Thursday, March 10 from 18:30
in partnership with the CRIF and Cercil
meeting with
Michael Prazan
around his book
Einsatzgruppen:
the footsteps of the Nazi death squads
(Editions du Seuil)
Mic Hael Prazan , born in 1970, is a documentary filmmaker, and author of several books including The Fanatics , history of the Japanese Red Army (Seuil, 2002 ) and Peter Goldman, the brother of shadow (Seuil, 2005). He also writes for various newspapers and magazines.
Einsatzgruppen was originally a documentary film about the death squads responsible for liquidating the enemies of the Reich in 1941. The book seems to contain the information threshold of the survey: literally, "Einsatzgruppen" means "advocacy groups". These 3,000 men launched in June 1941 in the wake of the German armies to conquer the Soviet Union were the zealous performers of the first phase of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question." Men, women, children, all are covered, slaughtered in large shootings by German formations and their local auxiliaries. Three months after the massacre of Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, where 33,771 people are executed in two days, the Baltic States are declared "Judenfrei" free of Jews. In the summer of 1942, close to 1, 5 million Jews who were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. The same year, the decision is taken by Hitler to continue the extermination of Jews in Western death camps and erase the traces of the massacres in the east. To do this, the Nazis formed commandos Jewish men charged with digging up and burning the corpses, and pledged themselves to certain death.
For this investigation, Michael Prazan found unsung archives and unpublished testimonies collected: "Sixty-five years later, traveling the Eastern Europe, the Baltic states on the borders of Romania, Galicia in the Crimea, I went to meet the witnesses, the few survivors and their tormentors. I walked the ravines, fields, marshes and cities that were the scene of mass executions. I found the rare burials, pits and anonymous places of memory as many scars left by this unprecedented disaster. Here, this mixes with the history, geography is the cadastre of a huge cemetery. MP