How the Murder of More Than Two Million Jews Was Carried Out—In Broad DaylightBased on a decade of work by Father Patrick Desbois and his team at Yahad–In Unum that has culminated to date in interviews with more than 5,700 neighbors to the murdered Jews and visits to more than 2,700 extermination sites, many of them unmarked.One key finding: Genocide does not happen without the neighbors. The … the neighbors. The neighbors are instrumental to the crime.
In his National Jewish Book Award–winning book The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with neighbors of the Jews, wartime records, and the application of modern forensic practices to long-hidden grave sites. has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.
In Broad Daylight documents mass killings in seven countries formerly part of the Soviet Union that were invaded by Nazi Germany. It shows how these murders followed a template, or script, which included a timetable that was duplicated from place to place. Far from being kept secret, the killings were done in broad daylight, before witnesses. Often, they were treated as public spectacle. The Nazis deliberately involved the local inhabitants in the mechanics of death—whether it was to cook for the killers, to dig or cover the graves, to witness their Jewish neighbors being marched off, or to take part in the slaughter. They availed themselves of local people and the structures of Soviet life in order to make the Eastern Holocaust happen.
Narrating in lucid, powerful prose that has the immediacy of a crime report, Father Desbois assembles a chilling account of how, concretely, these events took place in village after village, from the selection of the date to the twenty-four-hour period in which the mass murders unfolded. Today, such groups as ISIS put into practice the Nazis’ lessons on making genocide efficient.
The book includes an historical introduction by Andrej Umansky, research fellow at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, University of Cologne, Germany, and historical and legal advisor to Yahad-In Unum.
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The book’s perspective was unique from the viewpoint of the common people. I broke down in several spots because it wasn’t just the act of genocide, but the process and acceptability by the Jewish neighbors. Touching, thought provoking, and informative. Highly recommended.
This shows much more about the total picture of the holocaust and what happened outside the concentration camps. Scary what the Nazi’s did to people and what they made them do to survive themselves.
What Father Desbois is doing is tremendous… No one else is doing the original groundwork. The evidence he has gathered is very important — the forensic evidence of how they did the killing by bullets.
Bluster can grab attention, but it is details that shake the conscience. Father Patrick Desbois has done the heroic work of documenting, literally down to the bullet, how genocide was perpetrated by the Nazis, and how it was tolerated, even facilitated, by civilians. By doing so, he has not only given us insight into what happened, but what will continue to happen if we, as civilians, are not vigilant. This book should be required reading.
Father Patrick Desbois expands on his earlier study of the Holocaust by Bullets with a deeply disturbing and penetrating account of the mass shooting process as a two-day event that started with a German official’s calculation — the dimensions of the mass grave based on the size of the local Jewish population — and ended with Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and other locals wearing the clothing of their murdered Jewish neighbors. Desbois’s unusual book is a hybrid read — a lyrical memoir of rural life, a graphic crime report that jolts your sensibilities and senses, and an exhortation to investigate genocidaires both past and present. This is among the most detailed and precise accounts of the intense timing and routine methods employed by the Nazis and their collaborators in their torture, murder, and theft of 2.2 million Jews in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
This is an incredibly difficult book to read because of the subject matter. It is also a must read for anyone interested in WW II. I am grateful to Fr. Desbois and his team for uncovering the mass graves and murders of Jews in the small villages of Russia and the Ukraine. Fr Desbois makes the case that these murders couldn’t have happened without the complicity of the villagers.
We are left heartbroken and asking the question, how can you send your neighbors and friends to their death and treat it as a normal event. No good answer has been found as yet.
Excellent reveal of a virtually forgotten part of the Holocaust; explains in excruciating detail how the Nazi regime’s deliberate organizational plans murdered thousands using the local population to facilitate it’s mobile killing machine. As an amateur WWII history “scholar”, I appreciate this deplorable chapter of Nazi behavior seeing the light of day. Never forget.
History which is always a reminder that we need to be alert to our political climate and be prepared to take action when injustices are so evident.
Wow!! What I did not know. It is a hard book to read. I had it on audio, I’m sure that is the only way I could get through it.
Not for the light of heart…
This book is a different angle on the holocost. It is so thought provoking. I keep asking, “what would I have done?” And “could it happen here?” Be ready to be challenged.
Hard for me to read quickly, because of the European slant or origin.
It opens the reader’s eyes to another angle to the Nazi mass genocide of Jews and others in Russia and nearby countries. Slaughter by gunfire. Mass slaughter. Thousands at a time marched to their deaths by firing squads in the villages where they lived. Killing for the sake of killing with no military objective. And compelling locals to participate and watch to execute the diabolical “program”. Can’t get much lower than this on the human totem pole.
To much repitition
This is the true account of the systematic murders of 2.5 million Jewish people in Russia and Eastern European countries, by the Nazi Fascist Germans during World War ll. This book tells how the burial sites were found and verified; and exactly how the Nazi Fascist Germans at the direction of Adolf Hitler committed these murders. They followed a very specific and detailed plan in every village. The local police and innocent villagers were forced to participate by digging mass graves, rounding up their Jewish neighbors, feeding the shooters and much more. It is the horrible Truth of the Holocaust.
This is a horrifying book that every adult should read. The memories of the Holocaust are gradually fading and we need to remember, or if not exposed in the past become aware. Today, it is incomprehensible that human beings could do this to other human beings on the industrial scale that it was persued by the Nazis during their invasion of eastern Europe and Russia during World War Ii. Unfortunately, it’s clear how easy it can happen since it continues to happen since then in Cambodia, Bosnia, Ruwanda.
By the author of Holocaust by Bullets, a revealing inside look at “how they did it.” Highlights the methodical, step by step system of the slaughter of Jewish populations in one tiny town after another. How could the total feature of one schtetl after another have been so thorough and ruthless? Chilling.
If you’re interested in history, read this book. There is nothing like the truth to further your understanding of the depths of human cruelty and depravity.
Very gripping! A topic that is anathema for some to even consider.
An eye opener.
This book is enlightening on the methods of the einsatzgruppen, the soldiers who killed jews with rifles and machine guns rather than gas chambers, in Poland and Russia. The author, a Catholic priest, is a pioneer in the researching of these crimes. Unfortunately he inserts himself and his past into the story and since he was born more than a decade after the war, he has nothing personal that adds to the book in any way. Yet he loves to share meaningless, boring personal memories. It is as if he went to all the trouble of locating those mass graves so he could stand in front of the bones and say “look at me! I want to tell you about my peaceful childhood in rural France during the 1950s.” I think that when he was in seminary he slept through the class on humility. Still, if you are interested in the einsatzgruppen, I’m sure that this in an essential work.