Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution. Hilberg was born to a Polish-Romanian Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. Hilberg was very much a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting. Though his parents attended synagogue on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellant. He did... however attend a Zionist school in Vienna, which had inculcated in him the necessity of defending oneself, rather than surrendering to, the rising menace of Nazism. Following the March 1938 Anschluss, the family were evicted at gunpoint from their home and his father was arrested by the Nazis, but was released because of his service record as a combatant in 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.
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| Birthdate: | June 2, 1926 |
| Birthplace: | Vienna |
| Date of death: | August 4, 2007 |
| Education: | Abraham Lincoln High School, Columbia University |
| Religion: | Atheism, Judaism |