He has written dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the subject, and has advanced new theories about the origins of the war and about Hitler's intentions that continue to be the subject of lively debate.

He himself was a victim of the Nazis, and later fought in the war as a U.S. soldier after he escaped from Germany.

Weinberg, 81, is this year's recipient of the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The library, located in downtown Chicago, opened in 2003 and features a collection of books, films and artifacts "focusing on the Citizen Soldier in the preservation of democracy," according to its literature. The award and honorarium are sponsored by the Tawani Foundation, a Chicago grant-making organization.

A national panel of historians and writers, including the two previous recipients of the award, chose Weinberg as this year's winner.

James N. Pritzker, the founder of the Military Library and founder and president of the Tawani Foundation and a retired colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard, said in an e-mail message that Weinberg "is truly a gifted writer of military history who has devoted his skills and talent to produce 'A World at Arms,' perhaps the finest study of World War Two ever attempted by a single scholar. It is indeed a great honor for me, on behalf of my distinguished colleagues, to bestow our highest award to a man who personally experienced the loss of democracy in Germany, defended his new homeland and gave the world enlightenment, learning, wisdom and understanding through his extraordinary writings and teachings." (The 1,000-page "A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II" was published in 1994.)

For Weinberg, who lives in North Carolina, where he is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, World War II is much more than a part of history.

"The world we live in now was largely created by World War II," the genial, energetic-sounding Weinberg said in a recent telephone interview. "It's the place you have to start."

One of the goals of his work, he says, has been "to show that the war had purpose. People didn't just go to war because they had armies and didn't know what to do with them. You need to see these things in a global context, and people need to be reminded that things need to be seen in a global context today."

In this respect, "I have been very much concerned that people get a clearer understanding of how this tremendous catastrophe of World War II came about," he says. His aim has also been "to shift some of the attention on World War II from looking at it, as much of the literature does, as a dangerous chess game where people lost their lives, but rather (to see that) there was a major purpose to it for which the Germans started the war. The purpose was to bring a demographic revolution to the globe-and the killing of Jews was to be a central early part."

His startling thesis, backed up by copious research, is that Hitler from the beginning of his political career was bent on global domination, and that he had planned what Weinberg calls "the first stage" - killing all the Jews of the world - far earlier than is generally believed. Many other historians believe that Hitler "merely" intended to conquer the European continent.

By the 1920s, Weinberg says, Hitler "made it clear that in any war Germany fought and won, the peace settlement would be the basis for the next war. The assumption was that the Germans would eventually inhabit and control the globe. Back in 1920, Hitler explained at great length in a speech to a cheering audience in Munich, that the thing to do about the Jews was not to stir up passions about a pogrom here and a pogrom there but to exterminate them, as we would say, root and branch."

When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, "he was not yet ready to do this," Weinberg says. By 1939, "he was sorry he had not gone to war before. He was not going to be cheated of war. At the same time as he is calling together the representatives of the German media to prepare the German public for war, Kristallnacht is taking place. In mid-January 1939, he first talks about the extermination of Jews to the Czechoslovak minister of foreign affairs who is visiting him."

By the end of January 1939, Hitler "says that in such a war, the Jews of Europe will be exterminated. In the spring of '41, as part of his plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union, organizations are established to implement the policy of killing all Jews in the parts of the Soviet Union to be overrun. By the end of July 1941, he orders this program extended to the rest of German-controlled Europe," Weinberg says.

By the end of 1941, Hitler "still thinks the war is going the right way," he says. "He meets with the founder of the Palestinian nationalist movement and promises him that when the German army gets into the Middle East, they are going to kill all the Jews there. After that, they will go to the non-European peoples and to the rest of the world. German settlers in the long run would displace all non-Germans on the face of the globe. The killing of all Jews is the first stage, an important stage, in this kind of program."

Hitler realized, he says, that "the rest of the program is going to take time. You need the work of the people in mines, farms, factories. In the concentration camps starting in '42, there were experiments to find ways to mass sterilize people. In the world in which there aren't any Jews or Gypsies, who was going to be mass sterilized? The Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe."

In addition, he says, "lots of German soldiers got killed, and (Hitler and his advisors) were discussing new laws about multiple marriages for surviving German soldiers. Those laws would allow German soldiers to have multiple wives. There were too many women left. They're looking ahead here, discussing changing laws in this area."

At the same time, he says, the Nazi leaders "were doing research on twins and other multiple births. If they're going to displace all other people on earth, they will also have to try, hope for more multiple births than would happen statistically."

Of course, none of that took place, but Weinberg says that "my point is, to understand a revolution halted in its tracks, one has to try and see where those in charge thought the tracks were going. They made their decisions on the basis of what they thought and hoped for. To understand the choices and decisions, one has to pay attention to where they thought and hoped they were going. These are aspects of issues of World War II that I have tried to build into my work, in part because it seems to me that others tend to overlook them."

He is particularly interested in the interrelationships among the various countries fighting on the German side. "There are more books about (German Field Marshal Erwin) Rommel than he ever had tanks, but the relationship of his fighting in North Africa and the plan to kill the Jews of the world, you never hear that," he says. "One of the reasons that the situation in North Africa eventually comes to an Allied victory is that during the time when the Japanese might have gone across the Indian Ocean to meet the Germans, they had decided instead to allocate resources to fighting the Americans in Guadalcanal."

Paying scant attention to "the relationship between the European war and the war in other places," most historians "talk about the world as if it is a cube," he says. "The reality is, I have a revelation for you. The world is round. There were competing strategies on different sides of the globe, and that area tends to get slighted in the books written on World War II."

Weinberg's own life was once on a collision course with the forces he was later to study. He was born in Hanover, in north central Germany, in 1928. By the time he was in fifth grade, 10 years later, all Jewish children were being expelled from the public schools. He attended a Jewish school for a few weeks, then was able to leave on a ship for England, along with his brother and sister, in December 1938. His parents joined him the next year, the last in which Jews could depart Germany for England. Many other family members perished.

He spent the next two years in a British boarding school, the result of a group of Quakers who went to boarding schools around the country asking if they would accept Jewish children. The family left for the United States in 1940 and settled in Albany, N.Y. where they had relatives. Weinberg entered military service when he was 18, as soon as he graduated from high school, and was stationed with the American occupation in Japan.

On his return, he attended the State University of New York at Albany on the GI Bill, then earned his master's degree and doctorate in history from the University of Chicago. He began work in what would become his specialty by accident, he says.

"When I started at the University of Chicago, I was planning to work on the diplomacy of the late 19th century," he relates. "But I discovered the professor had views of Otto von Bismarck that were the opposite of mine. Since I couldn't afford to change universities, I changed centuries. That sounds crazy but it happens to be true." His dissertation was on German-Soviet relations in the period of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

In 1951, he was recruited by Columbia University on a contract with the U.S. Air Force to work on German documents captured at the end of the war. He held this position until 1954 and published a "Guide to Captured German Documents." That work led to his lifelong project of researching and writing about the diplomatic and military history of World War II.

A startling discovery came his way in 1958: an unpublished sequel to "Mein Kampf," written by Hitler. He published the book in German in 1961 and in English, as "Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf" in 2003.

As odious as it was for him to do so, Weinberg feels the publication served an important purpose. "I'm not (Hitler's) press agent, but it does seem to me that a figure that is central to the history of the 20th century who wrote all of two books" should have them both published. "Not that it makes exciting reading, but it is interesting and important. It was published in German in 1961 and now people who can't read German can inform themselves," he says.

Much of Weinberg's research has been focused on the relationship between the Holocaust and the war, an area he believes other historians have often neglected. "So much of the literature on the Holocaust divorces it from a war," he says. "So much of the history of the war that is published would lead you to think that Rommel was sent into Egypt so the pyramids could be dismantled and rebuilt outside Berlin. The reason was to kill Jews. World War II was initiated by people who had ideas in mind."

In his acceptance speech for the award, during the library's annual Liberty Gala, Weinberg thanked his teachers, including those at the University of Chicago, his students, his wife and "all the archivists who responded patiently to a very demanding visitor." His journey through the archives of a number of countries could probably be a book in itself.

He began with American, British and German archives - Russian records were closed during the Soviet era - then had "massive access into Japanese archives, not directly but because Americans were reading and translating enormous numbers of Japanese telegrams and reports," he says. "The U.S. archives had an enormous collection of intercepted Japanese documents of the military kind but also, in the long run perhaps more important, of the diplomatic and political kind."

Until August 1945, Japan had an embassy in the Soviet Union, he says, and when representatives there reported back to Tokyo by telegram, "to a large extent those were being read by our people." In Germany meanwhile, "the Japanese ambassador was very much on the in with the Nazi leadership," he says. "We got an idea from his reports on what the people in Berlin were thinking. For example, the only way we knew that a French collaborator was urging the Germans to make a separate peace with the Soviet Union so the Axis powers could concentrate on defeating Britain and the United States, was because the Japanese representative in Vichy discussed and reported this issue back to Tokyo."

Conversely, he says, the American and British governments knew through clandestine sources that "the Japanese were constantly urging the Germans to make peace with the Soviet Union. They knew that the Bolsheviks had made peace with the Germans in 1918 and had made a non-aggression pact in 1939, and they were very worried that such a separate peace on the eastern front might take place. The Russians were carrying an enormous share of the war, and the leadership in London and Washington watched this with great care." Their fears were never realized.

Meanwhile, after a lifetime of study, Weinberg says that World War II can offer important lessons for today. "Large-scale military operations don't take place away from a society," he says. "They have to be seen as part of a society. When it's not handled that way it can be very bad for all concerned."

That brings him to the current wars in Iraq (winding down) and Afghanistan (gearing up). "I think it's important that our country has been engaged in conflict without most people in the country being related to it or aware of it in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In World War II the people in the White House had a very direct contact to the war," he says, noting that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's sons fought in the war, a cousin had died at Normandy and one of his most important advisors had also lost a son to the fighting.

"On D-Day, the president (Roosevelt) went on the radio and led the people of this country in prayer," he says. "When things in Iraq went wrong, the president (George W. Bush) said 'Bring it on.' There is a disconnect; that is one side of a very difficult issue that people in the future are going to have to think about."

His thoughts about the two current wars are that "we should never have gone into Iraq. We did have to go into Afghanistan. We should have taken that on in the first place. That's where the people attacking us were. Now we have to work to rally the people and the government and get them to be responsible for handling their affairs and controlling their country, and we should help them in that process."

But he worries about the aftermath of both wars. "These kinds of issues are not going to disappear after Iraq and Afghanistan are done," he says. "This is asymmetrical warfare, and people are going to have to find ways to adjust to this, relate to it, not leave all the sacrifices to those on the front lines and their families at home."

In World War II, "we had rationing at home," he says. "People knew there was a war on. There was a sense that this was not just somebody else's business. This relates to veterans' issues. Because of the advances made in medicine, which are going to be greater in the future, we see the survival of many men and women from wounds they would have died from in World War II. What happens to them afterwards?"

That question, he leaves to future Weinbergs to answer.