The Holocaust by bullets, shooting in Ukraine - Shoah Memorial

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), Waffen SS units, German police and local collaborators. Only a minority of them were deported to the extermination camps.

Known by the British and the Americans since 1941, these massacres are partially recorded by the Soviet commissions in 1944-45. The main authors of the «Shoah by bullets» 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 accounts of the few survivors and judicial investigations, this story of the Holocaust that took place in Eastern Europe remains little known. Since 2004, Father Patrick Desbois and the research team of Yahad-In Unum have found many Ukrainian witnesses who had seen the massacres or who had been requisitioned during the 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 mass graves previously forgotten and to collect material elements of the genocide (weapons, shells, bullets). It finally becomes possible to preserve and respect the burial of the victims.

The exhibition organized at the Shoah Memorial from June 20, 2007 to January 6, 2008 presents this ongoing research which, by reconstructing the processes of the assassins, leads to a better understanding of how the genocide of the Jews in Eastern Europe was implemented. It proposes to describe the first results of the research team led by Father Patrick Desbois, some of the ballistic evidence found on the sites and a selection of testimonies collected over 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 Soviet territory by troops Nazies.

The violence of the narratives contained in this exhibition invites us to discourage visits to children and adolescents.

This exhibition was created by the Shoah Memorial and the association Yahad-In Unum, with the support of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, in partnership with France Culture and History.

General Commissioner: Sophie Nagiscarde assisted by Marlène Rigler.

Scientific Commission: 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 of history, maître de conférences at the university Paris IV-Sorbonne and Boris Czerny Maître de conférences in Russian language and civilization, Department of Slavonic Studies, UFR of Foreign Modern Languages, University of Caen Basse Normandie.

Assisted by Andrej Umansky, Fanny Chassain and Patrice Bensimon.

Scenography: Natacha Nisic. Contemporary photographs: Guillaume Ribot.

Members of a Einsatzkommando firing on men standing at the bottom of a trench. Circa: 1941-1942. Location unknown. Photographer unknown. © USHMM, courtesy of Supplemental Archive of the Oesterreichische Wideraker.

Simferopol, Ukraine, 2006.
Mass grave where 11,000 Jews were shot. © Guillaume Ribot