Priest To Speak In Milwaukee About Discovery Of New World War II-Era Mass Graves

A French priest coming to Wisconsin on Tuesday will give a lecture about how he and his organization are continuing to find World War II-era mass execution grave sites throughout Eastern Europe, underscoring how mass graves weren’t limited to concentration camps.

Film of Allied soldiers liberating Nazi concentration camps and finding mass graves of Jewish prisoners is often shown on documentaries. But, the Rev. Patrick Desbois said the Nazis also went into many towns and villages and killed Jews, gypsies and uncooperative local citizens. Desbois called the killings the “Holocaust by bullets.”

“All this shooting was done in public,” he said. “They arrived in the morning … in the village, gathered the population, shot them and threw them in mass graves and went back at night.”

Debois said he was inspired to look into the atrocities by a grandfather who was a camp prisoner on the Poland-Ukraine border and relayed stories of what happening outside the camps. The Catholic priest now heads a Paris-based group called Yahad-In Unum, which brings together Jews, Catholics and others to identify mass killing sites and to videotape testimony from witnesses, many who are now in their 70s and 80s

Desbois said that during the last decade in seven Eastern European countries, about 1,700 execution sites have been found containing the remains of 1.2 million Jews.

The Milwaukee Jewish Federation and Marquette University are sponsoring a free lecture by Desbois in Milwaukee on Tuesday night. The priest said that he expects to encounter relatives of people buried in the mass graves.

“Everywhere I go there are people,” he said. “I have not been in an American city without people telling me, ‘my mother …,’ ‘my grandma …,’ ‘my uncle …,’ ‘the rabbi has been shot this way.’”

Desbois said that researchers at Yahad -In Unum have been examining Soviet and German archives and believe mass execution sites containing another 1 million Jews have yet to be found.

The Milwaukee Jewish Federation is sponsoring a trip to a likely site in Poland later this year.

Desbois said recent mass shootings in France show hatred against Jews and others continues in Europe. He said there is hatred elsewhere, too.

‘Like in the Islamic State of Iraq, where they kill Christians and Yazidis,” he said. It’s the same disease. We have to name a disease. These people are sick and in the name of their sickness they destroy a full part of humanity.”

Desbois said he’ll head to Iraq a few weeks after his Milwaukee appearance.