Alex J. Kay

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Alex J. Kay (born March 8, 1979 in Kingston upon Hull , England ) is a British historian with a focus on National Socialism , who has emerged primarily with publications on the hunger plan and the National Socialist genocide of Soviet Jews.

After studying history at the University of Huddersfield and the University of Sheffield in his home country England (BA and MA degrees) , Kay received his doctorate in 2005 under Ludolf Herbst at the Humboldt University of Berlin in Modern and Contemporary History with the thesis Reorganization and Hunger Policy: The Development and Compatibility of Political and Economic Planning within the Nazi Hierarchy for the Occupation of the Soviet Union, July 1940 – July 1941 . In 2006 he was awarded the first George L. Mosse Prize by the renowned journal Journal of Contemporary History for his contribution, based on this dissertation, to Germany's State Secretaries, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of May 2, 1941 .

Kay contributed to the scientific research and the drafting of texts for the touring exhibition of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe "What was right then ..." - soldiers and civilians before the courts of the Wehrmacht , which opened in June 2007 in Berlin . He was the head of the traveling exhibition of the Hesse Archive Advice Center at the Hessian State Archives in Darmstadt Preservation - Protection of Cultural Property in the Hessian Municipal Archives , which was shown from February 15 to March 29, 2011 in the Darmstadt House of History. From 2006 to 2014 he was also a freelancer at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War and presented other publications on the German-Soviet War . Kay has published articles in various German newspapers, including the national daily newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung , the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel and the national weekly newspaper Der Freitag, published by Jakob Augstein .

From 2014 to 2016, Kay was the scientific project coordinator of the English-language edition of the 16-volume series The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (VEJ) , which is currently in preparation, and has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2016 . Since 2017 he has been teaching at the Historical Institute of the University of Potsdam.

Perpetrator biography

Kays' study The Making of an SS Killer , a biography of the SS officer and direct Holocaust perpetrator Alfred Filbert , which was published in English in 2016 and in German translation in 2017 , received a particularly positive response . It was largely positively discussed in English and German-language journals, including German History , Central European History , the American Historical Review , sehepunkte and the Historisch-Politischen Buch . In German History , Waitman Wade Beorn wrote: "Alex Kay has crafted an intensely compelling and detailed narrative of the life of one Nazi killer. [...] Most impressively, Kay manages to pack detailed analysis, broader implications, the life trajectory of Filbert and a good number of excellent images into only 126 pages. [...] Kay has written a book that is accessible to both scholars and students alike (and which would make a great companion book for a Holocaust course). " In Central European History , Christopher Dillon noted, "An impressively researched piece of scholarship, drawing on personal interviews and documentation from more than thirty archives. [...] [Kay] provides an extremely interesting and exhaustively researched perpetrator case study that will be essential reading for specialists. " In the American Historical Review , Peter Black wrote: "Kay has provided a significant addition to the biographical literature of the Nazi annihilation apparatus; one can only hope that more individual biographies or a strong collective biography will follow." For the sehepunkte Henning Pieper wrote: "Kay has presented an impressive study based on in-depth research in archives and making full use of the current literature [...] To study the Holocaust based on perpetrator biographies makes this book an invaluable contribution.. " In the historical-political book Ludger Tewes summed up : "The disclosure of this profile helps in the interpretation of the background to such terrible perpetrators. There should be more of this work."

The book was also received positively on German radio. In the show Gutenbergs Welt on WDR 3 , Uli Hufen commented: "[...] the shocking biography that the British historian Alex J. Kay has now written about Alfred Filbert is all the more welcome." The review by Jürgen Matthäus at H-Soz-Kult can be described as mixed to positive , the final verdict being: "Alex Kay's book not only enriches Holocaust research, but also shows what a biographical approach to understanding genocidal" Direct perpetrators "can do and where they reach their limits." There were only a few negative voices. In the historical magazine , Edith Raim made negative comments about the biographies of perpetrators in general, without specifically subjecting Kay's Filbert biography to a detailed criticism: "As necessary as it is to research the Holocaust, it is just as unproductive to examine the biographies of individual perpetrators from it To single out the division of labor mass murder and to reduce the necessary multiple perspectives in this way. "

Publications

Monographs

  • Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 . Series: Studies on War and Genocide, Vol. 10, Berghahn Books, New York / Oxford 2006 [Zugl .: Berlin, Humboldt-Univ., Diss., 2005 udT Neuordnung and Hungerpolitik ] (paperback edition 2011), ISBN 1-84545- 186-4 .
  • (Edited with Jeff Rutherford and David Stahel) Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization . With a foreword by Christian Streit. Series: Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe, Vol. 9, University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY 2012 (paperback 2014), ISBN 978-1-58046-407-9 .
  • The Making of an SS Killer. The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert , 1905–1990. Cambridge University Press , Cambridge 2016, ISBN 978-1-10714-634-1 .
  • (Editor together with David Stahel) Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 2018, ISBN 978-0-253-03680-3 .

Articles (selection)

  • Germany's State Secretaries, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941 . In: Journal of Contemporary History . Vol. 41, 2006, No. 4, pp. 685-700 (awarded the George L. Mosse Prize 2006).
  • Revisiting the Meeting of the State Secretaries on May 2, 1941: A Response to Klaus Jochen Arnold and Gert C. Lübbers . In: Journal of Contemporary History . Vol. 43, 2008, Issue 1, pp. 93-104.
  • "This will undoubtedly starve tens of millions of people." German economic planning for the occupied Soviet Union and its implementation 1941–1944 . In: Transit (European Review) . Issue 38, 2009, pp. 57-77.
  • Starvation as a strategy of mass murder. The meeting of the German State Secretaries on May 2, 1941 . In: Journal of World History . Vol. 11, 2010, Issue 1, pp. 81-105.
  • A "Was in a region beyond State Control"? The German-Soviet War, 1941-1944 . In: Was in History . Vol. 18, 2011, Issue 1, pp. 109-122.
  • "The Purpose of the Russian Campaign Is the Decimation of the Slavic Population by Thirty Million": The Radicalization of German Food Policy in Early 1941 . In: Alex J. Kay et al. (Ed.), Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization . University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY 2012, pp. 101-129.
  • Death Threat in the Reichstag, June 13, 1929: Nazi Parliamentary Practice and the Fate of Ernst Heilmann . In: German Studies Review . Vol. 35, 2012, Issue 1, pp. 19-32.
  • Transition to Genocide, July 1941: Einsatzkommando 9 and the Annihilation of Soviet Jewry . In: Holocaust and Genocide Studies . Vol. 27, 2013, Issue 3, pp. 411-442.
  • German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and their Implementation, 1941–1944 . In: Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon (Eds.), Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 . Oxford University Press, New York 2014, pp. 163-189.
  • Dr. Hanns Martin Schleyer : "I am an old National Socialist and SS leader" . In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.), Täter Helfer Free Rider, Volume 6: Nazi victims from South Baden . 2nd, revised edition. Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2017, ISBN 978-3-945-89306-7 , pp. 301-311.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ page by Dr. Alex Kay at the University of Potsdam (employee profile) .
  2. ^ Wigbert Benz : Review of Alex J. Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder. Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 . In: Archive for Social History online , No. 48, 2008.
  3. ^ Journal of Contemporary History . Vol. 42, 2007, Issue 3, p. 420. The winners are named here .
  4. ↑ Ulrich Baumann and Magnus Koch (eds.), "What was right then ..." - soldiers and civilians before courts of the Wehrmacht . be.bra verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 258. ISBN 978-3-89809-079-7 . The previous stations of the traveling exhibition are listed here .
  5. ↑ An article on the exhibition can be found here ( Memento of the original from May 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.staatsarchiv-darmstadt.hessen.de
  6. ↑ "Many tens of millions of people are becoming redundant" . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 13, 2007, p. N 3.
  7. ^ Counterproductive Murder . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 18, 2010, p. 14.
  8. ↑ False heroes . In: Der Tagesspiegel , January 2, 2013, p. 23.
  9. ↑ Starvation according to plan . In: Friday , January 23, 2009, p. 11. Chronicle of an announced murder . In: Friday , March 18, 2010, p. 12. Certain death . In: Friday , July 25, 2010, p. 12. Is the Reich War Flag forbidden? . In: Friday. Community , August 6, 2012.
  10. ↑ Directory of lectures and lecturers as well as page from Dr. Alex Kay at the University of Potsdam (employee profile) .
  11. ^ German History, Vol. 35 (2017), Issue 4: pp. 666–668.
  12. ↑ Central European History, Vol. 50 (2017), Issue 2: pp. 280–282.
  13. ↑ American Historical Review, Vol. 122 (2017), Issue 5: pp. 1707-1709.
  14. ↑ Henning Pieper: Review of: Alex J. Kay: The Making of an SS Killer. The life of Obersturmbannführer Alfred Filbert 1905-1990, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh 2017 . In: sehepunkte 18 (2018), No. 9 [15.09.2018].
  15. ↑ Book Review No. 35 . In: Das Historisch-Politische Buch, Vol. 66 (2018), Issue 1: p. 37.
  16. ↑ WDR 3 - Gutenbergs Welt, March 4, 2018.
  17. ↑ Jürgen Matthäus: Review of: Kay, Alex J .: The Making of an SS Killer. The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990. Cambridge 2016 . In: H-Soz-Kult, January 20, 2017.
  18. ↑ Historical Journal, Volume 305 (2017), Issue 3: pp. 888–889.
personal data
SURNAME Kay, Alex J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian with a focus on National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingston upon Hull , England