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Hilberg's "landmark synthesis, based on a masterful reading of German documents," soon resulted in a massive array of writings and debates, both scholarly and popular, on the Jewish Holocaust. Two works which preceded Hilberg's by a decade or so, but remained little known in their time, were Léon Poliakov 's Bréviaire de la haine (Harvest of hate) published in 1951, and Gerald Reitlinger 's The Final Solution, published in 1953. ¹

1 Written with support, published with difficulties

Hilberg began his study of the Holocaust leading to The Destruction while stationed in Munich in 1948 for the US Army's War Documentation Project. He proposed the idea for the work as a PhD dissertation and was supported in this by his doctoral advisor, Columbia University professor Franz Neumann. While the dissertation won a prize, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Oklahoma Univesity Press, as well as Yad Vashem ( ) all declined to publish it. It was eventually published, with lower quality, by a small publishing company (Quadrangle Books). This was not the end of Hilberg's publishing woes.

1.1 Not a sufficiently important contribution: Arendt

In his recent autobiography, Hilberg reveals learning that Hannah Arendt advised Princeton University Press against publishing The Destruction on the grounds that it was not a sufficiently important contribution to the subject. Hilberg strongly criticized Arendt's Banality of Evil thesis which appeared shortly after The Destruction, to be published with her articles for the New Yorker with respect to Adolf Eichmann's trial (Eichmann in Jerusalem). He still defended Arendt's right to have her views aired upon being condemned by the Anti-Defamation League.

Hilberg also goes on to claim that historian Nora Levin heavily borrowed from The Destruction without acknowledgment in her 1968 The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, and that historian Lucy Dawidowicz not only ignored The Destruction's findings in her 1975 The War against the Jews, 1933-1945, but also went on to exclude mention of him in her 1981 historiographyic work, The Holocaust and the Historians.

2 Widely acclaimed as seminal

Today, The Destruction has achieved a certain level of infamy amongst Holocaust historians. While its ideas have been modified (including, by Hilberg himself) and criticized throughout four decades, few in the field dispute it being a monumental work, in both originality and scope.

¹ Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History, pp. 4-7.