Empire of Destruction

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 thirteen 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.