WILLISTON, Vt. (AP) – Dr. Raul Hilberg, a world renowned Holocaust scholar has died. He was 81.

Hilberg, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, died Saturday from a recurrence of lung cancer although he never smoked, his wife Gwen said. He died with her at his side in a Williston nursing home.

Hilberg was the author of “The Destruction of the European Jews,” (1961), a landmark study of the Nazi killings of more than 5 million Jews.

He was honored by the German government for his contributions and teaching on the Holocaust and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, according to UVM.

Hilberg, who taught at UVM from 1956 to 1991, started the school’s Holocaust Studies program and UVM later created the Center for Holocaust Studies in 1992 “to honor Hilberg’s teaching and research accomplishments.”

“For more than three decades Raul Hilberg taught and conducted research at UVM with an authority and passion that made an indelible impression on his colleagues and the thousands of UVM students who enrolled in his classes,” said UVM president Daniel Mark Fogel.

Hilberg and his parents left Austria in 1938 after the Nazi invasion emigrated to the United States, where Hilberg served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II.

As a member of the War Documentation Project, he found Hitler’s private library in crates stored in Munich, UVM said. That prompted him to start investigating the Holocaust.

“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 had said.

He earned a B.A. degree from Brooklyn College in 1948 and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1950 and 1955. Hilberg also was author of “Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders” (1992); “The Politics of Memory” (1996); and “Sources of Holocaust Research” (2001).