Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007) was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist, historian, and Holocaust researcher. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust.
Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution.
Hilberg was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Polish-speaking Jewish family. His 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 Hilberg was a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting. Though his parents attended a synagogue on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellent and developed an aversion to it.
He 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.
Following the March 1938 German annexation of Austria, his family was evicted from their home at gunpoint and his father was arrested by the Nazis; 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 Miami, Florida, on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out in Europe. During the ensuing war in Europe, 26 members of Hilberg's family were murdered in the Holocaust.
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 found that it did not suit him, and he left his studies to work in a factory. He served in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946.
As early as 1942, Hilberg, after reading scattered reports of what would later become known as the Nazi genocide, went so far as to call 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.
Hilberg served first in the 45th Infantry Division during World War II, but, given his native fluency in German and academic interests, he was soon attached to the War Documentation Department, charged with examining archives throughout Europe. While in Munich, he stumbled upon Hitler's crated private library. This discovery, together with learning that 26 close members of his family had been exterminated, prompted Hilberg's research into the Holocaust, a term which he personally disliked, though in later years he himself used it.
After returning to civilian life, Hilberg chose to study political science, earning his Bachelor of Arts degree at Brooklyn College in 1948. He was deeply impressed by the importance of elites and bureaucracies while attending Hans Rosenberg's lectures on the Prussian civil service.
In 1947, at one particular point in Rosenberg's course, Hilberg was taken aback when his teacher remarked: "The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain." The young Hilberg interrupted the lecture to ask why the recent murder of 6 million Jews did not figure in Rosenberg's assessment.
Rosenberg replied that it was a complicated matter, but that the lectures dealt only with history down to 1930, adding, "History doesn't reach down into the present age." Hilberg was amazed by this highly educated, German-Jewish emigrant passing over the genocide of European Jews in order to expound on Napoleon and the occupation of Spain. Hilberg recalled, it was an almost taboo topic in the Jewish community, and he pursued his research as a kind of "protest against silence".
Hilberg went on to first complete a Master of Arts degree (1950) and then a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree (1955) at Columbia University, where he entered the graduate program in public law and government. In 1951, he obtained a temporary appointment to work on the War Documentation Project under the direction of Fritz T. Epstein. Hilberg was undecided under whom he should carry out his doctoral research. Having attended a course on international law, he was also attracted to the lectures of Salo Baron, the leading authority on Jewish historiography at the time, with particular expertise in the field of laws pertaining to the Jewish people.
According to Hilberg, to attend Baron's lectures was to enjoy the rare opportunity of observing "a walking library, a monument of incredible erudition", active before his classroom of students. Baron asked Hilberg whether he was interested in working under him on the annihilation of Europe's Jewish population. 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.
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. Neumann was initially reluctant to take Hilberg on as his doctoral student. He 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.
In particular, he had asked that the section on Jewish cooperation be removed, to no avail. Neumann nonetheless relented, warning his student, however, that such a dissertation was professionally imprudent and might well prove to be his academic funeral.
Undeterred by the prospect, Hilberg pressed on without regard for the possible consequences. Neumann himself contacted Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor directly, to facilitate Hilberg's access to the appropriate archives. After Neumann's death in a traffic accident in 1954, Hilberg completed his doctoral requirement under the supervision of William T. R. Fox.