The Holocaust by Bullets [antikvár]

FOREWORD Before German bureaucrats met in early 1942 at Wannsee outside Berlin to elaborate plans for the deportation and mechanized murder of European Jewry in extermination camps. Before the Birkenau killing center opened near Auschwitz. Before Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, or Majdanek assumed their full fury. Before all of this, hundreds of thousands of Jews from a number that would grow quickly to over 1.5 million had already been murdered by the Germans, their Axis allies and local collaborators in the towns and villages of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and other republics of the USSR. These first mass victims of the Holocaust were not transported in crowded cattle cars to secluded sites far from their homes, removed from the consciousness of anyone who might have known them as neighbor, schoolmate, client or friend, or who might still acknowledge their humanity. Nor were they murdered in the industrialized killing centers the Nazis built in Poland, with their high barbed wire fences, gas chambers, and crematoria that define "Holocaust" for most of us. These victims —mostly women, children, and old people—were taken from their homes, on foot or by cart or truck, to locations just outside the towns and villages where they lived, if even that far. There they were shot, usually the same day or hour, at close range, face to face or in the back, one human being killing another, and all in the presence