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:

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 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.

" He goes on to echo the early critics of ( the no longer marginalized ) Hilberg, stating that: " it is about time to publish researched testimonies of the victims and survivors opposed to those documentations and books, based solely on German documents.

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.

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.

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

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.

" 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 went on to complete first an M. A.

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

Neumann was initially reluctant to take Hilberg on as his doctoral student.

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 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.

Though a non-smoker, Hilberg died following a recurrence of lung cancer on August 4, 2007, aged 81, in Williston, Vermont.

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.

To that end, Hilberg refrained from laying emphasis on the suffering of Jews, the victims, or their lives in the concentration camps.

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

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

" 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.

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

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.

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.

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 served first in the 45th Infantry Division ( United States ) in World War II, but, given his native fluency and academic interests, was soon attached to the War Documentation Department, charged with examining archives throughout Europe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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 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 ...

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 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 ).

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.

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