In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets

by Patrick Desbois

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 Genocide does not happen without 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.

Genres: History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, World War II, Audiobook, Russia, Politics

334 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 23, 2018

About the author

Patrick Desbois is a French Roman Catholic priest, former head of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops' Conference and consultant to the Vatican. He is the founder of the Yahad-In Unum, an organization dedicated to locating the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile-killing units in the former Soviet Union. He received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest honor, for his work documenting the Holocaust.

Reviews

[Pauly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very engrossing book. Father Desbois asks questions about the simple logistics of the Holocaust-by-Bullets that generally haven't been asked and uncovers a great deal of collusion from the local non-Jewish populations in eastern Europe. The interviews he includes with Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians who witnessed the activities of the Einsatzgruppen and their local helpers underscores his conclusions.

[LeeAnne · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have any interest in the Holocaust, this is an essential read. It is unlike any other account I have ever read. It completely changed me and how I view the Holocaust. The Holocaust would have never happened without the help of neighbors. Neighbors are instrumental anytime there is genocide.

World-renowned historian and human-rights activist Father Patrick Desbois spent 15 years interviewing 7,000 eyewitnesses in his research. He estimates that there are no less than 1 million victims buried in 1,200 unmarked, mass graves in Ukraine.

Father Desbois' interest in the Holocaust started at a young age because his grandfather, who helped raise him, was imprisoned in the Nazi prison camp, Rava-Ruska, Ukraine. His grandfather never spoke of his horrible experiences in the camp, which made the young Desbois even more curious about the camp, the Holocaust, and its victims.

In 2002, Father Desbois traveled to Ukraine, so he could see where his grandfather had been imprisoned. When he arrived, he was shocked that 60 years after the Holocaust, there wasn't a single commemoration or marking to acknowledge the 1.25 million Ukrainian Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Desbois knew that 15,000 Jews had lived in the town of Rawa-Ruska but when he asked to see their gravesite, the town's mayor dismissed him, claiming neither he nor anyone else he knew had ever heard about Jews being murdered in their town. How were 10,000 Jews slaughtered in a town but not one person knew anything about it? Father Desbois, the righteous man that he is, became even more determined to find out what happened. He returned to Rawa-Ruska four more times and each time he was stonewalled. Finally, the mayor lost the election and a new mayor was elected.  

The new mayor led Desbois to a wooded area where 50 elderly people gathered in a semicircle around him. One by one the elderly villagers, who had been teenagers or children at the time of the massacre, stepped forward to tell Father Desbouse about their experiences during the slaughter of the Jews. They spoke openly about how trucks and trucks and trucks of sobbing Jewish families were beaten and mowed down with machine-gun fire from dawn to dusk, for days.

In response to this crime, Father Desbois helped establish Yahad-In Unum in 2004: https://www.yahadinunum.org/ This organization collects historical testimony and documents about the mass killing of Jews in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova, and Romania between 1941 and 1944.  Father Desbois estimates that no less than 1 million Jewish victims are buried in 1,200 unmarked graves in Ukraine, alone.

Through meticulous forensic study, 2,900 execution sites of mass graves have since been discovered. Using metal detectors, hundreds of German rifle cartridges and bullets from the pits where the bodies of executed Jews were thrown. Many mass grave sites remain undiscovered to this day.

Parts of this made my stomach turn. One of the most shocking parts is the revelation of how the genocide of Jews in Ukraine and Baltic states was conducted, not by the Germans, but by the local neighbors of the Jews.

Who were these neighbors? They were the local police who hunted down Jewish families, yanking them from hiding their basements and attics so they could be killed. They bashed in the skulls of babies as a method to terrorize Jewish parents into being compliant. They were the local preschool teachers who voluntarily pointed out the Jewish toddlers and children in their care to be collected for execution. They were the local truckers who transported truck after truck after truck of Jewish families to the execution pits. They were the cooks who spent all day cooking hot meals for the gunman who would take turns eating, then shooting, then drinking, then shooting. Apparently pulling triggers is very tiring, well, at least they didn't have to dig the steep pits, they forced the Jews to do that. 

Father Desbois' findings revealed very dark, buried secrets of Eastern Europeans. Millions of Jews were slaughtered all over Eastern Europe, not in concentration camps, but right in their own towns, by their own neighbors.

A very similar book to this, for further learning on this topic that I strongly recommend: Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yahad in Unum means 'together' in Hebrew and in Latin; it is a Jewish and Roman Catholic body investigating the Nazi murder of the Jews, especially the massacres in the former Soviet Union. Father Desbois is a French Catholic priest, though I'm pleased to say also connected with my alma mater Georgetown University. This book completes the details one needs to understand Fresco's The Death of Jews and Lower's The Ravine, where photographs of the atrocities reveal the participation of not only the Germans, but of local militiamen. The subject of local collaboration in the Holocaust in Poland, the Baltic republics, and the Ukraine is still politically extremely sensitive, but Fr. Desbois shows how the German Einsatzkommandos required a huge supporting cast of local police, pit diggers, clothes sorters, caterers (the shooters needed food and drink - lots of the latter), pushers of bodies into the pits, fillers, often covering the still living, and sanitisers to cover the graves with quicklime. The victims weren't stripped of their clothes simply to humiliate them; there was a lively trade in used clothing, often with money and valuable hidden in the linings. Most of the witnesses interviewed by the team had been children or young adults at the time, but their memories of those terrible events were still sharp.

[Todd Settimo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've rewritten this review about 5 times. It's simply too horrific to go into great detail. I'm simply going to say this is one of the more difficult books I've read. I had to read it in small pieces. This was murder committed by the Nazis, for sure, but aided, abetted, and witnessed by the local population.

Imagine that on top of you and your whole family being murdered, that it's done with the complicity, often willing, of your neighbors; people you and your family have been living with on generally good terms for generations. Imagine many are looking on as you are stripped of everything and killed. Imagine that some are even entertained. Imagine that they will bid on your valuables after your murder and will proudly wear your clothing in the street when you're gone.

It happened in village after village far from Berlin. Even in places the Nazis only occupied for a very short time, they found time to murder Jews.

A tough book to read, for sure. But a necessary one.

[Alisa]

I'm not sure how to rate this book, since the subject matter is horrifying. This book is the result of academic research into the murder of entire villages of Jews in eastern Europe during WWII. The author asks questions about the mechanics of it which leads to questions about who was actually involved and what their motivations were, and how people end up participating in genocide. The subject is presented in an accessible writing style, and has been well-researched.

Important reading for everyone, so we can think about how to prevent such horrors in the future.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a chilling exposition of the results of work of a group that investigates the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe - the ex-Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania- by research in archives and also by traveling to rural areas of these countries formerly occupied by the Germans and asking elderly local villagers if they saw anything, if they knew anything. The interviews and perusal of archives turn up information about these massacres that the team uses to put together a more complete picture of the holocaust by bullets - which, it turns out, wasn't secretly performed. The method of the massacres in countless small villages of the vast territory of the former Soviet Union that was occupied by the Nazis is revealed - driven by a precise timetable set by the Germans. This is a powerful volume, which reveals the obsessional dedication of the Germans in wiping out Jewish communities wherever they advanced in the Soviet Union, even if they occupied territory for a short period of time, in large cities and small towns, to tiny hamlets - how ghettos were set up and later "liquidated" or sometimes the Jews of a village were simply rounded up from their homes the day of the shootings and marched to the ditch that would be their mass grave, that had been dug by their neighbors, requisitioned by the Nazis to do the work, overnight. The totalitarian system of the Soviet Union probably facilitated the recruitment of the local villagers, neighbors of the victims, since they were already used to requisitions of their labor, livestock, etc., by the Soviets. Villagers were requisitioned to work on all aspects of the actions except the actual shooting - digging the ditches, pushing the victims in, filling in the ditches, sorting the clothing and goods, and helping with the subsequent public auctions by the Germans of the belongings, furniture, and homes of the murdered Jews. Nazi totalitarianism benefited from dealing with those already used to a totalitarian system - a top-down "command" system where orders had to be obeyed. There was nothing secret about the actions. Sometimes they were public spectacles, sometimes villagers were made to watch, no doubt to terrorize them - sometimes the shootings occurred near schools. The shootings were usually done right by the villages. This is in contrast to Western Europe, where the Jews were usually put on trains and sent to distant camps - concentration, work camps or death camps - away from population centers. Perhaps so that the illusion could be perpetrated that they were being deported to new settlements or even Palestine. Weren't the victims who arrived Auschwitz made to send postcards to their relatives stating that they were fine before they were killed? The holocaust in E. Europe though was carried out in the open, village by village, city by city, as ghetto after ghetto was liquidated, and Jews were often shot one by one near ditches or ravines. The killings could not have been carried out without the help of numerous local requisitioned helpers, diggers, fillers in, sorters, cooks, who were usually "paid" by being given a few articles of clothing of the dead Jews. News of the massacres in E. Europe was suppressed - prevented from reaching the outside world - just as information about the death camps was suppressed, so that the illusion that Jews were merely being relocated could continue to be presented in Nazi propaganda.

This is a compelling book which anyone interested in the Second World War, the USSR, the Holocaust, may wish to read. The text flows easily - it's extremely well-written, and also is a window into the writer's spiritual and intellectual journey, such as when he sees the parallels between his childhood and youth in rural France and the similar rhythms of immutable village life further East in the former USSR. The mass crime of genocide draws into its organization and commission those who use the insane racial ideology to "justify"their criminal rapacity, greed and murderous tendencies, although there may also be true believers of the ideologies - the stealing from and killing of "criminals" thus finds a convenient "cover" in the ideology that transforms the crime of mass killing into a "justified" purification of a nation by "cutting out" a "diseased" portion of the population. The author draws a parallel between the Nazi crimes of 70 years ago and the Islamist crimes of ISIS of today - both are carried out in the name of ideological purity by criminals who nevertheless find their own interests served by the convenient "permission" to steal, rape, and kill, given by insane ideologically-driven leadership.

Here are a couple of quotes:

"My childhood was a universe of manual jobs. Everything was made by hand. That world has been swallowed up today by big industry."

"To think while watching, to try to understand these acts, is already to resist."

"A genocide, on the scale I am looking at, is, above all, human beings who murder other human beings while pretending to "save" a world from a danger. They "save" by killing, because for them the danger is the other."

[MaryCatherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a difficult book in many ways. I would like to provide some wonderful quotes from it, but they are waiting for an Internet connection on my a Kindle, so I can’t. The sheer dedication of the author and his team to track down and interview thousands of surviving witnesses to the shooting of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Communists, resistance, disabled, or others in Poland, Belarus, parts of Russia, and the Ukraine—representing ten years’ work and more study—is an impressive achievement. These witnesses give us a more complete and chilling testimony to how so many were murdered by the Nazi killing machine with much help from villages and cities where the mass murders took place. The sheer number of the dead is overwhelming and the flat statements of how people were enlisted, most forcibly, and with varying degrees of responsibility in the crimes, are chilling to read about. The author’s personal family history drives him on—his own grandfather was imprisoned by Nazis and their family lived near the border, in Bresse, between France and Germany, and was variously raided, occupied, and requisitioned by French Resistance, German Nazis, and roaming bands of pillagers throughout the war. Born after the war, the author tried to learn what happened to make his family silent about so much of their wartime experiences. His questions drive his curiosity and fascination with issues of responsibility and cooperation with atrocities, beginning with inquiries about who dug the graves, who received the items stolen from the victims, how were villagers selected for assisting the murders, etc. The answers he found were mundane as the killings were a fixed and efficient “process,” yet individuals varied greatly in how they felt about their participation, just as some people rush to see a fire or an accident, while others look away from suffering or feel guilt for participating in violence. What I took away from the book was how violent the deaths were and how no resistance could prevent the inevitable killing, despite the great numbers of Jews, including men, women, children, old people, and babies—that they did not meekly lay down to die, but were herded, with death and violence through every encounter, until the bullets were fired into the ditch. And that none of it would have been possible without the enlistment (voluntarily and forcibly) of the local population at nearly every step of the “process.” And like the mass killing pits where thousands died in a day, the local people filled in the ditches, covered them up, and lived with their guilt and guarded secrets, for most of a lifetime. The most awful secret is how all of us could do the same. Whether forced to watch or to dig, or because of simple curiosity, a bent for larceny, or a perverse pleasure in others’ pain, the witnesses—who were mostly children during the war, and very elderly by the time of the interviews—had been complicit in atrocities beyond imagining that informed nearly their entire lives and whose secrets continued to affect succeeding generations. Meticulously researched, an incredible achievement, the author takes care not to overstate his conclusions, choosing rather to let the banalities and contradictions of human nature speak through the many voices and actors to provide a clear picture of what was done, who did it, and how it was accomplished. We come away realizing these were men and women, not degraded monsters, and that we are not different. Raw power, once achieved, exerts force from the top down, and once organized and as its aims become law, we all become complicit the strategic execution of those laws. The tipping point seems to be before that power is given over our lives; afterwards, resistance becomes futile.

[B. Rule · Rating 4 out of 5]

Horror, pure horror. We have a moral duty to witness atrocities with horror. We all want to look away, to forget, to minimize, to deny. We want to see in the killers something alien and corrupted, a monstrous figure who has shed his humanity. But that isn't so. The horror of the Shoah is that that violence is in all of us, and the horror is how banal, bureaucratic, and collaborative it was, is, and will be again. Desbois points out that the Holocaust by bullets on the Eastern Front wasn't perpetrated just by invading Nazis: it was possible only through the willing and at times eager cooperation of German settlers, local police, and Soviet peasants. It was carried out by the Jews' neighbors, who sometimes greeted their Jewish neighbors with a kindly word and a shared cigarette on the edge of the massive ditch they dug to contain those very neighbors' bodies. These people could be us.

It's almost impossible to read these accounts and not imagine what the last moments were like for the Jewish people murdered, or to think about the experiences the collaborators would have had. How would you react if you were roused from your sleep by the police, told to load your vehicle with your neighbors and their valuables, take them to a hole in the woods, watch them gunned down, then shovel black earth on top of the still-writhing bodies? It's the routinization of the "process" that is so terrifying. It becomes inexorable, methodical, and commonplace. It's easy to lose the humanity in the numbers, but each of those killings was an encounter between individuals, despite all efforts to conceal and obscure the fact.

The structure of the book loosely follows the chronology of the "Aktion", describing the process of recruitment and preparation in the days prior, the events of the crime itself, and the follow-up. All is told through excerpts of thousands of interviews conducted by Fr. Desbois and his team. Desbois also interjects a lot of personal commentary. His narration is very, VERY French. It would be almost funny in any other context. You have the sense that the entire thing was written while brooding over cigarettes in a cafe. He waxes philosophical, but it must be forgiven and perhaps even celebrated as an appropriate response to what he describes.

This is not an easy read, but every person should force themselves to confront such things, if only to realize how close the danger of a recurrence always remains. How many horrors are perpetrated in our name even today?

[Ana-Maria Bujor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very simple and yet powerful book. Compiling a series of witness testimonies, it explains how hundreds of thousands of people were massacred in Eastern Europe while many others watched. The stories show the many faces of humanity when confronted with atrocities - some did everything just to watch, others prepared the killers' food, some finished off the dying victims with a shovel while others returned during the night to save whoever could still be saved. Most of the stories present a series of small episodes that become meaningful in the context - the little girl who did not get her coat because the seamstress was killed, the man asking for a cigarette from the neighbor who brought him to be slaughtered, the old lady still crying for her childhood crush.
These small episodes don't tell as much about history as they tell about what it means to be human when the world is turned on its head. And it makes one think: "what would I do?"

[Adam Hummel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book for anyone who knows anything about the Holocaust to read. Father Desbois is a remarkable man.

[Paul Crozier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting but horrifying account of the Genocide caused by the Nazis and collaborators outside of the usual Concentration Camps and Extermination Camp stories I’ve read / listened too.

The sheer number of interviews done by Father Desbois, his team and others is astonishing.. The account interviews range from normal villagers who had nothing to do with this part of the Genocide to the diggers who dug the graves under supervision to the exact specifications of the Nazis.

Each chapter deals with different people from the villages picking up the Jewish people, the diggers who dug the mass graves, to the people who cooked for the Nazis and others ( the list of actions of the people in each chapter involved is too long to list here )

Father Desbois does an excellent job conveying how this Genocidal Mass Murder Machine worked and how normal people got dragged into it and how some people willingly went without question.

There were people who refused to help the Nazis with their plan which makes you ask the question…what would you have done ? I honesty can’t answer that question and I don’t think anyone in the day and age could answer…why ? Because we weren’t there at the time under those circumstances.

The narrator Stephan Rudnicki was a very good choice for this title, his pronunciation of difficult words were with the ease of a professional who has taken time to learn the languages used and place names. I’d listen to more done by Stephan.

If you’re interested in the Holocaust and want to learn something new, relevant and interestingly different from most Holocaust stories I’d highly encourage you to check this title out.

* Paperback & Audiobook Editions - I only listened to a few chapters at a time due to how much of this horrendous era I had read before this and wanted to take it in small parts *

[Zella Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very disturbing but important read that detonates a lot of misunderstandings about the little covered but extremely devastating Holocaust by Bullets that preceded the camps.

For most people, the death toll from the Holocaust automatically brings to mind hellholes like Auschwitz and Treblinka and gas chambers, but French priest Patrick Desbois has made a second career out of investigating and documenting the hundreds, if not thousands, of executions that took place by German forces in the USSR during the war. These Jewish families weren't deported to camps but rather killed close to home in horrific mass shootings, a procedure that changed only because the Nazis felt it was inefficient.

And as Desbois's research reveals, it operated on a well-established procedure that was repeated across Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine that repurposed rural agricultural tools and customs and couldn't function without local assistance, either voluntary or forced. Desbois's organization combs through old archives in post-Soviet countries and interviews elderly peasant witnesses and he interweaves their research with what happened, as well as his own story of how he became involved in the research. Desbois himself is from a farming background in post-war France and was a mathematician before becoming a priest, which likely accounts for his highly analytic style. His dawning realization of the overlap between regular childhood chores and memories with the horrors of genocide on the other side of the continent is especially poignant.

[Jerry Peace · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's funny rating a book a five whose subject is a three year window of atrocity almost eighty years old, which is recognized by all but the most ignorant racist yahoos among us. "Within the present-day borders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine alone, historians estimate the number of Jews exterminated to have been 2.2 million, more than 80 percent of them by bullets..." But this book is only tangentially about the victims; they are undoubtedly worthy but also dead. And it's not really about the Nazi exterminators. Rather, it concerns the memories and actions of the citizens of the hundreds of towns where the murders occurred. It's about the citizens who were requisitioned to string barbwire around ghettos, who dug huge mass graves, who cleaned and separated and auctioned off the victims' clothing, who transported the Jews to their death, who filled in the mass graves, who witnessed the rapes of Jewish women and girls right before their murders. And who witnessed, in many cases, the mass executions, for the Nazis did not hide their actions, did not slink away in the night. This book is a necessary reminder of what we are capable of, through fear or suddenly freed inherent racism or greed or indifference. "And why is it necessary not to sleep well today, seventy years after the Shoah [murder by bullets]? Quite simply, because our genocidal sickness, mass murder disguised as morality, is still with us."

[Nicholas Holloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

The follow-up volume to The Holocaust by Bullets, this book further examines the logistics of the Einsatzgruppen that operated in Russia. Continuing to interview thousands of unwilling (and sometimes, willing) Russians and Ukrainians who were forced to aid the slaughter of their Jewish friends and neighbours, Desbois provides further information as to how the Germans and their auxiliaries were able to destroy 1.5 million human beings.

Heartbreaking and even more shocking is the mechanics of this aspect of the Holocaust. Deeply disturbing testimonies that are hard to read, as Desbois himself said many times. The sickening horror revealed by his interviewees and their personal traumas are very difficult to read but necessary. And their participation was crucial to the "success " of the Holocaust by Bullets.

It was disturbing, in many ways, as to how nazi efficiency was possible only by forcing civilians to help. The methodology was cold and calculated - banal in fact. Looking at the perpetrators in many Einsatzgruppen pictures, I could see this indifference to what they were doing. Of course there were those who did refuse to participate but their actions made no impression on the genocide.

Desbois research over ten years is critical to Holocaust research.

[Lord Zion · Rating 5 out of 5]

What drives seemingly normal people to betray their neighbours and participate in the genocide of an entire race?

In a nutshell, this is the big question asked by the author. However, the targets of the inquisitions are not the Germans who pulled the triggers, but the ancillary characters who, whether forced or voluntarily, contributed to events.

The people that dug the graves. The people that used their carts to transport the Jews. The women who cooked meals for the killers. The men who covered the dead - or nearly dead - with lime. The community who buried their Jewish neighbours.

This does not make easy reading and, like any book on the holocaust, it can never get close to answering those big questions.

Intensely researched, you get a real feel for the author's own agony in hearing testimony upon testimony from seemingly "normal" people, all now in their old age, discussing their involvement. Some live with regret. Some thought it was a matter of (their) life or death. Some joined in, because they could.

I wonder how many of us, in the same circumstances, would join in, free of risk? It doesn't bear thinking about...

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a supremely informative, but also very emotionally difficult, read. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the Holocaust, particularly as I was aware of the Einsatzgruppen but didn't know anything beyond that about their operations in eastern Europe.

The accounts are centered on Ukraine and Russia, and mostly come from villagers in very rural areas who witnessed or took part in atrocities in various capacities, and the range of roles and responses and degrees of willingness in their collaboration is surprising. A central point of the book is that the Einsatzgruppen couldn't have killed nearly as many as they did in the occupied territories without help from the local populations. Sometimes the help was eagerly given, as with local police who became killers and accomplices, and sometimes it was forced. Sometimes villagers seemed indifferent to what they did or saw. Also, there was a sickening degree of planning and method to the killings. The book is in part a recounting of interviews that highlighted different banal-but-essential roles, such as diggers fillers (of the mass graves), and those who transported Jews to the killing site.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting side note: I finished this exactly one year after starting it. I know why. At times, this book was absolutely debilitating to read. Nauseating. Holocaust by Bullets was the same way. It's completely overwhelming to read how methodical and calculated the operations of the Germans in Eastern Europe and Russia were. Desbois once again leaves no stone unturned and uses testimonial after testimonial to provide the facts and details of the Holocaust by Bullets. His work is essential and important and necessary, but I couldn't help but wonder how he listens to all of these first person accounts without wanting to stop. Some of the witnesses describe the executions of Jews in their town as if they were spectator events and, occasionally, as an inconvenience to their everyday life - people that they lived next door to, went to school with, worked alongside. The most upsetting part of reading In Broad Daylight was the realization that this has happened and continues to happen since WWII. Knowledge is power. Forgetting and ignoring is ignorance.

[Jo Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had heard about this author and book, but didn’t read it until we were going on our first trip to Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. I am a student of all WWII history and make sure to honor the dead whenever we travel in Europe by visiting cemeteries and camps. I had a lot of information about camps, but was not prepared for the way the Jewish people of the Baltic’s were systematically murdered near their homes. There was some enthusiastic help from the non-Jewish citizens, and also reluctant help. However, it is clear that citizens helped tremendously to carry out these murders. Instead of being taken to camps, the Nazis traveled from place to place. They then recruited citizen helpers to take part in the murders. The Jewish people were marched from their villages to fields and shot. Outside of Vilnius, Lithuania, we visited one of the largest killing fields. We went on a Sunday morning and there were few other visitors. After reading this superb book, it was so easy to imagine the entire operation. Chilling.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of first-hand accounts of the genocide against the Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, it should go without saying that it would be upsetting. In fact, it has been the most harrowing and upsetting book I have ever read, but it is crucial that such heinous feats of humanity should never be forgotten. The concentration camps at places such as Auschwitz remain a vivid reminder of the horrors of the Nazi regime, but the acts carried out across the former Soviet Union by the Nazis, on a local, village-to-village basis, are less well known despite resulting in the deaths of 1.5 million Jews. The accounts in this book describe the experience thousands of villages witnessed, from how the Jews were rounded up from their homes, their schools, their nurseries, to the scarring experiences of those left to clean up after the Germans had left. This was a brutal, heartbreaking book and for that very reason, I strongly recommend you read it.

[Heiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful. I wasn't sure about reading this, as I was looking for more of a straight history as opposed to a memoir of his craft as a researcher. But I actually ended up finding that side of things very fascinating and humanizing. The author grew up in a small farming village in France, and he relates his youth experiences, to the rural villages in Ukraine where the massacres happened. And it took on the feel of a historical crime scene detective digging up the evidence. So it ended up being an enriching experience of how history is made.

It really shook my perspective on history, as far as any linear progress goes if in 1942 the middle of the 20th century, such a hell on earth could exist. It puts the lie to any straight line of progression from Reformation, Enlightenment, Revolution.

[Marjorie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is profoundly disturbing. I've heard Father Desbois speak about the Holocaust by Bullets. Here he looks in detail about the actual organization behind the murder of Jews largely in the region of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Behind the German troops were thousands of everyday people who were forced (or were willing) to bring their carts, dig trenches, cover up trenches, cook for the Germans (who took time off from the shooting to eat and drink) and sort victims belongings. Sometimes the villagers were forced to watch and sometimes the children came running along to view the spectacle as a respite from daily life. The witnesses are both coy about their acts and desperate to confess. Desbois also provides a portrait of daily life which he compares to his own upbringing in rural France before WWII.

[Glen Chern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witness to Murder

There are few words to describe the immensity of the genocide of News during World War II. The book's author, Fr. Patrick Desbois,, brilliantly describes the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. He spent a decade, through interviews of people who were first and second witnesses of the atrocities. The mass murders took place between 1941-45 and largely in Ukraine and other Soviet countries during the Nazi occupation of Soviet lands during this period.

While most of us have some knowledge of these atrocities, there is a general belief that the Nazis rounded up Jews, put them in concentration camps and executed them. As written by Fr. Desbois, the genocide took place throughout the Soviet Union.

Anyone with an interest for history, especially WW II, should read "In Broad Daylight.".

[Jeff Rash · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was in Ukraine in 2009 and loved the people there very much. I did notice a palpable aloofness though, almost like it was a built in characteristic. I had read some of their history before going but historically there is so much going on due to it being a natural crossroads geographically. Father Desbois's work is so important but I still remain intrigued by the willingness of neighbors to ignore and participate in the death of people they were interacting with just days and weeks before. I can see it even today with the divisiveness we see in social media and the dehumanization that seems almost natural to some. I want to understand but, then again, maybe I don't want to understand people who do not value the uniqueness of the those who occupy this earth with us. Thank you Father Desbois for this insight. It is a must read!

[Kevin Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrific

It details the murder 'process' in many aspects that are often overlooked. The 'police' (locals) and SS who raped girls in broad daylight, shooting parents who tried to stop - teachers pointing out the Jewish children, principals sending kids to watch, the 'requisitioned' who helped due to threat, petsonal gain or sadism. The method of bashing babies skulls in to instill terror and compliance into the rest of the family, the cooks, the forced dances, the voyeurism, the planks, pens, auctions...too many horrors to mention. Every chapter offers imsight into the deeply criminal aspect of the killings and those who willingly and unwillingly did or did nothing to prevent it.

[Jeremy Pynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it were not for the forced labor of villagers throughout Eastern Europe the Nazi regime would not have been able to carry out the mass shootings of 1.5 million Jews from the years 1942-1945. The Nazi death squads (aka Einsatzgruppens) were able to perform these massacres in precise detail due to these requisitioned workers: from the digging of ditches, to the round up, to the march, to the filling of the mass graves these workers played a vital role in carrying out this genocide. Though there are several flaws in Patrick Desbois logic I believe this book is disturbingly necessary for all generations.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an extremely difficult book for me to read. I had to put it down several times before continuing. My family suffered through WW II in the ghettos and Auschwitz and lost many relatives there. I know a great deal about the horrors of WW II through personal stories and books, however other than BabiYar I didn't know about the mass murders of Jews in the Russian and Ukrainian villages.

I am grateful to Fr Desbois and his team for uncovering these mass murders. As he consistently pointed out none of this could have happened without the cooperation of the local villagers. In a number of villages they shooting of their neighbors became an entertainment spectacle. I still can't wrap my mind around that scene.

This is a must read for anyone interested in WW II.

[Amélie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great non-fiction book about the mass shootings of the Jewish population in the former USSR during World War 2. It's the author's account of when he interviewed 4000+ witnesses to those atrocities and parts of their testimonies. I knew that the USSR had been invaded, but I had no clue what went on there before reading this book. It was a real eye opener. I find it important to educate ourselves about the Holocaust and this book is a must-read! Some parts of it can be harder to read, so a small heads-up to those who are more sensitive to graphic descriptions. I recommend this book to everyone!

[Babs M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was about the massacre of the Jews in mass shooting, mainly in the Ukraine. It was different in that the book interviewed many of the villagers that were witnesses and forced to participate in a variety of ways, i.e., cook for the German shooters, sorting through clothing, transport to the area where the ditches were that became mass graves. The first hand accounts by the villagers and city residents were important to hear because we will never understand how this inhumanity was allowed to occur.

[Bess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and engrossing book that really explains the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and the villagers. It’s hard to find this information in a way that makes sense. This is the best book I’ve read on the subject.

The only slight criticism is one I’ve read before and that is the author’s need to inject his own stories into the narrative. Regardless, I admire his work and wish I could work with them to uncover these stories and make sense of the unthinkable.

Hopefully this work will inspire him as it seems to be to continue to work for human rights.

[Michael Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting but worth reading

I was expecting a history of various execution sites, however it covers a more broad approach not by specific regions. The Author and his team interview about 4,000 citizens from various regions of the former Soviet Union and that formed the basis of this book. Each testimony is used to describe how the local population was involved in each execution from digging the mass graves to filling them in. Very vivid and graphic but it is a book that needs to be read.