The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (review)

Father Patrick Desbois, director of the French Conference of Bishops’ Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish religion, has written a lucid account of a part of the Holocaust that started before the full fury of the extermination camps was reached. Desbois has traced the gradual annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews, an undertaking that began long before the Wannsee Conference. These early victims were not loaded onto trains and taken to already existing death camps far away. They were rounded up and taken by foot, cart, or truck to the outskirts of their towns and massacred by bullets in the presence of neighbors.

The murderers were the Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht soldiers, Romanian enlistees, Ukrainian policemen, and Volksdeutsche volunteers. The locales of the killing—hastily arranged mass graves in field and forest, most bearing no discernible markers today—long failed to attract the same attention that scholars devoted to the extermination camps. The story was obscured by Soviet secrecy and popular antisemitism. Gradually scholars have explicated the bureaucratic Holocaust of Western and Central European Jewry in camps the Germans located in occupied Poland, but with one or two exceptions, the killing fields of Ukraine have remained all but unknown. In particular—as Paul Shapiro points out in a foreword that is a model of contextualization—the Jewish specificities of Nazi mass murder were a taboo topic in the USSR. The murdered Soviet Jews counted as “peaceful Soviet civilians” or “heroic Soviet resistance fighters.” The political orchestration of the postwar trials of war criminals and their indigenous collaborators added a Stalinist layer to the Nazi shroud of secrecy.

The situation began to change with Perestroika and increasing access to Soviet and post-Soviet archives. But another measure of progress came with the efforts of Father Desbois and the Yahad-In Unum Association, supported by the Catholic Church in France and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. After the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the USHMM launched an intensive effort to microfilm the Holocaust-related documents held in the various archives of its successor states. The collections were voluminous and included such bodies of documentation as tens of thousands of war crimes trial records formerly held in the KGB archives. No country was so ardent in their pursuit of the killers as the USSR, and the Museum has collected over five million pages of Soviet trial records thus far. Yet the material remains to be fully utilized.

Until the investigations of Father Desbois shed such intimate light on the massacres, there had been little certitude about the location of many murder sites and the way the murders were carried out there. The author describes in the opening pages of The Holocaust by Bullets the factors that brought him to what became a project to locate and study the killing sites and to videotape the testimony of the hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw friends, neighbors, and schoolmates slain. Desbois credits his grandfather’s story of incarceration as a French deportee in Camp #325, located in Western Ukraine, as one of the experiences that moved him to study the Holocaust. An early visit to that site provided the push that motivated the author to undertake his mission, eventually assembling a team that included an interpreter, a ballistics expert, a photographer, an archival scholar, translators, and lawyers.

The hundreds of testimonies Desbois and his team gathered jibe with German and Soviet documentation long available. But they bring to the attention of the world for the first time the emotional impact the genocide had at the time and the emotional consequences that witnesses still bore sixty years later. They convey a human dimension difficult to extract from bureaucratic reports. The witnesses recount in intimate detail...