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    After Documenting Nazi Crimes, A French Priest Exposes ISIS Attacks On Yazidis

    Patrick Desbois has spent the last 15 years uncovering details of Nazi massacres in Eastern Europe and Russia. Using the same methods, the priest is now uncovering ISIS crimes against Yazidis.
    by Eleanor Beardsley Mar 18, 2018 5 minutes
    Patrick Desbois began investigating Nazi crimes because of his family history. His grandfather was deported to a work camp in Ukraine during World War II but never spoke about what had happened. "So I decided to go there one day," he says, "and that's when I discovered that the Germans shot at a minimum 18,000 Jews, plus gypsies, plus Soviet prisoners. But no one wanted to speak about it."

    Patrick Desbois, a Roman Catholic priest, has spent the last 15 years investigating and uncovering the details of Nazi massacres across Eastern Europe and Russia, crimes known as the "Holocaust by bullets."

    During World War II, the Nazis killed some 1.5 million Jews and Roma across the Soviet Union. While the Nazi death camps are well documented, much less has been known about the systematic murdering of Jews in what are today Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and other countries.

    Desbois changed that: He and his team interviewed nearly 6,000 witnesses, reconstructed the details of thousands of massacres and identified nearly 2,500 previously unknown execution sites.

    Desbois founded a Paris-based nonprofit organization in 2004, Yahad-In Unum (Hebrew and Latin for "Together in One"), dedicated to documenting evidence of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and preventing future genocides.

    "We've been working now for more than 15 years to find the

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