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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 ;

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

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 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 ...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

" 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.

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

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.

In The Destruction, Hilberg established what today has become orthodoxy in Holocaust historiography: the increasingly intensifying historical stages leading to genocide.

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 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.

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.