Holocaust by Bullets - The Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews
The Holocaust by Bullets - A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews.
The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces. Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves.
Between 1941 and 1944, almost one and a half million Ukrainian Jews were assassinated when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The immense majority was killed by Einsatzgruppen firing squads (mobile execution units in the East), Waffen SS units, the German police and local collaborators. Only a small minority was shot after having been deported to extermination camps.
Photo Left - a German soldier shooting an Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnitsa, Ukraine.
Photo Centre - German firing squad open fire on the Jews at the bottom of the pit
Photo Right - Father Patrick Desbois
Despite accounts by the rare survivors and judicial inquiries, this part of Holocaust history, which took place in Eastern Europe, is still virtually unknown. Since 2004, Father Patrick Desbois and the Yahad-In Unum research team have found many Ukrainian witnesses who actually saw the massacres or were requisitioned during the executions of the Jewish population.
The witness accounts that Yahad-In Unum have assembled, and systematically compared with written documents, provide information as to the whereabouts of five hundred forgotten common graves. Various pieces of material evidence relating to the genocide (firearms, gun-casing, bullets) have also been gathered together. It has finally become possible to preserve and respect the victims' burial places.
Introduction to the the Exhibition: The Mass Shooting of Jews in the Ukraine 1941-1944 (with documents, images, photos, videos, news, books)
The Holocaust by Bullets
The photos are simply shattering.
Father Desbois is a great and righteous man. The Jewish people—dead and alive—owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
At first glance, Rev. Patrick Desbois seems an unlikely Holocaust investigator.
Yet this modest Roman Catholic priest from Paris, without using much more than his calm voice and Roman collar, has shattered the silence surrounding a largely untold chapter of the Holocaust when Nazis killed 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine from 1941 to 1944. Read more at Digging up a Holocaust secret Priest helps find nearly 800 mass graves in Ukraine ~ Chicago Tribune
His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution. Read more at A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate ~ NY Times
Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter by bullets was the opening phase of what became the Nazis' Final Solution with its factories of death operating in Auschwitz and other camps, all in Nazi-occupied Poland. Read more at Priest Uncovering The Beginnings Of Nazi Final Solution ~ HuffingtonPost
1 comments:
Photo was first published in SPIEGEL magazine in 1966. In his article "Do Photographs Prove Extermination of Jews?" the photographic expert Udo Walendy proved the photographs to be a fake.
Post a Comment