By 1941, a lot of people were tired of Germany, which couldn’t seem to shake its habit of declaring war on the entire world. That year, an eccentric Jewish American journalist named Theodore N. Kaufman published a book called Germany Must Perish!, in which he suggested that the only means of achieving world peace consisted in the sterilization of all Germans and the partitioning of the country’s territory among its neighbors. Kaufman promoted his proposal by placing ads in the New York Times and the New York Post and sending miniature cardboard coffins to reviewers. A few bemused pieces ran in Time magazine and other venues, but Kaufman’s most dedicated readers were Nazis: the regime presented him as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt; Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels printed five million pamphlets summarizing his ideas; and Adolf Hitler used his text to argue that sterilizing Germans was a “primary” American goal.