Presentation of the exhibition

Between 1941 and 1944, nearly one and a half million Jews from Ukraine were murdered during the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. The vast majority died under the bullets of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units in the East), units of the Waffen SS, the German police and local collaborators. Only a minority of them were deported to the death camps.

Known by the British and Americans as early as 1941, these massacres are partially recorded by Soviet commissions in 1944-45. The main authors of the «Shoah par balles» are tried during the trial of the Einsatzgruppen in Nuremberg in 1947-48 and, from the end of the 1950s, in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Despite the stories of the few survivors and judicial investigations, this story of the Shoah that took place in Eastern Europe remains little known. Since 2004, Father Patrick Desbois and the Yahad-In Unum research team have been tracking down numerous Ukrainian witnesses who had witnessed the massacres or had been requisitioned during executions of Jews. The testimonies collected by Yahad, systematically confronted with information from written documents, have already made it possible to locate more than five hundred previously forgotten mass graves and to gather material elements of the genocide (weapons, cartridges, bullets). It is finally possible to preserve and respect the burial of victims.

The exhibition organized at the Holocaust Memorial from 20 June 2007 to 6 January 2008 presents these ongoing research, which, by reconstructing the murderers' processes, leads to a better understanding of how the genocide of the Jews in Eastern Europe was carried out. She proposes to describe the first results of the research team led by Father Patrick Desbois, a part of the ballistics evidence found at the sites and a selection of testimonies collected over the past six years by the Yahad-In Unum team. The exhibition also traces the archaeological expertise of a mass grave, conducted in the village of Busk at the request of the Shoah Memorial by the team of Father Patrick Desbois in August 2006 and whose results confirm the terrible reality of the genocide by bullets carried out between 1941 and 1944 in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet territory by the Nazi troops.

The violence of the stories in this exhibition invites us to discourage children and adolescents from visiting them.

This exhibition was realized by the Memorial de la Shoah and the association Yahad-In Unum, with the support of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, in partnership with France Culture et L'Histoire.

General Commissariat: Sophie Nagiscarde assisted by Marlène Rigler.

Scientific commissariat: Father Patrick Desbois, president of Yahad-In Unum, director of the National Service of the Bishops of France for relations with Judaism, consultant to the Holy See for relations with Judaism, Edouard Husson, doctor in history, Lecturer at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne and Boris Czerny Lecturer in Russian language and civilization, Department of Slavic Studies, UFR of Foreign Languages, University of Caen Lower Normandy.

Assisted by Andrej Umansky, Fanny Chassain and Patrice Bensimon.

Scenography: Natacha Nisic. Contemporary photographs: Guillaume Ribot.

Membres d'un Einsatzkommando faisant feu sur des hommes debout au fond d'une tranch�e

Members of a Einsatzkommando firing at men standing at the bottom of a trench. Circa: 1941-1942. Location unknown. Unknown photographer. © USHMM, courtesy of Dokumentationarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes.