Raul Hilberg, a pioneering authority on the study of the Holocaust, died on August 4. At the time of his death, Hilberg was an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Vermont.

Hilberg is most renowned for his 1961 book, The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg had trouble finding a publisher for the book, which was initially greeted with a shrug. And, as Gustav Seibt notes, it took another 20 years before the book was brought out in German.

Focusing on the bureaucratic process by which almost the entire apparatus of the German state became invested in mass murder, Hilberg dismissed the importance of Jewish resistance movements and even emphasized how Jews were sometimes, however unwillingly, complicit in their own destruction. His ideas were popularized, and arguably perverted, by Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Christopher Browning, a Hilberg disciple and professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is quoted in the Forward  as saying that Arendt's argument differed in a subtle but important way: “What Hilberg portrayed as a catastrophic and tragic failure of perception, Arendt in contrast portrayed in terms of seduction by apparent power, self-serving corruption, and ultimately betrayal — in short a searing accusation of moral failure.” 

In an extended appreciation of Hilberg, Yaakov Lozowick, director of archives at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem,  writes that he is "the single most important historian of the Holocaust" despite the flaws of his work because of his achievement in piecing together the story of the Holocaust, alone, "surrounded by indifference."

Norman Geras, an emeritus professor of government at the University of Manchester, calls The Destruction of the European Jews an "indispensable work," but urges readers not to overlook some significant shorter pieces by Hilberg as well.