46 Facts About Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian.

Raul Hilberg was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust.

Raul Hilberg's father, a small-goods salesman, was born in a Galician village, moved to Vienna in his teens, was decorated for bravery on the Russian front in World War I, and married Hilberg's mother who was from Buczacz, now in Ukraine.

The young Raul Hilberg was a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting.

Raul Hilberg did however attend a Zionist school in Vienna, which inculcated in him the necessity of defending against, rather than surrendering to, the rising menace of Nazism.

The Hilbergs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where Raul attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College.

Raul Hilberg intended to make a career in chemistry but found that it did not suit him, and he left his studies to work in a factory.

Raul Hilberg served in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946.

Raul Hilberg served first in the 45th Infantry Division during World War II, but, given his native fluency in German and academic interests, he was attached to the War Documentation Department, charged with examining archives throughout Europe.

Raul Hilberg was deeply impressed by the importance of elites and bureaucracies while attending Hans Rosenberg's lectures on the Prussian civil service.

Raul Hilberg recalled, it was an almost taboo topic in the Jewish community, and he pursued his research as a kind of "protest against silence".

Raul Hilberg went on to first complete a Master of Arts degree and then a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Columbia University, where he entered the graduate program in public law and government.

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

Raul 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.

Raul Hilberg decided to write the greater part of his PhD under the supervision of Franz Neumann, the author of an influential wartime analysis of the German totalitarian state.

Raul Hilberg had already read Hilberg's master's thesis, and found, as both a deeply patriotic German and a Jew, that certain themes sketched there were unbearably painful.

Raul Hilberg's dissertation won him the university's prestigious Clark F Ansley Award in 1955, which carried with it the right to have his thesis published by his alma mater.

Raul Hilberg taught the first college-level course in the United States dedicated to the Holocaust, when the subject was finally introduced into his university's curriculum in 1974.

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

Raul Hilberg was appointed emeritus professor upon his retirement in 1991.

In 2006, the university established the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professorship of Holocaust Studies.

Raul Hilberg was appointed to the President's Commission on the Holocaust by Jimmy Carter in 1979.

Raul Hilberg later served for many years on its successor, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which is the governing body for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Raul Hilberg was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Raul Hilberg is best known for his influential study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews.

Raul Hilberg's approach assumed that the event of the Shoah was not "unique".

Raul Hilberg therefore suggested submitting a mere quarter of the research he had written up, and his proposal was accepted.

However, Raul Hilberg was firm in desiring that the whole work be published, not just the doctoral version.

For Raul Hilberg there was deep irony in the judgement since Arendt, asked to give an opinion of his manuscript in 1959, had advised against publication.

Raul Hilberg's judgement influenced the rejection slip he received from Princeton University Press following its submission, thus denying him a mainstream academic publishing house.

Raul Hilberg refrained from laying emphasis on the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust or their lives in concentration camps.

Raul Hilberg made it clear that such functionaries were quite aware of their involvement in what was a process of destruction.

Raul Hilberg responded graciously to Isaiah Trunk's pathfinding research on the Judenrate, which was critical of Raul Hilberg's assessment of the issue.

Raul Hilberg's study was praised by scholars and the American press.

Some scholars argued that Raul Hilberg overlooked Nazi ideology and the nature of the regime.

The task Raul Hilberg set for himself was to analyze the way the overall policies of genocide were engineered within the otherwise conflicting politics of Nazi factions.

Raul Hilberg came to be considered as the foremost representative of what a later generation has called the functionalist school of Holocaust historiography, of which Christopher Browning, whose life was changed by reading Raul Hilberg's book, is a prominent member.

Raul Hilberg was Jewish and an Austrian who had fled to the United States to escape the Nazis and 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.

In earlier editions of Destruction, in fact, Raul Hilberg discussed an "order" given by Hitler to have Jews killed, while more recent editions do not refer to a direct command.

Raul Hilberg criticized Goldhagen's scholarship, which he called poor and he was even harsher concerning the lack of primary sources or secondary literature competence at Harvard by those who oversaw the research for Goldhagen's book.

Raul Hilberg was a strong supporter of the research of Norman Finkelstein during the latter's unsuccessful attempt to secure tenure; of Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry, which Hilberg endorsed "with specific regard" to his demonstration that the money claimed to be owed by Swiss banks to Holocaust survivors was greatly exaggerated; and of his critique of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Raul Hilberg made a posthumous appearance in the 2009 film, American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein.

In regard to claims that a New anti-Semitism was emerging, Raul Hilberg, speaking in 2007, was dismissive.

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

Raul Hilberg has written memorably of her father's approach to rearing in an article composed on the occasion of the publication of the Hebrew translation of The Destruction of the European Jews, in 2012.

Raul Hilberg was not religious, and he considered himself an atheist.