Seventy years on from the end of the Second World War the full, shocking scale of the Nazi-inspired Holocaust inUkraine is finally being revealed – thanks to pioneering work by a French Catholic priest to research the truth of the industrial-scale killing.
Around 2,000 mass graves of Jewish victims have been located where men, women and children were shot and buried by the Germans and their collaborators.
But there maybe up to 6,000 more sites to uncover, with victims of this ‘Holocaust of bullets’ – so called because unlike in Poland and Germany where gas chambers were used as the means of slaughter – here most were summarily shot and buried nearby.
In many cases, the Jews were ordered to dig pits and then to strip naked before they were mown down by their murderers.
Some were buried in the unmarked plots while still alive.
Blood oozed through the soil at sites of these graves, according to accounts assiduously collected by French Catholic priest, Father Patrick Desbois, who began his search by seeking to trace his grandfather’s experience as a prisoner of war held in a concentration camp by the Nazis in Ukraine during the Second World War.
He uncovered accounts of how Jews were killed by the Nazis ‘for fun’, or ‘out of anger, boredom, drunkenness’, or ‘to rape the girls’.
Yet the Soviet Union, for its own motives, obscured the full scale of the Holocaust on its own territory.
Leading historian Mikhail Tyaglyy told MailOnline the number of Jewish victims in Ukraine is between 1.4million and 1.6million, significantly higher than the oft-quoted figure of around one million.
The priest’s search
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