07 August 2007
The Jewish-American historian Raul Hilberg, one of the world's most renowned Holocaust scholars and author of ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, has died at the age of 81 in the US state of Vermont. The Destruction of the European Jews was first published In 1961 and is widely seen as the seminal study of the Nazis' extermination of Jews during World War II. Born in 1926 in Vienna, Hilberg fled his native Austria with his parents after Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938, and the family settled in the United States in 1939. Conscripted into the US army at the age of 18, he returned to Europe to fight with US troops until 1945.
Back in the United States, after studies in political science and law, he joined the ‘War Documentation Project’, a body charged with analyzing wartime German documents seized by the US armed forces. It was while working on the project that he discovered Hitler's private library packed away in crates and stored in Munich. The experience inspired him to investigate any historical records that might shed light on the build up to the Holocaust. "Once the Nuremberg Trials were over and a few people judged guilty, no one wanted to talk about it. But I was driven by a desire to know what happened," Hilberg said.
Step by step, he pieced together the administrative, bureaucratic and industrial aspects of the genocide, presenting his findings as a doctoral thesis in 1955. The work initially met with suspicion in the Jewish community due to its heavy reliance on German sources and critical assessment of the Jewish population's reaction to Nazi persecution. A second, reworked edition was published in 1985 in the United States, and a third in 2003, with new material drawn from Soviet archives made available after the end of the Cold War. By the 1990s, Hilberg had achieved international acclaim as the author of more than a dozen works on the Holocaust.
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