The Holocaust by Bullets and its Legacy in Contemporary Genocides and Mass Atrocities
Marco Gonzalez is the Director of Yahad - In Unum (“Together in One”), a non-governmental organization dedicated to discovering genocide wherever it is found around the world, providing documented proof of crimes against humanity, and serving as a voice of protest on behalf of all past and present victims of systemic hate crimes and mass murder. Working closely with its well-recognized founder, Father Patrick Desbois, Gonzalez has scoured Eastern Europe for witnesses and corroborating evidence of Nazi war crimes by the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi Death Squads). These soldiers hunted Jewish and Roma citizens across Eastern Europe, village by village. They gathered their victims in groups, shot them and buried them in unmarked mass graves. This dark episode of history has been termed as “The Holocaust by Bullets.”
Although Yahad - In Unum is based in Paris, Gonzalez himself is Guatemalan-born and his work with Yahad-In Unum has a deep personal resonance for him. Growing up in Guatemala, he was always keenly aware of the abysmal human rights record in that region, especially the systematic mass killings of an estimated 200,000 ethnic Mayans, perpetrated by the country’s military dictatorships, mostly during the early 1980s. His current work allows him to raise awareness of the Holocaust to the Guatemalan people and also of its parallel to the tragedy his home country endured in the recent past. In January of 2016, Yahad-In Unum founded The Museum of the Holocaust in Guatemala, the first museum of its kind in Central America.
Gonzalez has also been a leading force in evolving Yahad-In Unum’s mission into that of a modern global humanitarian initiative. The organization has expanded its scope of historical forensic research to also focus on modern day genocide as
well as systemic hate crimes and anti-Semitism that could potentially lead to genocide. Since 2015, they have been investigating the Yazidi massacres in Northern Iraq at the hands of ISIS.
Mr. Gonzalez’s talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.
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