Born in Vienna, Raul Hilberg and his family were forced to emigrate from Austria in 1939 via Cuba to the United States. He attended Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College, and served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. As a young soldier in postwar Germany, he first came into contact with some of the enormous store of Nazi records that would expose the crimes of the Third Reich, in particular the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. He returned to the United States to complete his undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College, and went on to earn his M.A. and then his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University in 1955. After brief tenures at Hunter College and with the U.S. government's War Documentation Project in Alexandria, Virginia, where he worked on captured German documents, he joined the political science department at the University of Vermont in 1956.
The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961, was the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust and the most exhaustive examination at that time of the trove of captured Nazi documents that became available during the decade of the 1950s. In depth and in scope, Hilberg's book far surpassed the few works that existed on the subject at the time. In its focus on the perpetrators of the genocide, Hilberg meticulously reconstructed and analyzed every cog in their bloated bureaucratic machinery as it implemented a policy of systematic mass murder of the Jews in Europe. His study soon became the standard work on the history of the Holocaust in Europe, a distinction it has retained in its revised and much expanded form to this day.
Along with the ever-increasing availability of massive amounts of Nazi documentation and the consequent explosion of interest by the 1970s in the history of Nazi Germany, Hilberg's pathbreaking work helped to spawn a generation of historians and other scholars of the Holocaust. A by-product of this was the emergence of an inter-disciplinary field of study that has become as varied today as it is large.
Throughout his scholarly career, Professor Hilberg infused his intelligence, his unrivaled familiarity with the sources, and his penetrating analysis into the debates that inevitably accompanied this growth. At international symposia and public lectures, in a number of additional books, and in other academic, scholarly, and media settings, he made ongoing contributions to the field that he had initially done so much to engender.
The University of Vermont, the field of Holocaust Studies, and the larger academic profession have lost a colleague and friend of immense stature and scholarly integrity, personal warmth and generosity, a person Herman Wouk once described as "the humblest great man that I have known."
Frank Nicosia, Professor
Interim Director of the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont
