Yahad-In Unum - Research

Research

Yahad-In Unum's seeks to find evidence of the massacres on the Eastern front and locate the mass graves of Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen. YIU's objective is to counter the claims of Holocaust deniers who use the lack of official documentation of the murders to make claims about the validity of Holocaust evidence, and to account for the graves that remain undiscovered to pay respect to the dead.

YIU approaches its work on two fronts—archival research and research trips. The archival research is primarily undertaken by PhD and graduate students in the United States and Germany. The researchers spend several months at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, where they study the Soviet archives of the Extraordinary State Commission of 1944 and the archives from the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Ludwigsburg, Germany.

After the research is complete, an 11 person team, usually led by Patrick Desbois, travels to Belarus and Ukraine to collect testimonial and forensic evidence of the murders. Each trip lasts 15–20 days. The team includes a photographer, ballistics expert, translators, drivers, daily report recorders, a witness interviewer and camera operator. During each trip, the team travels from village to village, where they interview and film the surviving eyewitnesses, using testimony of witnesses to discover the locations of the graves. Once the graves are located, the team uses high-tech equipment to obtain forensic evidence that validates the testimonies. When the team returns to Paris, the translated video testimony and the physical evidence is archived.