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Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926–August 4, 2007) was an Austrian-born American political scientist and...

Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926–August 4, 2007) was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the doyen of the postwar generation of Holocaust scholars, 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. Following the March 1938 Anschluss, 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. Following a four-month stay in Cuba, his family arrived in the United States on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out in Europe. During the ensuing war in Europe, Hilberg's family was to lose 26 members 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 left his studies to work in a factory. Having