Word: holocaust
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...contain several mass graves, and he now suspects there may be another 1,800 graves scattered across the country. Ukraine's graves - many of them just depressions in the ground, suggesting the weight of hundreds of bodies - were neglected through decades of Soviet rule. Now, with many of the Holocaust's witnesses in their 70s and 80s, Desbois feels he is running out of time. "In five years," he says, "there will be no more witnesses...
Historians have long known that the Holocaust involved mass executions, as well as concentration camps. Yet despite the mountain of literature, films and photographs documenting the Holocaust, Desbois has filled in a crucial missing piece of history by interviewing hundreds of people who witnessed the Ukrainian killings firsthand. "The testimony is just unbelievable," says Paul Shapiro, director of research for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is honoring Desbois at a dinner in the capital in April. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish-rights organization in Los Angeles, is awarding Desbois a Medal of Valor...
...years, Holocaust researchers have relied heavily on accounts from Jewish survivors, and on official German and Soviet archives; about 16 million pages of Soviet reports are now housed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. But Desbois has taken Holocaust research in a new direction. As he sees it, his work is more like "a police investigation," in which he tracks down eye witnesses, cross-checks their stories, and hunts for graves and bullet shells. The resulting voices of hundreds of witnesses provide a window into how a well-organized genocide could occur in these Ukrainian communities with no one choosing...
Unearthing the Truth Unlike the industrial-scale, anonymous genocide in death camps such as Auschwitz - the world's iconic images of the Holocaust - Ukraine's killings were often terrifyingly intimate. While 400,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered in concentration camps, about 1.1 million were shot dead at close range. The murders were often in full view of neighbors and acquaintances, many of whom the Nazis deployed to dig and cover the graves, then to distribute the belongings of the dead. The fact that locals sometimes received these possessions, or were ordered to help in the executions, may partly...
...quickly came to be known. Over the course of the next few months the Japanese army essentially became an ungovernable mob, and before some semblance of order was restored, an estimated 200,000 Chinese were killed and 20,000 women were brutally raped. Well before Hitler's Holocaust in Europe was planned, let alone set in implacable motion, the events in Nanking essentially established the paradigm for the conduct of World War II. By which one means that both sides subsequently conducted unrestricted warfare against civilian populations, making no distinction between them and military forces. If there is a difference...