The historian Raul Hilberg came to be recognised as one of the great authorities on the Holocaust, with his study The Destruction of the European Jews, which first appeared in 1961, setting out in detail how the bureaucratic machinery of the Nazi State had made the murder of millions of Jews possible. But this recognition was far from immediate. During the early decades there were still many in both the US and Europe reluctant to confront precisely what had happened in the Third Reich.

Hilberg’s work took some time to find a publisher in the US where he lived, and much longer to find a translator into German. His doubts about the extent and effectiveness of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust earned him many critics, and his academic career was hardly stellar.

As “Holocaust studies” expanded massively in subsequent decades, however, Hilberg’s contribution was acknowledged more widely, not least for the sober way in which he had set out the grim factual framework, based on his painstaking pursuit of material in thousands of Third Reich documents, and his particular skill in interpreting how the official mind thought and functioned under Nazi rule.

Hilberg had encountered personally the prelude to Nazi rule, when he was forced as a 13-year-old to flee with his Jewish family from his native Vienna as it was annexed by Hitler and absorbed into “Greater Germany”. The family escaped via France and Cuba to the US, where Hilberg was recruited, after school, to serve in the US Army. He ended the war based in the former Nazi party headquarters in Munich, where he stumbled across crates full of Hitler’s personal library – an early indication of the historical riches that were being accumulated by Allied confiscation.

After returning to the US Hilberg studied history and politics and was particularly influenced by German émigré scholars such as Franz Neu-mann, who taught him about traditions in German bureaucracy and official thought reaching back centuries. This fired Hilberg’s interest in how the bureaucracy had behaved under Nazism.

Hilberg embarked on research into the huge number of captured Nazi documents which had formed part of the background to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, but which had never been evaluated by historians.

Rather than focusing on leaders, Hilberg was concerned to show how the murder of the Jews was the product of a system that had evolved through several stages. Each of these was steadily more radical, and involved almost the whole apparatus of the German state. Jews were at first defined as enemies of the State, then discriminated against in various ways, expropriated, moved into ghettos and finally transported to their deaths.

Hilberg famously showed how even railway records — with their euphemistic terms relating to death camp transports – could reveal how lowly officials were drawn into the rationali-sation of mass murder. Documents, Hilberg insisted, could be as significant for what they did not say as for what they explicitly described. (He later set out his expertise in the interpretation of these documents in a book, Sources of Holocaust Research.)

Once Hilberg had completed his first book, The Destruction of the European Jews, he began the long search for a publisher, eventually succeeding with a small Chicago publishing house in 1961. The book had been rejected by several mainstream academic publishers, being seen as too unwieldy or based too exclusively on German documents.

Hilberg’s focus on the bureaucratic state and its mass of anonymous agents rather than the Nazi leadership also ran against the fashion of the time, coming relatively soon after the Nuremberg trials and all the attendant publicity. In Germany, meanwhile, there was still great reluctance to engage in detail with Nazi history, and Hilberg’s book did not appear in German translation until the 1980s.

Hilberg was also much criticised in some quarters for playing down the extent of Jewish resistance to Nazi attack, and emphasising the way in which, through institutions such as the Judenräte or Jewish councils, some Jews had, however unwillingly, been part of the administrative machinery of Nazi rule. One historian, Oscar Handlin, accused Hilberg of “defaming the dead”.

There was sharp criticism in Israel, and Hilberg was later denied access to the Yad Vashem archives there. Others suggested that he had ignored the great variation in the role played by the Judenräte in different areas and circumstances.

Hilberg, who could be extremely sharp in his own defence, wrote later in his memoirs: “It has taken me some time to absorb what I should always have known, that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought.” However, he did publish in 1979 with two colleagues The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, which detailed one man’s attempt to deal with the dilemmas of living under Nazi rule.

Hilberg, who taught at the University of Vermont from the mid-1950s until his retirement in 1991, never published anything as substantial as that first book. But its influence grew steadily — even if at first Hilberg was enraged by the way others such as Hannah Arendt appeared to use his research without acknowledging it.

The so-called “functionalist” historians of Nazism – such as Hans Mom-msen and Martin Broszat in Germany and Christopher Browning in the US – built on his ideas of the murderous bureaucratic machine and the connivance of what Browning simply called “ordinary men”.

Hilberg developed his own perspective on the various human types required for a crime on the scale of the Holocaust in Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (1992) which gave more detailed case studies of the machinery he had earlier outlined. But some researchers questioned whether Hilberg’s model was too monolithic, excluding an awareness of how the murder of the Jews and others by the Nazis could often be influenced by more specific and local circumstances.

Hilberg himself was ready with trenchant words as debates multiplied and hundreds of researchers began to explore where he had once been a somewhat solitary figure. He was critical of the mass expansion of Holocaust studies (disliking the term Holocaust itself), behind which he saw various agendas lurking, taking study away from solid archival work. And he was extremely critical of what he saw as one-dimensional and distorted accounts of the human motivation behind Nazi crimes, such as Daniel Goldhagen’s international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

While he might have disapproved of much research into Nazism, Hilberg always insisted that much more was there to be discovered. “We know perhaps 20 per cent about the Holocaust,” he told an audience recently in his native Vienna.

His own early work had done much to open up a field where, in early postwar decades, many had been unwilling to learn very much at all.

He is survived by his second wife, Gwendolyn Montgomery, and by two children from his first marriage to Christine Hemenway.

Raul Hilberg, historian, was born on June 2, 1926. He died on August 4, 2007, aged 81