Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg founded the historical study of the Holocaust with 'The Destruction of the European Jews' (1961), a 1,273-page reconstruction of the machinery of murder assembled from the perpetrators' own documents at a time when almost no one was writing that history. He taught political science at the University of Vermont for most of his career. He was born in Vienna to a Polish-speaking Jewish family; after the Anschluss his family was evicted at gunpoint, and he fled Austria at thirteen in April 1939, reaching Miami on the day the war began. Twenty-six members of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.