The Vinnytsia Area: Wehmacht soldiers look on as member of the Einsatzgruppe troop prepares to shoot a Ukrainian Jew kneeling on the edge of a mass grave filled with corpses.© USHMM, courtesy of Library of Congress

Between 1941 and 1944, almost 1.5 million Jews were massacred when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In two and half years, the Nazis killed nearly every Jew in the region. The mass murder was part of the Holocaust, Hitler’s genocide of the Jewish people. Until recently, this chapter of Holocaust history was almost entirely unknown.

The Nazis conducted the majority of their killing by deporting Jews to death camps, located mostly in Western Europe. In the Soviet Union, however, the murder was local. Because of the region’s inadequate railway systems, the Nazis were unable to easily transport the Jews to the camps.  Instead, mobile execution units known as Einsatzgruppen gathered, shot and killed the Jews on their home soil. Villages became execution sites and villagers became witnesses.

After the executions, the Nazis buried their victims in mass ditches and continued on to another village. With bodies and bullets beneath the ground, the perperatrors left behind little indication of what had occurred. Knowledge of the murder was limited mostly to the Nazis and the villagers that had been forced to watch. Traumatized and fearful, few of these witnesses spoke about what they had seen.

Because of their silence and the lack of visible evidence, there existed, until recently, little record of the mass murder that occurred.  The Einsatzgruppen were tried in the Einsatzgruppen Nuremberg Trials, and later in the Federal Republic of German, but a comprehensive understanding of the massacre was never achieved. Many remained unaware that it had even taken place.

In 2004, Father Patrick Desbois initiated an effort to thoroughly detail the genocide history nearly missed.  In his ongoing efforts, Father Desbois asks the aging witnesses to share their memories.  With their help, he is able to locate the evidence that validates historical fact. His goal is to identify and record each site of Jewish mass execution, so he can provide the dead a decent burial and ensure that no genocide goes unnoticed.  He has labelled this chapter of history “Holocaust by Bullets,” as reference to the bullets the Einsatzgruppen used to kill their victims.

An Urgent Cause:

The surviving witnesses are in their late 70’s and early 80’s, and their first-person accounts of history will soon no longer be available. The window of opportunity to collect the evidence is rapidly closing. Without eyewitness testimony, it will be impossible to identify the location of the mass graves and collect the evidence of the genocide.