The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, Father Patrick Desbois, with a Foreword by Paul Shapiro (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xx + 233 pp., cloth $26.95, pbk. $17.00

Abstract

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.