The news of Hilbergs death comes as a sad blow to the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team as several of our American members were on personal terms with Mr. Hilberg and would occasionally meet with him at his home.

Hilberg died in the northeastern US state of Vermont of lung cancer on Sunday, according to the University of Vermont, where he taught from 1956 until 1991.

It was while at the university in 1961 that Hilberg first published his masterwork, widely seen as the seminal study of the Nazis' extermination of Jews during World War II.

Born in June 1926 in Vienna, Hilberg fled Austria with his parents after Nazi Germany annexed the country, settling in the United States in 1939.

Conscripted into the US army at the age of 18, he returned to Europe to fight with US troops until 1945.

Back in the United States, after studies in political science and law, he joined the War Documentation Project - a body charged with analysing wartime German documents seized by the US armed forces.

It was while working on the project that he discovered Hitler's private library packed away in crates and stored in Munich.

The experience inspired him to investigate any historical records that might shed light on the build up to the Holocaust, even after several leading Nazis were tried and sentenced to death immediately after the war.

"Once the Nuremberg Trials were over and a few people judged guilty, no one wanted to talk about it. But I was driven by a desire to know what happened," he once said.

Step by step, he pieced together the administrative, bureaucratic and industrial aspects of the genocide, presenting his findings as a doctoral thesis in 1955.

Published by a small Chicago outfit, the work initially met with suspicion in the Jewish community due to its heavy reliance on German sources and critical assessment of the Jewish population's reaction to Nazi persecution.

A second, reworked edition was published in 1985 in the United States, and a third in 2003, with new material drawn from Soviet archives made available after the end of the Cold War.

By the 1990s, Hilberg had achieved international renown as the author of more than a dozen works on the Holocaust, including The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian and Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders.

The University of Vermont's president, Daniel Mark Fogel, paid tribute to Hilberg, saying his research had inspired a generation of fellow academics and students.

"For more than three decades Raul Hilberg taught and conducted research at the University of Vermont with an authority and passion that made an indelible impression on his colleagues and the thousands of University of Vermont students who enrolled in his classes," he said.

"The entire university community is saddened by the loss of this great scholar, but comforted in the legacy of writing and research he leaves for those who seek to understand one of the darkest, defining chapters in human history," he said.