source of information on this tragic subject." Today, The Destruction has achieved a highly distinguished level of prestige amongst Holocaust historians. While its ideas have been modified (including by Hilberg himself) and criticized throughout four decades, few in the field dispute its being a monumental work, in both originality and scope. Reviewing the appreciably expanded 1,440-page second edition, Holocaust historian Christopher Browning noted that Hilberg "has improved a classic, not an easy task." And while Browning maintains that, with the exception of Hitler's role, there are no fundamental changes to the work's principal findings, he nevertheless states that: The controversies surrounding Hilberg's book were perhaps the main reason why its Polish translation was released only after the collapse of the Soviet union, five decades after its original publication. The year Hilberg died, he refused an offer to have a shortened version published in translation, insisting that particularly in Poland, where so much of the Holocaust took place, only the full text of his work would suffice. The complete three-volume edition translated by Jerzy Giebułtowski was released in Poland in 2013. Dariusz Libionka from IPN, who led the book launch seminars in various cities, noted that the stories of defiance so prevalent in Poland can no longer be told without his perspective which includes the viewpoint of Holocaust bureaucracy. Reportedly, the last document Hilberg signed before his death was the release form allowing for the use of the word annihilation (as opposed to destruction) in the Polish title.Jerzy Kochanowski (19 lutego 2013), Historyka Zagłady podróż pod prąd. Tygodnik Polityka. Alleged mistakes According to Henry Friedlander, Hilberg's 1961 and 1985 editions of Destruction mistakenly overlooked what Friedlander called "the most elaborate [Nazi] subterfuge" involving the disabled. This involved the collection of Jewish patients at various hospitals before being transported elsewhere and killed during the summer and autumn of 1940. Friedlander discusses this ruse in Chapter 13 of his Origins of Nazi Genocide (1995). According to Lithuanian-American scholar Saulius Sužiedėlis, Hilberg misinterpreted a document regarding Algirdas Klimaitis, "a small-time journalist and killer shunned by even pro-Nazi Lithuanian elements and unknown to most Lithuanians". This resulted in Klimaitis being inadvertently "transformed into the head of the 'anti-Soviet partisans. Footnotes References Nora Levin. Holocaust Years: The Nazi Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Krieger Pub. Co., London, 1990, c1968). Franz L. Neumann. Behemoth: The structure and practice of National Socialism (Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1942). Neumann,