Aladdin Library

Born in 1926 in Vienna, Raul Hilberg immigrated to the United States with his family on the eve of World War Two. During his military service, he was attached to U.S. Army’s War Documentation Department, charged with examining archives throughout Europe. It was his discovery of part of Hitler's private library in Munich that aroused his interest in Holocaust history, an interest that would lead to ground-breaking research into the genocide of the European Jews.
Hilberg is considered the world’s pre-eminent scholar of the Holocaust, the first to carefully analyse the mechanisms of the Jewish genocide. After years of research, he published “The Destruction of the European Jews” in 1961, but the book was greeted with indifference. It was only in the 1960s, and especially after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, that Western interest in Holocaust history was rekindled.
"The Destruction of the European Jews" is the result of many years of research into the archives of different European nations. The book seeks to elucidate the reasons for the killing of more than five million Jews during the war. Refusing to limit it to a moral catastrophe, Hilberg carefully analyzed the steps that, from the definition of the Jewish identity by the Nazi regime in the 1930s to the Final Solution, have marked the process of extermination.

"The Destruction of the European Jews" consists of three volumes. The first volume, which will be available on the Aladdin Online Library, contains chapters I to VII.