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

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.

According to Raul Hilberg, this camp was where " one the first instances that reference was made to the ' soap-making rumor '.

Hilberg went on to complete first an M. A.

Hilberg obtained his first academic position at the University of Vermont in Burlington, in 1955, and took up residence there in January 1956.

Hilberg had two children, David and Deborah, by his first wife, Christine Hemenway.

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 ".

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.

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 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.

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 notes that Dawidowicz not only ignored The Destructions findings in The War Against the Jews, but also went on to exclude mention of him in her 1981 historiographic work, The Holocaust and the Historians.

" In a letter of July 14, 1982 Hilberg had written to Mr. Wolter / Olle & Wolter, " Everything you said to me during this brief visit has impressed me very much and has given me a good feeling about our joint venture.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

" 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 ).

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.

Raul Hilberg ( June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007 ) was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian.

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

Hilberg was very much a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting.

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.

At one particular point in Rosenberg's course, Hilberg was taken aback by a remark his teacher dropped:

" 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 was undecided under whom he should carry out his doctoral research.

According to Hilberg, to attend Baron's lectures was to enjoy the rare opportunity of observing " a walking library, a monument of incredible erudition ", active before his classroom of students.

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

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.

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

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

" 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.

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.