High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926, Vienna ? August 4, 2007, Williston, Vermont) was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent Holocaust scholar, 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. The young Hilberg interrupted the lecture to ask why the recent murder of 6 million Jews did not figure in Rosenberg's assessment. Rosenberg replied that it was a complicated matter, but that the lectures only dealt with history down to 1930, adding, "History doesn?t reach down into the present age." Hilberg was amazed by this highly-educated, German-Jewish emigrant passing over the genocide of European Jews in order to expound on Napoleon and the occupation of Spain. The episode served to strengthen his interest in the subject.