Council, which is the governing body for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Following his death, the Museum established the Raul Hilberg Fellowship, intended to support the development of new generations of Holocaust scholars. For his seminal and profound services to the historiography of the Holocaust, he was honored with Germany's Order of Merit, the highest recognition that can be paid to a non-German. In 2002, he was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis for Die Quellen des Holocaust (Sources of the Holocaust). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 . The Destruction of the European Jews Hilberg is best known for his influential study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews. His approach assumed that the event of the Shoah was not "unique". He said in a late interview:For me the Holocaust was a vast, single event, but I am never going to use the word unique, because I recognize that when one starts breaking it into pieces, which is my trade, one finds completely recognizable, ordinary ingredients.His final doctoral supervisor, Professor Fox, worried that the original study was far too long. Hilberg therefore suggested submitting a mere quarter of the research he had written up, and his proposal was accepted. His PhD dissertation was awarded the prestigious Clark F. Ansley prize, which entitled it to be published by Columbia University Press in a print run of 850 copies. However, Hilberg was firm in desiring that the whole work be published, not just the doctoral version. To obtain this, two opinions in favor of full publication were required. Yad Vashem as early as 1958, declined to participate in its projected publication, fearing that it would encounter "hostile criticism". The work was duly submitted to two additional academic authorities in the field, but both judgments were negative, viewing Hilberg's work as polemical: one rejected it as anti-German, the other as anti-Jewish. Struggle for publication Hilberg, unwilling to compromise, submitted the complete manuscript to several major publishing houses over the following six years, without luck. Princeton University Press turned down the manuscript, on Hannah Arendt's advice, after quickly vetting it in a mere two weeks. After successive rejections from five prominent publishers, it finally went to press in 1961 under a minor imprint, the Chicago-based publisher, Quadrangle Books. Yad Vashem also reneged on an initial agreement to publish the manuscript, since it treated as