Empire of Destruction

A History of Nazi Mass Killing

By: Alex J. Kay

Narrated by: Tom Lawrence

The first integrative history of Nazi mass killing - showing how policies of mass murder were crucial to the regime’s strategy to win the war.

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

Alex Kay argues that the genocide of European Jewry can also be examined in the wider context of Nazi mass killing. For the first time, Kay considers 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. He 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. This groundbreaking work combines the full quantitative scale of the killings with the individual horror.

©2021 Alex J. Kay (P)2021 Yale Press Audio

Detailed, compelling. Shocking. One of the best I’m aware of on the topic.

Recommend for anyone who has more than a basic knowledge of the subject, and for those who do not.

Bleak, terrifying. Plumbs the depths

Can highly recommend as a wide-ranging survey of Nazi eliminationist practice. Superb and clear narration. A pdf download of the citations and sources would have been appreciated. Why doesn’t the publisher include this?