The secrets of Ukraine's shameful 'Holocaust of Bullets' killing centre

Around 2,000 mass graves of Jewish victims have been located where men, women and children were shot and buried by the Germans and their collaborators.

But there maybe up to 6,000 more sites to uncover, with victims of this 'Holocaust of bullets' - so called because unlike in Poland and Germany where gas chambers were used as the means of slaughter - here most were summarily shot and buried nearby.

In many cases, the Jews were ordered to dig pits and then to strip naked before they were mown down by their murderers.

Some were buried in the unmarked plots while still alive.

Blood oozed through the soil at sites of these graves, according to accounts assiduously collected by French Catholic priest, Father Patrick Desbois, who began his search by seeking to trace his grandfather's experience as a prisoner of war held in a concentration camp by the Nazis in Ukraine during the Second World War.

He uncovered accounts of how Jews were killed by the Nazis 'for fun', or 'out of anger, boredom, drunkenness', or 'to rape the girls'.

Yet the Soviet Union, for its own motives, obscured the full scale of the Holocaust on its own territory.

Leading historian Mikhail Tyaglyy told MailOnline the number of Jewish victims in Ukraine is between 1.4million and 1.6million, significantly higher than the oft-quoted figure of around one million.

The priest's search took him to four sites around Rava Ruska, close to the Ukrainian border with Poland, where 15,000 Jews were slain, and also the site of a Nazi camp where his grandfather Claudius Desbois had been held as a prisoner of war.

Gradually, elderly locals who had kept quiet all their lives - mainly under Soviet rule - opened up to him, as hundreds more did in many other villages and towns in Ukraine.

One account from Rava Ruska was of a Nazi officer who spotted a young Jewish woman running out of the ghetto to buy butter at the market. He ordered her to be stripped naked, and demanded the trader smear her with the butter after which he decreed her beaten to death with sticks. 

In another case he recounted how 'an unspeakably cruel German soldier grabbed a Jewish woman's child from her'.

He added: 'He was barely two years old, and he took him and banged his head repeatedly against the wall... The child died in pools of blood in front of the parent's eyes.'

In separate testimony, an elderly witness called Yaroslav showed him to a site outside the town, and told him how he witnessed the horror of mass killing as a 13 year old boy in 1942.

He was the first of the elderly villagers to speak: many others followed him, here and in other locations.

Yaroslav described how the Jews arrived on foot and were forced to undress before being marched to 'the side of a grave' in Rava Ruska.

'Yaroslav brought me in the forest with 50 farmers, very old people who were present at the killings,' Father Desbois said.

'They described one by one what happened. One person said a German arrived alone on a motorcycle. 

'He rode around the village. At the time, everyone wondered why. It turned out, he was planning the site of what would become Rava Ruska's Jewish mass grave.'

On this occasion, some 1,500 Jews were marched to the huge pit, dug earlier by other Jews who had been killed with explosives.

The group seen by Yaroslav were then shot, their bodies layered on top of each other and covered by local youths from the village who had been requisitioned by the Germans.

Their clothes were ransacked for cash and valuables. 

(dailymail.co.uk)