In Broad Daylight Read online

  Also by Father Patrick Desbois

  The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth

  Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews

  Copyright © 2015 by Librairie Arthème Fayard

  English-language translation copyright © 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Desbois, Patrick, author. | Reyl, Hilary, translator. | Barksdale, Calvert, translator.

  Title: In broad daylight : the secret procedures behind the Holocaust by bullets / Father Patrick Desbois ; translated from the French by Hilary Reyl and Calvert Barksdale.

  Other titles: Voisins du crime. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Arcade Publishing, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017041541 (print) | LCCN 2017043328 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728590 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728576 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Persecutions—Soviet Union. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Soviet Union—Personal narratives. | Soviet Union—Ethnic relations.

  Classification: LCC DS134.85 (ebook) | LCC DS134.85 .D4713 2018 (print) | DDC 940.53/180922477—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041541

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo © Imperial War Museum (HU86369)

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  Historical Introduction by Andrej Umansky

  Introduction

  Part One: The Night Before

  1 The Architect

  2 The Requisitions

  3 The Diggers

  4 The Night

  5 The Rapes

  Part Two: The Morning

  6 Barriers

  7 The Column of Jews

  8 The Girl in Love

  9 The Director of the Trucking Company

  10 The Transporters of Jews

  11 The Layers of Planks

  Part Three: The Day

  12 The Dance

  13 The Cooks and the Shooters

  14 The Curious Children

  15 The Child with the Bullets

  16 The Forced Witnesses

  17 A German Soldier as Spectator

  18 The Transporter of Clothing

  19 The Teachers

  Part Four: The Evening

  20 The Fillers

  21 The Sale

  Part Five: The Day After

  22 The Auctions

  23 The Coats

  24 The Patchworker

  25 The Sanitizer

  26 The Method

  Conclusion: The Photographer

  Afterword

  Notes

  Index

  Photos

  HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

  SEPTEMBER 1941: Eight hundred Jews are shot by a German unit in Pushkin, near Saint Petersburg, in Russia.

  OCTOBER 12, 1941: Three hundred Jewish women and children are executed by German customs officials and Lithuanian police in Palanga, Lithuania.

  THE END OF 1941: Dozens of Jewish families are killed by a German unit in Naro-Fominsk, forty miles from Moscow.

  DECEMBER 1942: Several hundred Jews are murdered by Sonderkommando 11b, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe D1 in Naltchik, in the Balkan republic of Kabardino in southern Russia, forty miles from Georgia.

  These four mass killings during World War II are geographically linked. They mark the farthest reaches of the Shoah by bullets that was perpetrated by German units in Soviet territory.

  Between 1941 and 1944, thousands of executions took place in the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, over an area ranging from Galicia to the shores of the Baltic Sea and from the Muscovite forests to the Caucasian borders.

  Within the present-day borders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine alone, historians estimate the number of Jews exterminated to have been 2.2 million,2 more than 80 percent of them by bullets, with the remainder having been deported and murdered in camps or gas trucks.3 It is for this reason that this period of mass murder of Soviet Jews is called the “Shoah by bullets.” The criminal “method” of murder by firing squad was employed throughout the Eastern Shoah, regardless of the number of victims. It could be a single Jewish family in a small village or tens of thousands of people in a large Ukrainian city.

  From the summer of 1941 through the spring of 1944, the killers repeated the same process over and over: the exterminating the Jewish population—men, women, and children—by firing squad, most often at sites just outside villages and towns. Despite concerns by the Nazis in charge about the psychological health of the executioners, no alternative method was put in place.

  Paul Blobel, the head of Sonderkommando 4a, the main unit responsible for the September 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kiev in the Babi Yar ravine,4 was questioned about the process of executing their Jewish victims by Judge Michael A. Musmanno during the trial of the Einsatzgruppen in Nuremberg5:

  BLOBEL: “Everything went very quietly. It took time, of course, and I must say that our men who took part in these executions suffered more from nervous exhaustion than those who had to be shot.”

  MUSMANNO: “In other words, your pity was more for the men who had to shoot than for the victims?”

  BLOBEL: “Our men had to be cared for.”

  MUSMANNO: “And you felt very sorry for them?”

  BLOBEL: “Yes. These people suffered a lot, psychologically.”6

  Certain members of the German units became veritable “experts,” congratulating themselves on Aktions7 smoothly carried out. Such was the case of Waffen-SS Herbert Wollenweber, a member of Sonderkommando 10a. When questioned about a major execution of Jews in the foothills of the Caucuses, he chose to emphasize his commando’s expertise.

  “The Jews were fairly calm. Schmitt [the leader of the commando] had organized the operation well. He was a fine man.”8

  The members of the death squads accepted the Shoah by bullets as the only efficient method of extermination over such vast territory (almost one million square miles). Franz Halle, a member of the police and Sonderkommando 4a, explained his attitude regarding the extermination of the Jews in Ukraine when he was questioned about the Sonderkommando’s actions in a hearing:

  “Today, I admit that these proceedings were very misguided. At the point we had reached, we should have found other methods of exterminating the Jews.”9

  Halle betrayed no guilt about killing Jews, nor did he question the nature of the orders he received. For him, only the method to be used in committing murder posed a pr
oblem. The murder itself was simply a task to be carried out.

  There is a second major difference between the Shoah in the East and the murder of the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, such as Operation Reinhardt.10 The deportation of Jews to these camps was often done in secret or at least discreetly. Sometimes, in the case of those headed to Auschwitz, the victims were forced to write to their relatives to say that all was well and not to worry.

  The Shoah in the East, by contrast, was not discreet. The victims were publicly assembled, albeit often at first on the pretext of being sent to a labor camp or to Palestine. The mass murder then took place in full view of the victims’ neighbors, the curious, and soldiers or civilians who happened to be there. The following testimony from a German staff sergeant named Sönnecken, a member of the Abwehr,11 appears in a report on the execution of several thousand Jews of Borisov, shot in Belarus in October 1941:

  “In the distance the noise of rifles could be heard all day, the women and children cried and screamed, cars sped through the streets of the ghetto, bringing new victims—all in full view of the civilian population and any German military personnel who happened to be passing by.

  “It might have been possible to block off the site in some way, but non-Jews lived the other side of the street and in the streets adjacent. In their eyes, you could read either apathy or horror, because the scenes they’d witnessed were so horrible!”12

  Maintaining secrecy would have been all the more difficult given that the local population was regularly conscripted to assist before, during, and after the shootings. Sometimes the executioners forced the townspeople to watch the killings; sometimes it was passersby, stopped to ensure that they didn’t get in the way, who witnessed the murders. The presence of spectators, whether forced or voluntary, wasn’t a concern, so long as it didn’t disrupt the efficiency of the operation.

  It may seem surprising, then, that this aspect of the Holocaust has remained so little known, when there has been testimony from witnesses as well as from the executioners and survivors among the victims. The reason for this may be that many of these accounts weren’t published until 1980, when the Black Book by Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg became publicly available.13 Thousands of accounts have yet to be discovered in the Soviet and German archives.

  Toward the end of 1942, the Soviets created the Extraordinary State Commission14 with the goal of recording the human and material damage caused by the Germans in occupied territory. In each formerly occupied district, committees were formed with representatives from the church, the police, and the schools. These committees searched for witnesses to the executions while experts examined the mass graves for medical and legal evidence. More than 25,000 people were interviewed. Several million pages were written.15 Virtually inaccessible to Western historians before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this material is now available in the Russian Federal Archives.

  The German judicial system,16 which to this day continues to investigate Nazi crimes, has questioned hundreds of thousands of people about the extermination of the Eastern Jews. Their memories are preserved in the regional archives of various states, primarily in the federal archives in Ludwigsburg, home of the central bureau for the investigation of National Socialist crimes.

  One would be hard-pressed to find the execution of a Jewish community that was not documented by the testimony of survivors, executioners, or neighbors. It all happened in plain sight. Yet the way in which these crimes unfolded, from the predawn hours well into the night, remains little known to the general public. The goal of this book is to remedy that.

  ANDREJ UMANSKY17

  INTRODUCTION

  I was moved recently to discover the beautiful book by Albert Camus, The Wrong Side and the Right Side.1 Since childhood, I’ve used the terms “the wrong side” and “the right side” to understand myself.

  Camus grew up in a poor family under the Algerian sun and I in the warmth of a joyful family, equally simple and full of love. The wrong side and the right side were imprinted within him, as the nervous system of what he would become: “For myself, I know that my roots are in The Wrong Side and the Right Side, in the world of poverty and light where I lived for so long, the memory of which still protects me from the two opposing dangers that threaten all artists, resentment and satisfaction. Poverty was never a misfortune for me: the light graced it with riches. Even my revolts were illuminated. They were almost always, and I believe I can say this truthfully, revolts in the name of all.”

  The wrong side. I spent my childhood and youth with the sense of dwelling, along with my entire family, on the wrong side of what was, for others, the right one.

  On my maternal side, the Rivière family, my farmer grandparents lived four and a half miles from the center of Villegaudin, a small village in Saône-et-Loire, on the site of a castle, the Château de la Marche, that had burned down long ago. The property now belonged to a Parisian family. We knew everything about the place: the moats that filled with water and frogs in the summertime, the linden trees whose flowers we had to gather quickly in big white sheets as soon as the weather turned hot, the round pond teeming with fish and bordered with ivy-covered stone benches, and, most of all, the acres of dense forest that, under the guidance of my grandfather Émile, a true woodsman, we tended like a fragile pearl. Everywhere there was light.

  My grandmother Victorine embodied the goodness, the smile, and the rigor of the Christian faith. A solid peasant, she not only spoke her native Bressane dialect but also cultivated a French that was refined, almost distinguished. She felt it her duty to serve her landlords when they arrived from Paris to their château. Our farm, our fields, our duck ponds, were for them a place to vacation, a place to spend their leisure time. Victorine called them “our patrons.” They usually arrived in the heat of August for their summer vacation. We were their second home.

  Once their arrival had been announced to the “Château de la Marche” by telephone, we had to open all the doors in their building as well as the wooden shutters that would sometimes creak, still swollen with winter’s humidity. We had to make the beds with big sheets from the armoires, chase away the mice, and then leave discreetly by the little back door behind the kitchen while they came in through the big front door. Therein lay the pride of Victorine Rivière.

  The Parisians must have had the impression that they’d left the house only the day before. The moment they arrived, my grandmother closed all of our south-facing shutters for the length of their stay so they could sunbathe undisturbed. Thus, we spent the entire month of August in semi-obscurity, on the wrong side of our landlords’ lives. It was a semi-darkness I found hard to bear, because I knew we shouldn’t, by our mere existence, spoil their light.

  My childhood was spent between town and country; the back-and-forth between Chalon-sur-Saône and Villegaudin gave our life its rhythm, like a metronome.

  My parents had a small shop in Chalon-sur-Saône that sold cheese and poultry—foods that, in Bresse, are often found at the same locations. At 47 rue aux Fèvres, “Au Bon Gruyère,” life and work were of a piece. In her work clothes, a blue or white smock, my mother practiced the smile she had learned from her mother. “Bonjour Madame, what is your pleasure today?” I heard her repeat this a thousand times.

  Inside the shop, we lived in the shade, in the gray light of walls so close together the sun’s rays could never reach us. We left the warm light of the country for the cold and lightless town.

  The lives of others were our theater; our clients confided constantly. The daughter of one was divorcing, another had lost his dog, a white poodle, and a third had just become a grandfather, at long last! Some railed against the left, others against the right.

  My father had given the strict order to smile, serve, and keep quiet. Their “interesting” lives paraded through our little shop like a living carousel.

  Sometimes we had to leave the stage and descend a small, rough wooden ladder backward to visit the cold storage room or f
etch wheels of Gruyère de Comté or bottles of milk from our basement, which was kept at a constant temperature, like us.

  This wrong side was quite amusing to my eyes. We knew everything about the lives of others, who spoke freely. Our presence didn’t bother them at all. We were transparent. They came to us without makeup. My father would often exclaim, “It’s worse than a confessional in here!” We lived in an opposite time and season from the others.

  I gave myself a task: to know all the inhabitants of rue aux Fèvres, floor by floor, building by building. I made it my work and, perhaps, also my game. They were my planet, my encyclopedia, and my life: Tunisians, Italians, Algerians, Jews, all living on my street. In order to better observe them, I asked my parents to give me a little straw-bottomed chair that I placed conscientiously at the entrance to the store, to the left of the door. I sat for hours watching them pass by, chatting, arguing, going home.

  I also knew the town well from delivering chickens. The telephone would ring: “Hello, Madame Desbois? I’d like a Bresse chicken, about one and a half kilos [three pounds]. Not fatty! Would you prepare it and have it delivered?” “But of course.”

  I knew the clients’ addresses by heart. The chicken, ready to cook, was wrapped in a pretty sheet of glazed paper with the name of our shop. I was proud of it.

  One day, it was raining hard. I had run all the way to my destination on the Grand Boulevard and arrived soaked, protecting the chicken in its glazed paper as best I could. At the entrance to the building, I rang, redid the packaging, and climbed up two flights. The door was opened by a woman, the notary’s wife, who said with a grimace, “Oh, don’t come in! You smell like wet clothes!” Then, with the proper discretion, she slipped me my ten or twenty centimes tip. I went back out into the rain, freed of my precious chicken, my heart a little pinched.

  It must have been on that day, returning to the shop, that I decided to apply myself to my studies. I didn’t want to remain the transparent assistant forever, living in the gloom, serving the inhabitants of the right side of the world who leaned so heavily on our wrong side.