any questions of historical antisemitism, and possible structural elements in Germany's historical-social tradition which might have conduced to the unparalleled industrialization of the European Jewish Catastrophe by that country. Yehuda Bauer, a lifelong adversary and friend of Hilberg,he had assisted him in finally getting access to Yad Vashem's archiveswho often clashed polemically with the man he considered 'without fault' over what Bauer saw as the latter's failure to deal with the complex dilemmas of Jews caught up in this machinery, recalls often prodding Hilberg on his exclusive focus on the how of the Holocaust rather than the why. According to Bauer, Hilberg "did not ask the big questions for fear that the answers would be too little" or, as Hilberg himself says interviewed in Lanzmann's film, "I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers." Hilberg's empirical, descriptive approach to the Holocaust, though it exercised a not fully acknowledged but pervasive influence on the far better-known work of Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in turn aroused considerable controversy, not least because of its details concerning the cooperation of Jewish councils in the actual procedures of evacuation to the camps. Hilberg nonetheless responded graciously to Isaiah Trunk's pathfinding research on the Judenräte, which was critical of Hilberg's assessment of the issue. Critical reception Hilberg's study was praised by scholars and the American press. His findings that all of German society was involved in the "destruction process" drew attention. Some scholars argued that Hilberg overlooked Nazi ideology and the nature of the regime type. Hilberg's claim that Jews abetted their own persecutors sparked a debate among Jewish scholars and in Jewish press. According to a 2021 study, "the reception of Hilberg’s work marks a crucial step in the formation of the Holocaust as part of historical consciousness." At the time, most historians of the phenomenon subscribed to what would today be called the extreme intentionalist position, where sometime early in his career, Hitler developed a master plan for the genocide of the Jewish people and that everything that happened was the unfolding of the plan. This clashed with the lesson Hilberg had absorbed under Neumann, whose Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942/1944) described the Nazi regime as a virtually stateless political order characterised by chronic bureaucratic infighting and turf disputes. The task Hilberg set for himself