Alon Confino: A World Without Jews: the Nazi Imagination From Persecution to Genocide
The book at Amazon and on Kindle
…That the Nazis’ genocidal purpose survives as an open aspiration of their heirs, radical Islamic terrorists, is proof of the staying power of an evil idea with a particular point of historical origin. So, what did anti-Semitism mean to Hitler’s Germany? How did Germans think and feel about what Nazism so often presented as its central task, the elimination of the Jews? These are questions routinely ignored by Holocaust historians, charges Alon Confino, professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of the recent book A World Without Jews: the Nazi Imagination From Persecution to Genocide. “Historians look to the Holocaust in a too cerebral way,” Confino said to me in a phone interview. “Did [Germans] know about the gas chambers? That’s not a good question. Most people didn’t know about Auschwitz, but still there was a sense of a finale. A sense, a feeling [that the Jews were gone]: It’s the vagueness that gave it power.”…
