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.

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 ).

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.

" 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.

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.

It is argued that Davidowicz, a renowned intentionalist, simply ignored Hilberg's work in order to follow an academically safer path, avoiding controversy by avoiding functionalist conclusions like those drawn by Hilberg.

The following is an excerpt from the testimony of Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg:

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.

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

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 ).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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, 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 ).

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.