The Holocaust by bullets, shootings in Ukraine - M Holocaust Memorial

Presentation of the exhibition

Between 1941 and 1944, nearly one and a half million Ukrainian Jews were murdered during the Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. 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 as early as 1941, these massacres were partially recorded by the Soviet commissions in 1944-45. The main perpetrators of the "Holocaust by bullets" were tried at the Einsatzgruppen trial in Nuremberg in 1947-48 and, from the late 1950s onwards, in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Despite the accounts 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 research team of Yahad-In Unum have found many Ukrainian witnesses who had seen the massacres or 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 previously forgotten mass graves and to collect material elements of the genocide (weapons, cartridges, bullets). It is finally becoming possible to preserve and respect the burial site of the victims.

The exhibition organized at the Shoah Memorial from 20 June 2007 to 6 January 2008 presents this ongoing research, which, by reconstructing the methods of the assassins, leads to a better understanding of how the genocide of the Jews was carried out in Eastern Europe. It proposes to describe the initial results of the research team led by Father Patrick Desbois, some of the ballistic 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 retraces 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 the troops Nazies.

The violence of the stories contained in this exhibition invites us to advise against visiting children and teenagers.

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 Police: 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 in history, maître de conférences at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne and Boris Czerny Maître de conférences in Russian language and civilization, Department of Slavic Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Caen Basse Normandie.

Assisted by Andrej Umansky, Fanny Chassain and Patrice Bensimon.

Scenography: Natacha Nisic. Contemporary photographs: Guillaume Ribot.

Members of an Einsatzkommando firing on men standing at the bottom of a trench. Circa: 1941-1942. Location unknown. Photographer unknown. © USHMM, courtesy of the Cookies Archive of the Oesterreichischen Aulrega.

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