A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide by Alon Confino (review)

On the basis of extremely careful and wide-ranging research, Confino offers a new perspective on the events that have come to be known as the Holocaust. He shows how the National Socialist government of Germany worked strenuously from the very beginning of its rule in 1933 to promote the idea that all of the evils and problems in the world would be solved with the eradication of the Jews. The Nazis used not only propaganda but also, significantly, public rituals, which Confino conveys through illustrations, most of which are new to the literature on the subject. Two of the most important rituals were the burning of books in May 1933 and the public burning of the Jewish Bible—in the form of torah scrolls taken from synagogues—especially in November 1938. In a small way, the process of total exclusion began with the posting of signs prohibiting Jews to enter certain communities, restaurants, swimming pools, and other buildings and institutions. Furthermore, the deportations of Jewish persons from German cities beginning in the fall of 1941 were also deliberately conducted in public.

Confino shows how in 1938/39, the authorities increasingly prepared the German public for the acceptance of killing as an entirely appropriate procedure; he then provides a summary of the actual killing process. In accord with the general theme of the book, Confino also stresses the systematic collecting of books and archives from Jewish institutions and the effort to remove suspected Jewish elements from Christianity. Unfortunately, he does not relate this procedure to the Nazi plans for the reconstruction of German cities after the war and the building of new German settlements in conquered territory, neither of which accommodated churches, since Christianity was also to disappear.

Adolf Hitler is curiously missing from this account of the Führerstaat, the Leader’s State. Confino makes no reference to Hitler’s telling an enthusiastic Munich audience in April 1920 that all of the Jews had to be exterminated. Nor does he mention Hitler’s report to the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia in January 1939 that the Jews of Germany were to be killed; to the Romanian leader Ion Antonescu on June 12, 1941, that all of the Jews in the Soviet Union were to be killed; to the Croatian Minister of War on July 21, 1941, that all of the Jews in Europe were to be killed; and to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in November, 1941, that all of the Jews on earth were to be killed. The relevant documents have been available for decades, as has the evidence that the Nazis set the Reichstag fire and had prepared arrest lists days before the fire.¹ Advance readers should have caught the erroneous dates for the Allied entrance into Rome and Hitler’s suicide.

Notwithstanding a few criticisms, this book has great value and importance. It offers in a thoroughly documented and illustrated manner a perspective on Nazi Germany that is largely missing from the existing literature. It provides major insights into the new world that the Nazis envisioned, as well as their manner of involving the German people in it.