https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Systematic-coordinated-genocide-556643
Father Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, has devoted the past 15 years to locating the mass grave sites of Jews who were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile mass murderers. In his 2009 book, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, Desbois documented the shooting murders of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews.
His second book, In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures Behind the Holocaust by Bullets uses interviews, wartime records and forensic methods to locate hidden, mass grave sites to provide yet another account of mass killings, this time of Jews in seven former Soviet bloc countries.
Desbois’s interest in the Holocaust began in childhood after he learned that his grandfather, a French soldier, had been deported to a Nazi prison camp during World War II. After studying Judaism, Jewish culture and antisemitism, he embarked on his quest to visit the Jewish execution sites in Ukraine and Belarus. Shortly thereafter, he founded Yahad-In Unum, an organization that collects information about the mass murder of Jews that took place from 1941 to 1944 in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania.
Desbois and his organization have interviewed more than 5,700 witnesses and visited more than 2,700 extermination sites. With simplicity, he poignantly describes the timetable, coordination, mechanization and spectacle of the genocidal process committed in broad daylight. His accounts describe how these events occurred repetitively and systematically from village to village. As the Nazis arrived empty-handed, local resources became tools for killing and pillaging. Because every resident in the Soviet Union was required to register, the Germans had an easy time locating all the Jews.
Although many are familiar with the death camps where Nazis gassed millions of Polish and German Jews, fewer are aware of the extermination of Jews by firing squad in eastern Europe. While the deportation of Jews to concentration camps was handled discreetly, the “Holocaust by bullets” was conducted openly with full participation of local communities. The German killers moved from town to town, requisitioning what they needed from the local population, including labor, vehicles, food and other provisions. With clock-like precision and coordination, shooters, police, transporters, diggers, cooks and others worked together as part of a genocidal machine.
