Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 284 pp.

This chapter reviews the book A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (2014), by Alon Confino. A World without Jews focuses on the Nazi rhetoric that called for the complete extermination of Jews in Germany during the 1930s. The book is a response to historians who have emphasized the uneven, experimental evolution of Nazi persecution of German Jews during this period. According to Confino, the Nazi imagining of a world without Jews contributed to the Holocaust well before it started. He argues that studies of the construction and application of Nazi racial “science” have overshadowed the full range of German anti-Jewish behavior, which was founded on antecedents and fantasies. In order to salvage some form of Christianity in the New Order, the Nazis had to conduct a radical purge of history and reformulate German identity.