In Broad Daylight

The Secret Procedures Behind the Holocaust by Bullets

By: Father Patrick Desbois

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.

The mass killings took place across the Eastern Front, in seven countries formerly part of the Soviet Union invaded by Nazi Germany. They followed a secret template, or repeatable script, that included a timetable and involved local inhabitants in the mechanics of death to ensure complicity, whether it was to cook for the killers; to clear, dig, and cover the graves; to witness their Jewish neighbors being marched off; or to take part in the slaughter.

Narrating in lucid, powerful prose that has the immediacy of a crime report, Father Desbois assembles a chilling account of how, concretely, these events took place in village after village, from the selection of the date to the twenty-four-hour period in which the mass murders unfolded. Today, such groups as ISIS put into practice the Nazis' lessons on making genocide efficient.

©2015 Librairie Arthème Fayard (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. English-language translation © 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Narration is annoying!

The book is hard to listen to, good info though, but it takes a while.

Haunting but essential

Most writers need only worry about relating one story. Father Patrick Desbois had an entirely different problem in writing this book - how does one tell thousands of stories?

Over the past 20 years, the author and his foundation have scoured the countries of the former Soviet Union looking for gravesites and witnesses, and they found both in abundance. To date they have discovered more than 2000 execution sites, where Jews were shot and dumped in mass graves by the killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen. Many of these sites were already known to history, others were not. In the towns that played host to these massacres, Debois and his team have interviewed nearly 10 000 people who were direct eye witnesses to, and sometimes even participants in, the shootings.

So how does one tell this tale? Simply listing figures and repeating the same details would quickly get overwhelming and dull. Instead, Debois opts to tell the story of a single day. At least, a day that represents all of those horrible days. He starts the night before the typical execution, and proceeds to detail each carefully planned step right up to the day after the massacre, when the possessions of the victims were sorted and sold off. Each of these steps required many hands.

Who rounded up the Jews? Who transported them? Who dug the ditches? Fed the shooters? Supplied the ammunition? Small though each of these details were, they were essential for the overall goal the Germans had - to murder as many people as efficiently as possible.

To do that, they conscripted locals to do all of the above and more. Many did so reluctantly, other with fervour. Debois paints a picture that is both immediate and intimate, making the horrors of the day all the more terrifying.

This is not an easy read, but a necessary one. The actions of the Einsatzgruppen remain criminally understudied and little known, especially in the West. The scale and efficiency of the atrocities beggars belief.

Rudnicki is a good narrator and does the material justice, with a calm, clear tone and excellent pronunciation of many tricky Ukrainian and Russian names.

Highly recommended.

Wow! From Silence to Hair-Raising Details

Father Patrick Desbois brings to life the silence behind so many witnesses to the Holocaust through the search for the details of how the murders were accomplished in the eastern Europe countries where people were rounded up to be shot. Each of the work details seem to be identified and explained in the words of witnesses, whether they were recently interviewed or deposed in records from the time and only now examined. The author masterfully leads the listener/reader on the journey to examine how, when, where, and importantly the who was involved in the smaller yet overall crime. Excellent weaving of the rural setting in France, which some people might relate to other countries, with the rural setting of the eastern European countries of WWII and now. This is a fascinating book that was just released in audio format and I really could not put it aside for more than a few minutes without being drawn back to it. Haunting. Highly recommending this book since it has applications in understanding current events. Do not wait to read this book!

Masterfully Told

I have read and listened to MANY books about WW2 Europe in general, and the Holocaust in particular, and this ranks in my top 5. The shear volume of interviews and the incredible specifics the interviewers were able to pull out are just amazing. Truly.
If you like “ordinary men” by Browning, this is a good companion book, in my opinion. They both cover the psyche/manipulation of psyche of the perpetrators, but each with their own angle.

Holocaust canon

Father Desbois has delivered a canonical work, not just in Holocaust study as it has never been done before, but in a deep exploration of the human condition that inspires contemplation and self-examination. If I found this book two thousand years from now, in a clay jar in a cave, I’d put it in a bible. The narrator is phenomenal.

Astonishing!

Absolutely unique, powerful, and highly disturbing information illuminates what used to be thought of as having happened in secret. As difficult as it is to learn details of the holocaust, the tone of the author detracts. For bless this dear priest, he waxes on quite incredulous that everybody was guilty and victimized, complicit and compromised in carrying out this "final solution". Still no other holocaust history book I've read in my forty reading years has come close to providing this detailed and painfully intimate account of the brutal and senseless "action". It is mandatory reading for anyone who hopes to maintain his humanity, but is absolutely not for children or the very delicate.

Genaciode behind the lines

This book is highly educational. A must read for people who want to understand the what it was like for people behind the German Russian lines. It’s very graphic in detail though.

Details of Horror

Remarkably researched and detailed, this book allows one to see the horror almost as if we were standing with either the victims or the murderers. There is a lesson to our time and place that this horror has really never ceased. It is still periodically appearing in our world. If we listen to this account we realize that we have a part to play in the continued violence and genocide. Read or listen and then pass it on to a friend.

everyone needs to listen

loved it all if you can say you loved a book about the holocaust. There were points where i had visceral reactions to the descriptions in the book. It was truly eye opening.

a very important message

thia story was. mentioned in a time of me being blind to reality of what was happening in broad daylight a story of murder. a man from a Missouri town mentioned rhis and said it was happening in his US town across the boarder from Kansas they said john Brown. he said in broad day light. driving in a truck I saw a sign in Chicago. said "your war the way you want it" and the Syatems were so good they got away with it. Maybe.....