ABSTRACT
This chapter adapts the arguments put forward by scholars such as Alon Confino, Saul Friedländer, Michael Burleigh, and Wolfgang Wippermann regarding the relationship between race and religion in Nazi antisemitism and anti-Jewish policy that culminated in the Holocaust. It demonstrates that the comprehensively “coordinated” racial state built by Hitler and the Nazi regime was a concrete representation of Nazi fantasies of “a world without Jews”—a utopian world purged of Jewish culture, religion, and, ultimately, Jewish people. Their racial state reinforced the antisemitic attitudes of non-Jewish Germans, including Protestants, who comprised roughly 60% of the German population during the Third Reich. A tiny minority, including Württemberg pastor Julius von Jan, thought and acted courageously on the behalf of German Jews at great risk to their own safety. However, such a stance was exceptionally rare in Nazi Germany. Even if most Protestants did not actively call for the physical destruction of their Jewish neighbors, by elevating the German Volk to quasi-divine status through theologian Paul Althaus’s doctrine of the orders of creation, many could envision a world without Jews.
