A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide is a 2014 book by Alon Confino published by Yale University Press, which seeks to explain Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust by looking into the imaginations and fantasies of Nazis. It received mixed reviews in scholarly and popular publications. Some reviewers praised Confino's analysis for its originality, while others criticize it for making assertions that are not sufficiently backed by evidence.
Confino dismisses some widely accepted explanations for Nazism, especially those that heavily emphasize racism, as too simplistic. [1] [2] He focuses on the period 1933–1939 and on public actions and statements. [3] His answer to the question of why the Nazis committed genocide against the Jews is that "Jews represented time, symbolizing evil historical origins that had to be eradicated for Nazi civilization to arise." [4] This opens up new areas of analysis: imagination and fantasy as well as ideology. [4]
Rather than stressing racism, Confino proposes that Nazi antisemitism transcended racism, even in its use of so-called scientific racism. Instead, Nazism twisted ideas about science and race to accommodate an extreme antisemitism partly derived from Christian antisemitism. [1] What was more important than scientific racism was telling a story about national origins. [1]
Confino rejects the idea, promoted by some historians and Christian apologists, that the Nazis sought to eradicate Christianity: "Their aim was not to eradicate Christianity but to eradicate Christianity’s Jewish roots". [1] This aim was based in an extreme version of supersessionism that would end the conflict between the contradictory truth claims of Judaism and Christianity. [5] Hitler used the anti-Jewish struggle to justify World War II: "Jews gave the overall meaning to the Nazi fight between good and evil: the messianic struggle to create a Nazi civilization depended on the extermination of the Jews." [1] When the Nazis burned Torah scrolls during Kristallnacht in November 1938, he contends, they severed a key link with the past and made it possible for both Germans and Jews to imagine "a world without Jews." [6]
Instead of focusing on concrete anti-Jewish policies, Confino explores the "sensibilities and emotions" that lay behind them. [1] In so doing, he verges into a psychoanalytic analysis of Nazi leaders, although he avoids "blatantly Freudian terminology." [5]
Confino also tries to steer a middle path between approaches that present Nazi antisemitism as a rupture with the past and those that view it as an extension of previous phenomena. Although he argues that "The Holocaust was the first experiment in a new humanity achieved by extermination, a humanity liberated from the shackles of its own past," [5] he also contends the Nazis' actions were rooted in centuries of Christian tradition. [5] Controversially, he asserts that the rupture with the past carries over into Holocaust memory, where "extermination as a sort of genesis" has continued: "The Holocaust has haunted the postwar imagination because the European-wide extermination provided for Jews, Germans, and Europeans a story of origins and new beginning". [2]
David Cesarani praised the book, although he found it to gloss over some detail of anti-Jewish persecution which would have complicated Confino's argument. He praised Confino's "thought-provoking" analysis of speeches by Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels from 1941 to 1945. Cesarani writes that Confino's book will appeal to those who believe that the Holocaust was unique. [1] Israeli historian Amos Goldberg stated that "A World Without Jews is to my mind one of the most important books on the Holocaust to be published in recent years; it constitutes both a methodological and a historical breakthrough". [7]
In a positive review, Ferenc Laczó describes the book as "a path-breaking cultural historical analysis of Nazi sensibilities, fantasies, and agendas" and praises its "innovative and insightful interpretation." However, he has "minor reservations" about the book's tendency to generalize and overlook heterogeneity in German society and states that the book lacks a "thorough grounding in social history". [2]
Richard Steigmann-Gall writes that the book is an outgrowth of Confino's earlier book, Foundational Pasts , which defended a culturalist understanding of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. He writes that "There is much to commend in Confino’s book" but that it suffers from lack of attention to detail in some areas, due to being composed as an extended essay rather than a monograph. [5]
Susannah Heschel is more critical of the book, arguing that Confino does not justify his conclusions with sufficient evidence, often makes unhelpful generalizations, and fails to place developments in their historical context. She wrote that Confino often fails to credit others who did more in-depth research than he did, and came to the same conclusions first. She argues that Confino never answers the question raised in the subtitle, of how Nazism went "from persecution to genocide". [4]
According to Jeffrey Herf Confino's book "displays repeated gaps between assertion and evidence." His method "impute[s] motivations and emotions to actors based on what they did, how they looked when they did it, and what they kept silent about"—which Herf argues is "dubious." Herf argues that Confino needs to do more research in archives to find evidence that would corroborate his conclusions. [3]
There were several other reviews. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]
The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
The Destruction of the European Jews is a 1961 book by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus, until the book appeared, little information about the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany had "reached the wider public" in both the West and the East, and even in pertinent scholarly studies it was "scarcely mentioned or only mentioned in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war".
David Cesarani was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998).
Yehuda Bauer is a Czech-born Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Saul Friedländer is a Czech-Jewish-born historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
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The Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941 was an encounter between Adolf Hitler and the highest-ranking officials of the Nazi Party. Almost all important party leaders were present to hear Hitler declare the ongoing destruction of the Jewish race, which culminated in the Holocaust. The meeting is less known than the later Wannsee Conference.
Racism in Poland in the 20th and 21st centuries has been a subject of extensive study. Ethnic minorities made up a greater proportion of the country's population from the founding of the Polish state through the Second Polish Republic than in the 21st century, when government statistics show 94% or more of the population self-reporting as ethnically Polish.
Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 is a 2016 non-fiction book by David Cesarani.
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war:
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
On 30 January 1939, Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler gave a speech in the Kroll Opera House to the Reichstag delegates, which is best known for the prediction he made that "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" would ensue if another world war were to occur.
Alon Confino is an Israeli cultural historian. He currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and a Professor of History and Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East is a controversial 2014 Yale University Press book by German historian Wolfgang G. Schwanitz and Israeli historian Barry Rubin. The authors argue that there is a high degree of similarity in the ideologies of Nazism, radical Arab nationalism, and Islamism. The book received a mixed reception with some historians criticizing the authors' methodology and conclusions.
Parole der Woche was a wall newspaper published by the Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP from 1937 to 1943. Historian Jeffrey Herf describes Parole der Woche as "the most ubiquitous and intrusive aspect of Nazism’s visual offensive ... no form of Nazi visual propaganda made so crucial a contribution to the regime’s presentation of ongoing events".
The question of how much Germans knew about the Holocaust while it was ongoing continues to be debated by historians. With regard to Nazi Germany, some historians argue that it was an open secret amongst the population, whilst others highlight a possibility that the German population were genuinely unaware of the Final Solution. Peter Longerich argues that the Holocaust was an "open secret" by early 1943, but some authors place it even earlier. However, after the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a claim associated with the stereotypical phrase "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst".
Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable/defensible, necessary, and/or sanctioned by law. Genocide justification differs from genocide denial, which is the attempt to reject the occurrence of genocide. Perpetrators often claim that genocide victims presented a serious threat, justifying their actions by stating it was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide. Genocide is often camouflaged as military activity against combatants, and the distinction between denial and justification is often blurred.
The claim that there was a Jewish war against Nazi Germany is an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted in Nazi propaganda which asserts that the Jews, framed within the theory as a single historical actor, started World War II and sought the destruction of Germany. Alleging that war was declared in 1939 by Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, Nazis used this false notion to justify the persecution of Jews under German control on the grounds that the Holocaust was justified self-defense. Since the end of World War II, the conspiracy theory has been popular among neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
The international Jewish conspiracy or the world Jewish conspiracy has been described as "the most widespread and durable conspiracy theory of the twentieth century" and "one of the most widespread and long-running conspiracy theories". Although it typically claims that a malevolent, usually global Jewish circle, referred to as International Jewry, conspires for world domination, the conspiracy theory's content is extremely variable, which helps explain its wide distribution and long duration. It was popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century especially by the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Among the beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy are Jewish Bolshevism, Cultural Marxism, Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, White genocide conspiracy theory and Holocaust denial. The Nazi leadership's belief in an international Jewish conspiracy that it blamed for starting World War II and controlling the Allied powers was key to their decision to launch the Final Solution.
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