In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets by Father Patrick Desbois (review)

Few historical events have been so well documented as Nazi Germany's attempt to annihilate the Jews. In recent years, however, French priest and researcher Father Patrick Desbois has shed light on a major aspect of the Shoah that had hitherto been neglected: the murder by the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi death squads) of millions of Jews in mass shootings in the occupied Soviet Union. Desbois became interested in the "Holocaust by bullets" for personal reasons: he served as an advisor on Christian-Jewish relations to the French bishops and the Vatican, and his grandfather, a member of the French resistance imprisoned in a World War II POW camp in Rava-Ruska, Ukraine, witnessed a mass shooting of Jews. While Debois's book suffers from several frustrating flaws and omissions, it is an admirable case study of the uses of oral history.

After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators shot many Jews, Romani, partisans, and people with disabilities—in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia alone, nearly two million Jews died. The reason why this aspect of the Holocaust nearly faded into oblivion is tragically simple: almost no one survived the mass shootings; it was the inmates still alive in the concentration camps at the time of liberation who could later write memoirs or give testimonies. While there were many witnesses to and participants in the shootings, until the early 2000s Holocaust scholars neglected these women and men as potential resources to understand this history. This changed when Desbois and his multinational team of volunteers interviewed nearly 6,000 witnesses to what he has dubbed the "Holocaust by bullets" in the ex-Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (In Broad Daylight contains no information about whether the researchers archived the interviews).

Desbois's previous book, The Holocaust by Bullets (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2009), focused on Ukraine and offered only a cursory overview of the shootings themselves. In Broad Daylight expands Desbois's geographic scope and tries to outline the specific procedures the Einsatzgruppen used to carry out the Holocaust by bullets. From interviews with witnesses, Desbois and his team tried to piece together and chronicle the structure of how the Holocaust by bullets looked in a typical Soviet village: the sealing of the ghetto the night before a massacre, the actual shooting, local women cooking for the perpetrators, the auctioning off of the murdered people's property, and the pouring of lime on the soil to get rid of the blood. In Broad Daylight, then, is an ambitious attempt to use oral histories as the primary sources in writing about an overlooked piece of history. But, just as with any other primary source, Desbois's interviews have limits which become clear at several points in the book. For example, he could not deduce why the Germans sealed ghettos the night before a shooting. To get a fuller picture of this aspect of the Holocaust by bullets, Desbois consulted relevant archives to fill in the missing information.

While much of the book is about reconstructing the technical history of these massacres, Debois also devotes time to reflecting on the behavior of non-Jewish bystanders during the Holocaust, a topic that has been the subject of significant debate. He and his team recorded examples of both those who felt compassion for their Jewish neighbors and sometimes risked their lives to hide them, as well as those who participated in the murders or were coldly indifferent. Undoubtedly reflecting his background as a priest who listens to confessions, Desbois emphasizes that even under extreme circumstances people have moral agency. These interviews help us to understand better that there was great variation in what the Gentile bystanders in Eastern Europe thought.

Desbois also uses the interviews to discuss the idea of anti-Semitism being the sole cause of the callousness of some of his subjects' reactions to...