By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Raul Hilberg, who spent more than half a century researching the Holocaust, has died at 81 of lung cancer, the University of Vermont said on Tuesday.

The Vienna-born Hilberg, a Jew himself, was best known for his massive study "The Destruction of the European Jews" which chronicled how Nazi Germany constructed and operated history's most lethal killing machine that murdered 6 million Jews.

When he started his research soon after World War Two, Hilberg was a rarity in his early scholarly passion for the topic. "In the Jewish community the topic was almost taboo," Hilberg told Reuters in a 2004 interview. "I went ahead with my work starting with the end of 1948, almost, I would say, as a protest against silence."

"There was a kind of defused resentment that somehow a topic of such magnitude was ignored."

Hilberg published the first version of his book in 1961, giving numbing detail on everything from the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany to the bureaucratic underpinnings of the concentration camp system.

He continued his research through the vast Holocaust archives into what he saw as a "gigantic jigsaw puzzle" long afterwards, leading ultimately to a much expanded third edition in 2003.

Some criticized him for focusing more on perpetrators of the Holocaust and the machinery they created rather than victims.

Hilberg was often able to work dispassionately on the grim theme but said he was sometimes overcome by the subject.

"In my dreams, I was a victim," he said in the interview. "I was on my way to Auschwitz. I was on the train and I was confronting SS guys and I was going to kill them."

Such nightmares cut close to the bone as his family only left Austria in 1938 following the German Anschluss of its neighbor. After a stop in Cuba, the Hilbergs arrived in the United States, and he later became a U.S. citizen.

NAUSEA FROM THE DETAILS

Sixty years later he remembered the horror he felt when he returned to Europe as a soldier with the U.S. Army in the later part of the war. While in France he came across the notebook and personal possessions of a dead student of chemistry -- a subject he had studied.

"I became totally nauseated," Hilberg recalled, saying he identified with the young student. "The chemistry notebook made me ill."

As a soldier he also came across crates with Adolf Hitler's library, a find that fascinated him.

Sometimes Hilberg would react particularly strongly to small details of the Holocaust, such as when he found out about a Jew who sued the Nazis for the right to purchase coffee.

"I was nauseated because obviously this Jew was picked up and sent to Auschwitz or wherever they sent him and died," he said. "Why did this particular incident affect me when I could calmly read about mass murder?"

After the war, Hilberg got a PhD from Columbia University and began a long association with the University of Vermont in 1956, during which he wrote several other books. He retired from teaching in 1991 but remained an emeritus professor.

"When you are done writing the work, bringing it to the public successfully, even being praised, you wake up one morning and say to yourself, 'They're still dead', and that's really the most profound reaction there is," he said.

Hilberg, who had not been a smoker, died on Saturday of lung cancer in Williston, Vermont.

AlertNet news is provided by