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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* 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 ...

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.

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 ).

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

" 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.

" 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 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.

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

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.

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 went on to complete first an M. A.

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.

" 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.

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.

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.