Father Patrick Desbois, a resident of Paris, speaks about his investigation of the mass murder of Eastern European Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War.
His extraordinary work in unearthing evidence of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine from 1941-1944 is recorded in his book Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. His team visits the sites of these murders and interview surviving witnesses, many of whom were recruited by the Germans to assist in the executions.
He has received a number of awards for this work, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Humanitarian Award. Father Desbois is president of Yahad-In Unum, an ecumenical organization that supports Catholic and Jewish projects in Europe, and has been involved in Catholic-Jewish relations in France and around the world throughout the past decade.
Bio
Father Patrick Desbois
Father Desbois has devoted his life to researching the Holocaust, fighting anti-Semitism, and improving the relations between Catholic and Jews. He is the advisor to the Vatican on Jewish relations and the founder of Yahad-in Unum.
In 2004, Father Desbois began leading missions to the Ukraine and Belarus, where he interviews witnesses to the Jewish massacres between 1941 and 1943. In these interviews, he allows the witnesses to give voice to what they saw, recording their testimony in the first-ever systematic investigation of the Nazi's massacres of Jews in former Soviet territory.