Alon Confino’s new book posits that the Final Solution was at once a radical rupture and essential continuity in German society, all toward the goal of national redemption and a new civilization.
By GLENN C. ALTSCHULERAlon Confino’s new book posits that the Final Solution was at once a radical rupture and essential continuity in German society, all toward the goal of national redemption and a new civilization(photo credit: REUTERS)
The Jews must get out of Germany, indeed out of Europe altogether,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1937. “This will take some time yet, but it will and must happen.”A year later, on November 9, 1938, Germans arrested Jews, beat them, set synagogues on fire, and burned copies of the Hebrew Bible in hundreds of communities, large and small, throughout the country.With Kristallnacht, Alon Confino claims, “a threshold was breached and a new one set up.” Reversing decades of post-Enlightenment values and a policy of Jewish emancipation, Germans had begun to embrace a “mental horizon” that imagined Germany without Jews.Within a few short years, he writes in A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, an apparatus to turn this wish into a reality was created by the Nazis “in a complete, massive, participatory fashion, without opposition.”A professor of history at the University of Virginia and Ben-Gurion University, Confino draws on the dramatic events in Germany between 1933 and 1939 to argue that the Final Solution was “simultaneously a radical rupture and an essential continuity.” The author acknowledges that anti-Semitic racial ideology and Nazi paranoia about the power of international Jewry underpinned the movement toward total extinction.He emphasizes the Nazi obsession with removing the shackles of history, traditions and morality, including the foundational and fundamental roles Jews played in Christianity, so that national redemption could be achieved and a new civilization created. This led the Nazis to try to see to it in 1938 that Jews had no place in Germany. Accordingly, in 1939, Jews were said to have “no place among human beings” and needed to wither away in some godforsaken territory; in June 1941, mass murder on a wholly different scale from previous violent actions was thought necessary to get rid of them completely and more quickly.Although Confino has canvassed archives on three continents, his argument is speculative. Germans said virtually nothing, he admits, about their motives for burning the Old Testament. It is not easy, therefore, to discern whether Germans separated the religion and race of Jews or conflated them – or, for that matter, whether Adolf Hitler “was as much a part of his culture as he had a decisive role in shaping it.”The evidence he needs, Confino admits, “goes beyond what was explicit and conscious, beyond expressions of beliefs in formal ideology propagated by the regime, into that which was inexplicit and unconscious – sensibilities, emotions, and sentiments revealed in public actions.” And so, he asks readers to accept the proposition that Kristallnacht is a case in which what Germans said “is less significant than what they were silent about.”Perhaps inevitably, then, A World Without Jews turns on generalizations, some of them at odds with one another, about the sensitivities and sensibilities of Nazi leaders and German citizens. Unlike witchcraft prosecutors and Stalinist judges, Confino points out, Nazis did not force Jews to confess their “crimes” or conduct show trials. They did not need to, because their fantasies about Jewish devils “were, in a sense, irrefutable to their believers, for they were not determined by rules of cause and effect.” Even those who retained some skepticism about what Jews supposedly did, he adds, remained convinced of “the reality of their otherness and the threat they posed.”More controversially, Confino claims that Nazi leaders concealed the extermination camps from the German public, “not only because they thought, correctly, that Germans would not sign up for this policy, but also because they shared the general cultural sense of breaking a taboo.” However, he also indicates that German soldiers described killings they witnessed, heard about or participated in “as unleashing a redemptive period of world peace.”While they thought they were winning the war, Confino adds, German civilians deemed extermination a fait accompli, shrugged off misgivings, or thought “the Jews got what they deserved.” And by making Hitler’s prophecy that the Jewish problem would be solved into “a common idiom,” he writes, “Germans showed that they understood very well the mass murder of the Jews.”These concerns should not detract from the compelling case Confino makes in A World Without Jews that the Holocaust was, in no small measure, anticipated in the culture of prewar Germany. Viewing extermination as a result that emerged from the circumstances of the conflict on the eastern front, rather than a goal of the Nazis – who were determined to be free of Jews – cannot account for the depth of their commitment to their redemptive project. Nor can it account for the creation of a new humanity, or their compulsion – even when it was clear that the war was lost – to kill all the Jews (and not all members of any other group).The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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