Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007) was an Austrian-born Jewish-American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent^[1][2][3] scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution.

Hilberg was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family from Poland and Romania.^{[citation needed]}

Hilberg was very much a lonesome man, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting.^[4] Though his parents attended synagogue on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellent and developed an allergy to it. He did however attend a Zionist school in Vienna, which inculcated the necessity of defending against, rather than surrendering to, the rising menace of Nazism.^[4] Following the March 1938 Anschluss, his family was evicted from their home at gunpoint and his father was arrested by the Nazis, but he was later released because of his service record as a combatant during World War I. 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. Following a four-month stay in Cuba, his family arrived in the United States on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out in Europe.^[5] During the ensuing war in Europe, 26 members of Hilberg's family were killed in the Holocaust.^[6]

The Hilbergs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where Raul attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College. He intended to make a career in chemistry, but he found that it did not suit him, and he left his studies to work in a factory. He was drafted into the United States Army in 1944.^[7] As early as 1942, Hilberg, after reading scattered reports of what would later become known as the Nazi genocide, went so far as to ring Stephen Samuel Wise and ask him what he planned to do with regard to "the complete annihilation of European Jewry". According to Hilberg, Wise hung up.^[4]

Hilberg served first in the 45th Infantry Division (United States) during World War II, but, given his native fluency and academic interests, he was soon attached to the War Documentation Department, charged with examining archives throughout Europe. While quartered in the Braunes Haus, he stumbled upon Hitler's crated private library in Munich. This discovery prompted Hilberg's research into the Holocaust, a term which he personally disliked,^[8] though in later years he himself used it.^[9]

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