following six years, without luck.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

" 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 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.

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

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

*" 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.

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

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

* Hilberg, Raul.

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.

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.

* Raul Hilberg.

Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition.

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.

" She wanted preeminence ," Hilberg writes.