Raul Hilberg, who established himself as the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust with his monumental and still-controversial 1961 book "The Destruction of the European Jews," the first comprehensive study of the Nazis' genocidal campaign, died of lung cancer Saturday at a hospice in Williston, Vt. He was 81.
A longtime professor at the University of Vermont, Hilberg was considered the dean of Holocaust studies for his meticulous portrait of the "machinery of destruction" that annihilated more than 5 million European Jews during World War II.
"Raul Hilberg's work and great opus, 'The Destruction of the European Jews,' set the standard and created the foundation for the development of the whole field of Holocaust studies," said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Hilberg's groundbreaking book, which drew on mountains of documents from the Nuremberg trials, demonstrated the systematic nature of the Nazi slaughter. He also wrote "Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders" (1992), which examined the vast bureaucracy of accountants, guards, engineers, architects and other anonymous workers whose cooperation enabled German dictator Adolf Hitler's killing machine to roll relentlessly in service of gruesome ends. In defining what Shapiro called "the three roles of human beings in the genocidal situation," the latter work created a framework for future scholars to follow.
Hilberg's primary focus on the perpetrators and some of his conclusions -- in particular, his assertions about the lack of substantial Jewish resistance -- drew sharp criticism from some Jewish historians and the Jewish public, whose attacks continued unabated throughout most of his five-decade career.
He came to his life's work through tragedy and luck. An Austrian Jew born in Vienna in 1926, he narrowly escaped the Holocaust as a teenager. He witnessed his father's arrest in 1938 when Germany annexed Austria, but because his father had served in World War I, Nazi policy allowed the entire family to avoid internment by giving up their property and leaving the country.
They fled first to Cuba, then to New York City. After high school, Hilberg was drafted into the U.S. Army and returned to Europe. His division helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp.
