75 years ago, on June 22, 1941, the largest invasion in history got underway. The United States of America was not even in the war yet. Three million men in three major German army groups got underway, followed closely behind by mobile killing units. Twenty-seven million Soviet people would be killed in World War II, leaving in the former Soviet Union a huge collective void that certainly shaped the rest of the 20th century and beyond. It also marked a turning point in the history of the greatest crime in the history of the world.What is relatively unknown by many who think they know about the Holocaust, is that the Holocaust took an especially dark turn, in a Europe consumed in darkness. Due to the poor infrastructure, Jewish victims could not be shipped en masse to centralized murder centers like Auschwitz. Nor were the mass murder camps fully functional at this stage. Rather, it fell to the murderers to kill men, women and children in their own hometowns and villages, in ditches, witnessed by their neighbors. The bodies would be covered over and the killerss would move on to the next town. More than two million people would be murdered at very close range by the Einsatzgruppen, these mobile German execution squads.
Last October, an important story aired on Oct. 4th on CBS 60 Minutes. I’ve known about Father Dubois for quite some time; his book, The Holocaust by Bullets, can be ordered here. I’m glad that his work is having such an impact, and being recognized as groundbreaking. Remember, we are only 75 years after the events… As I am at work on my own book about the Holocaust, I find myself admiring a kindred spirit, in the sense that I’m not Jewish, but Catholic like him. Maybe that is hardly relevant, except to call attention to what happened from the perspective of a non-Jew. For deniers, it won’t make a difference-but as we study, and interview, we become witnesses, too.
And that is why the work is so important. You can click on the map at the bottom and then click on just one of the red dots to see what I mean. You will find out what happened in that small village or town, and even meet the people who saw the horror unfold. And you can spend a day on this page, easily.
His team can’t mark the mass graves that they find-they will be looted- and sadly I already knew what to expect when I reached the comments section of the article on the CBS News web page. And I am told that Father Dubois has received death threats at his residence in Paris.
So think about that, too.
“The Holocaust is marked and memorialized at places like Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau. But nearly half of the six million Jewish victims were executed in fields and forests and ravines, places that were not named and remain mostly unmarked today. They were slaughtered in mass shootings and buried in mass graves in the former Soviet Union, where until very recently, little had been done to find them.
Our story is about a man who’s brought these crimes of the Holocaust to light. He is not a historian, or a detective or a Jew. He’s a French Catholic priest named Father Patrick Desbois. And for the past 13 years, he has been tracking down the sites where many of the victims lie and searching for witnesses who are still alive; many of whom had never been asked before to describe the horrors they had seen more than 70 years ago.”
Lara Logan: So what you’re learning here is completely unrecorded?
Father Desbois: Yeah, if we didn’t come, we’ll never know they killed Jews. These Jews would have never been counted as dead, never known, and the mass grave is totally unknown.
Gheorghe brought us down this road where, he said, all the Jewish families from the village were taken. He told us the day of the shooting he was tending to cows nearby. Now 70 years later, we watched as he traced the victims steps to the edge of the ravine.
See the full report, here. http://www.yahadinunum.org/
Read the transcript and view the report: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hidden-holocaust-60-minutes/
Related article: Voices of ghosts: Remembering the Holocaust’s mass killings
‘I have lived with the Holocaust my entire life — and I still don’t understand how this could have happened’
Teaching History Matters 
