US Holocaust Scholar Raul Hilberg Dies
'Pakistan Times' Foreign Desk

PARIS (France): The American historian Raul Hilberg, one of the world's foremost scholars of the Holocaust has died aged 81, his French publisher announced on Monday.

Hilberg was the author of "The Destruction of the European Jews," widely seen as the seminal study of the Nazis' extermination of Jews during World War II, to which he continued to add throughout his life.

He died on Saturday in Burlington, in the US state of Vermont, according to his publisher Gallimard.

Born in June 1926 in Vienna, Hilberg emigrated to the United States in 1939 after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. Conscripted at the age of 18, he returned to Europe to fight in US ranks until 1945.

Back in the United States, after studies in political science and law, he joined the War Documentation Project -- a body charged with analysing wartime German documents seized by the US armed forces.

Step by step, he pieced together the administrative, bureaucratic and industrial aspects of the genocide, presenting his findings as a doctoral thesis in 1955.

Published by a small Chicago outfit, 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 renown, as the author of more than a dozen works on the Holocaust, including "The politics of memory: The journey of a Holocaust historian" and "Perpetrators Victims Bystanders".●