Empire of Destruction: The History of Nazi Mass Killing

Speaker: Dr Alex Kay, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Potsdam and lifetime Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Chair: Andreas Moeller, PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London

Nazi Germany killed approximately 13 million civilians and other non-combatants in deliberate policies of mass murder, the vast majority of them during the war years. Almost half the victims were Jewish, systematically destroyed in the Holocaust, the core of the Nazis’ pan-European racial purification programme.

For the first time, Dr Alex Kay’s latest book, Empire of Destruction, examines the genocide of European Jewry in the wider context of Nazi mass killing, considering Europe’s Jews alongside all other major victim groups: captive Red Army soldiers, the Soviet urban population, unarmed civilian victims of preventive terror and reprisals, the mentally and physically disabled, the European Roma and the Polish intelligentsia. Kay shows how each of these groups was regarded by the Nazi regime as a potential threat to Germany’s ability to successfully wage a war for hegemony in Europe.

At this event, the author will discuss his new study. Combining the full quantitative scale of the killings with the individual horror, this is a vital and groundbreaking work.

About the speakers 

Dr Alex Kay is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Potsdam and lifetime Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He specialises in the history of Germany from 1918 to 1945, National Socialist policies of extermination, and comparative research on genocide and violence. He has published five acclaimed books on Nazi Germany, including The Making of an SS Killer. He is currently on a three-year German Research Foundation scholarship.

Andreas Moeller is a PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. His research is funded through an AHRC studentship through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP). Prior to this, he was awarded a Cambridge European Scholarship from the Cambridge Commonwealth, European & International Trust to study for an MPhil in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge. He graduated with distinction in 2017. At the University of Leeds, Andreas pursued undergraduate studies on the History BA programme. He was awarded first class honours in 2014, as well as the Beresford Prize for Economic and Social History (2014), and the Runner-up to the John Taylor Prize (2013).