“Insightful [and] chilling . . . represents Nazism less as a ‘banality of evil’ and more as an ‘intimate brutality.’”—Kirkus Reviews

“In this sensitive intellectual history, Alon Confino maintains that the Nazis envisioned a world without Jews long before they found the means to kill them. This is a book about the Holocaust, but it is also something more: an attempt to make us see how what we call unthinkable was indeed a matter of thought.”—Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands

"In this pioneering exploration and explanation of Nazi antisemitic violence as a failed cultural revolution, Alon Confino's presentation is compelling, convincing, and long overdue. Uncovering new evidence and reexamining what has been known in an original way, A World Without Jews is an important history of culture as an agent of genocide."—Wendy Lower, author of Hitler’s Furies, National Bood Award Finalist

“A very original and persuasive account of the Holocaust. With style, imagination, and confidence, Confino has offered a telling critique of the reading of the Nazis as racial ideologues and shown how Nazi persecution was embedded in Christian imagery and memory.”—Mark Roseman, Indiana University

“With style, sensitivity and nuance, Alon Confino pushes the boundaries of Holocaust history. A World Without Jews will be widely read and keenly debated.”—Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London

“In this refreshingly provocative re-reading of Nazi anti-Semitism, Alon Confino depicts a civilizational reordering of German origins and the making of a radically transgressive new European order. He sensitively analyzes how this counter-narrative was cruelly and fanatically implemented from 1933 on and illustrates it in almost unbearably graphic photographs.”—Steven E. Aschheim, author of At the Edges of Liberalism

An excerpt from A World Without Jews:

A history of the Holocaust must include the history of emotions and imagination of Germans during the Third Reich, for the fundamental reason that the persecution and extermination was built on fantasy. In persecuting and exterminating the Jews, Germans waged a war against an imaginary enemy that had no belligerent intentions toward Germany and possessed no army, state, or government.

The essential motivations for this war were not practical, for Germans and Jews did not have a conflict over territory, land, resources, borders, or political power that often characterizes cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the modern world. In the mind of the Nazis, this was a war about identity. Nothing about Nazi anti-Semitism was driven by a desire to provide a truthful account of reality. Yet it was nonetheless believed by many Germans and therefore was for them real and truthful.

A key to understanding this world of anti-Semitic fantasies is no longer to account for what happened—the administrative process of extermination, the racial ideological indoctrination by the regime, and the brutalizing war—because we now have sufficiently good accounts of these historical realities. Rather, a key is to account for what the Nazis thought was happening, for how they imagined their world. What was this fantasy created by Nazis and other Germans during the Third Reich, and the story that went along with it, that made the persecution and extermination of the Jews justifiable, conceivable, and imaginable?