Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007) was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution. Life and career Hilberg was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Polish-speaking Jewish family. His father, a small-goods salesman, was born in a Galician village, moved to Vienna in his teens, was decorated for bravery on the Russian front, and married Hilberg's mother who was from Buczacz, now in Ukraine. The young Hilberg was a loner, pursuing solitary hobbies such as geography, music and train spotting. Though his parents attended synagogue on occasion, he personally found the irrationality of religion repellent and developed an allergy to it. He did however attend a Zionist school in Vienna, which inculcated the necessity of defending against, rather than surrendering to, the rising menace of Nazism. Following the March 1938 Anschluss, his family was evicted from their home at gunpoint and his father was arrested by the Nazis, but he was later released because of his service record as a combatant during World War I. One year later, on April 1, 1939, at age 13, Hilberg fled Austria with his family; after reaching France, they embarked on a ship bound for Cuba. Following a four-month stay in Cuba, his family arrived in Miami, Florida, on September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War broke out in Europe. During the ensuing war in Europe, 26 members of Hilberg's family were murdered in the Holocaust. The Hilbergs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where Raul attended Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College. He intended to make a career in chemistry, but he found that it did not suit him, and he left his studies to work in a factory. He served in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946. As early as 1942, Hilberg, after reading scattered reports of what would later become known as the Nazi genocide, went so far as to ring Stephen Samuel Wise and ask him what he planned to do with regard to "the complete annihilation of European Jewry". According to Hilberg, Wise hung up. Hilberg served first in the 45th Infantry Division during