According to Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois, many more than six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
After interviewing more than 1,200 witnesses, Desbois has uncovered upwards of 700 previously unknown Jewish mass graves in Eastern Europe, where he believes at least 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews are buried.
Since 2004, Desbois has worked painstakingly, documenting and mapping the site of Jewish mass killings by Nazi mobile killing units in Eastern Europe before the so-called Final Solution of death camps was later implemented. Having made his way through the Ukraine, he went to Belarus last year. He believes that the actual number murdered by such mobile killing units is far higher than all previous estimates.
"What we can say is that the number of shootings is without any comparison. If you look only at the German archives, you'll find five to six times less than what we found. It's sure that at the end, the number will increase," he said on Tuesday, at a gathering in New York City hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and reported in the Jerusalem Post.
"This killing began the first day of the war, and finished the last day of the war."
Desbois began his research about five years ago. He said that his grandfather, who was held at Rawa-Ruska in the former Soviet Union which functioned as a death camp after 1942, mostly refused to speak about the experience, but he always said, "Outside the camp, was worse," said Desbois. "For me, I was wondering, what is worse?"
In 2004, Desbois established Yahad-In Unum, meaning "together" in Hebrew and Latin, to collect forensic evidence of the killings. The organization also maintains an archive in Paris. In November, Desbois published a book, The Holocaust by Bullets, which documents his findings to date.
During one of his trips to Eastern Europe, Desbois said he went to one farming village where 100 old farmers met with him. They took him to a mass grave, recalling that Germans had listened to music and played a harmonica while Jewish workers dug it. They secretly placed explosives in a field, and sent Jews from the town to rest in the area, where they were killed.
Desbois and his team used a metal detector in the area and recovered fragments of the harmonica, along with bones and German shell casings. The German policemen used one bullet per Jew, and they buried alive whomever they failed to shoot and kill, Desbois said.
Like so many Holocaust research projects, his is a race against time. It is a painstaking process, with his researchers cobbling together files on each town using documents and maps that are part of Soviet and German archives.
Desbois tries to get precise information regarding where the Germans stood, whether they brought dogs, which streets they blocked off. Forensic scientists then return to the scene and look for evidence, such as shell casings or neglected jewelry.
If the Holocaust was a secretive extermination in the West, it was public in the East, he said.
"Anybody who had a pistol could be invited to be in the killing group," he said. Local Germans sometimes organized the killings.
For Desbois, a primary goal is not only to document what happened more than 60 years ago, but also to protect the mass graves, which are vulnerable to looting. He has encountered antisemitism along the way, and travels with bodyguards.
The recipient of honorary degrees from Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University, Desbois has been honored by Jewish organizations around the globe. In June 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy named Desbois Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur for his research.
