60 Minutes - 10/4/2015: Hands Off the Wheel, Patrick Kennedy, The Hidden Holocaust

Episode Date: October 4, 2015

Correspondent Bill Whitaker takes a look at the race to develop driverless cars powered by a form of artificial intelligence. Correspondent Lesley Stahl speaks with former Congressman Patrick Kennedy about his new book, including how he fed his addictions while he was a congressman. And correspondent Lara Logan reports on a dramatic finding about the Holocaust that we never knew before. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. We are at probably the largest transformative moment in the history of the automobile. That's quite a statement from the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But as you'll see tonight, the biggest names in the auto industry and high tech are racing to develop driverless cars, powered by a form of artificial intelligence. So this is like no hands, no feet, car is in charge. Yeah, the car is in charge. You put vodka in water bottles. I put vodka in Poland spring water bottles and I put oxy

cotton in bear aspirin bottles. Patrick Kennedy is talking about how he fed his addictions while he was a congressman. What he writes in his book is some pretty explosive stuff about himself and about his famous family. Are you worried about how the family's going to react? I know how some of them are going to react. They're not pleased? No. They're angry? They're angry.

What have we learned about the Holocaust that we didn't know before you began your investigations? I learned that you like to see other people dying in front of you, killed by other people, when you're sure you will not be killed. It was a dramatic finding, one of many revelations this selfless French priest discovered about the Holocaust that we never knew before. The method that he's used, extraordinary. We can understand minute by minute what happened in hundreds of localities where before we just had fog.

I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Morley Safer. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Lara Logan. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription

phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Car accidents cost us much more than time and money. They also take a staggering number of lives. Every year on American roads, nearly 33,000 people die, almost all because of driver error. That's the equivalent of a 747 full of passengers crashing once a week for a year. Self-driving cars could save more than two-thirds of those lives. That's what the nation's top auto regulator told us. It's no wonder the biggest names in the auto industry and high tech

are racing to develop driverless cars powered by a form of artificial intelligence. Six years ago, Google rolled out a prototype that jump-started the competition. Today, Apple and Uber are experimenting too. We wanted to see how far the technology has come. So we hit the road in Silicon Valley, the new Detroit for self-driving cars. What do you have to do to make the car take over? I just pull this lever and now now it goes. System is active. Computer scientist Ralph Hertwig runs autonomous vehicle research for Mercedes-Benz. He punched in a route and took us for a 20-mile drive

on city streets and highways in this S500, the company's most advanced self-driving prototype. So this is like no hands, no feet, car is in charge. Yeah, the car is in charge. Right from the start, the car astonished us. As we approached our first intersection, it slowed down and steered itself into the left turn lane. Traffic light ahead shows. It's a German car, so naturally it has a German accent. That was the voice of Hertwig's secretary. So it just took off by itself when the light turned green, and now it's making this left turn by itself with other traffic around. This is absolutely amazing. Just two minutes into

the ride, we entered a freeway on-ramp. If you think a normal merge is nerve-wracking, try it with a driver who's talking with his hands. I must admit, I find it a little disconcerting that we're driving toward the freeway and you don't have your hands on the wheel. Shall I put them back on? Would that make you feel more comfortable? Herdwick gave us a rare opportunity to go on an actual test run near Mercedes' Silicon Valley lab. Almost every major automaker is working on the technology here. Nissan has teamed up with NASA. Auto parts maker Delphi put its system in this Audi. It was the first to drive itself across the country.

Back at that merge, don't hold your breath for the car to step on it. This S500 won't break the speed limit. Are you going to have little old ladies driving up behind you, beeping the horn to get going, get moving? Some people have remarked that the car itself, in some cases, drives a bit like an old lady. That's fine with us for the time being.

Especially since the car has driven about 20,000 miles without an accident. Mercedes made its name selling the passion for driving on the open road. Now it sees a future in the growing desire to be driven through traffic jammed streets. What's fueling this? People are increasingly asking for this. People probably have become used to live more with computers and interact with computers and they feel more comfortable doing this. And so all of a sudden we see this interest and, hey, there are certain situations where I don't want to drive. Can your car do it for me? First, you're amazed. Then, you begin to relax. Surprisingly, it took less than 10 minutes to feel comfortable with the car in control. This is amazing. But don't get too

comfortable. That's not good. Those beeps, that's not a sound you want to hear. It means the car senses trouble and needs a helping human hand. Now the vehicle asked me to take over. At this intersection, that silver car got too close. This is, for example, I'd rather took over. It would have managed, but I really was... That guy was getting into our lane there. It only happened a few times while we were driving around.

Hertwig says teaching the car to handle encounters like that silver car on chaotic city streets with impulsive human drivers will keep his engineers busy for the next decade. I'm not an engineer, but how do you figure things like that out? The important thing about an autonomous vehicle is it has to have a very good sense of its environment. A vehicle cannot react to something it does not see. So we have to be very careful that we see everything that happens around us. The car sees with an array of cameras and radar sensors designed into the body, constantly

scanning up to 600 feet in all directions. We can actually detect more quickly that something is happening that may cause an accident than the human driver can. So these cars would actually be safer, you're saying, than a human driver? That's what we aim for. That's what Google is driving for, too. Its autonomous cars rely on roof-mounted laser sensors to see the road. In the last six years, its fleet has driven more than a million miles. We're getting to a place where we're comparable to human driving today. Robotics scientist Chris Urmson is the director of Google's self-driving car project. He invited us inside his Silicon Valley garage where the autonomous future is taking shape.

Google's a tech company, not a car maker. Absolutely. But the heart of what makes the technology work is the algorithms and the software. And that's one of the things that we are really quite good at. There are so many variables, so many different scenarios. How is it possible to put all of that knowledge into a car? And that's really the trick, right?

And that's what makes this hard. You can't just kind of go through and enumerate, you know, the thousand different scenarios it might encounter because it's not a thousand. There's an infinite number of them, right? And so the trick is to develop these algorithms that can generalize. By generalize, he means think. And this is how it works. The algorithms are trained to recognize other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, and animals from their movements, size, and shape. Each car's daily driving experience is analyzed, uploaded, and shared. The cars can then make predictions

and choices based on the collective knowledge of the fleet. Look in the lower left corner as one of Urmson's cars encounters a pickup truck that stops to parallel park. Now, how does the computer know that it's someone intending to back into a parking space and not someone who's just stopped in the street? Our cars have seen thousands and thousands of vehicles, and they get a feeling, you know, they get a feeling, really, for what the behavior of those vehicles are going to be. Really. So it's seen lots of cars backing up, and so it understands if there's a space here

and a car stops just in front of it, that means it's going to probably back into that spot. My smartphone has computer glitches. My computer has glitches. How do you get people to trust that this computer on wheels is not going to have a glitch? We're all used to our bits of home computing doing funny things, right? And what you have to remember is they're engineered and designed very differently. The way we develop the software, the way we develop the hardware, the way we think about redundancy,

the way we think about the situations it has to deal with on the road is completely different. Right now, the technology can't handle snow. Google's cars can't operate in heavy rain. The Mercedes S500 can't decipher hand gestures from traffic cops or pedestrians. Four million miles of roads in the U.S. must be mapped in ultra-high-definition detail. The automakers call these solvable problems. In the meantime, the car industry plans to automate the driving experience feature by feature, what some are calling revolution by evolution.

The revolution is already being televised in ads. Backup collision intervention, which can break even before you do. In showrooms today, you can buy features to automatically keep you in your lane, help you park, drive you in stop and go traffic, and coming soon, hands-free highway driving. Tesla is making it available this month. GM plans to offer it in a 2017 Cadillac. We are at probably the largest transformative moment in the history of the automobile. Mark Rosekind is head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

He is optimistic but also National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. He is optimistic, but also realistic about this new technology. This is really different than just thinking about the engine parts and the tires. Now we're talking about cars or computers. So issues related to cybersecurity and privacy are just as big an issue as the defect in the manufacturing process. Someone can hack your computer and steal your money, but someone can hack your car and you can die. People have to trust these vehicles. If they read or suspect in any way that they literally could be one virus away from a crash occurring, they're not going to get in that car. They're not going to buy it. They're not going to

let it drive them. That whole future evaporates. Rosekind also worries about a future in which drivers place too much trust in the cars. Think about how some of this is being sold. Oh, you can take a nap. You can read the paper. What would you do if you had to take over in a certain emergency situation? Nobody has that future totally nailed yet. Mercedes and other major car makers say humans will always have a role in driving. But Chris Armson of Google says it's dangerous to require humans to snap to attention and take control at a moment's notice. So the company stopped developing cars that put humans on call. Now it's testing 25 fully autonomous electric prototypes custom built for the job. So I would punch in where I wanted to go and it would just take off and go

there. And take off, you press the little go button under here, pull away from the curb, take you where you want it. For safety, the cars max out at 25 miles per hour. They don't need steering wheels or pedals, but they have them to comply with current California law. The goal of this is to improve the remote assistance link. Jamie Wado oversees the engineering. She used to work at NASA on autonomous vehicles of a different sort, the Mars rovers. Doing self-driving cars here on Earth is actually more challenging in a lot of ways. More difficult than driving across the surface of Mars. I think so. Humans are so unpredictable,

and so having to try to have a car who can out-predict an unpredictable human is amazing and really, really hard. Google's cars have been in nine minor accidents in self-driving mode. All the company says the fault of humans driving in the other cars. Google and Mercedes told us if their technology is at fault once it becomes commercially available, they'll accept responsibility and liability. But all involved expect fewer crashes as the technology evolves. For now, it's accelerating to the near future and beyond. This is Mercedes' vision for the year 2030, the F015. So we have an app. You can summon it with your phone.

The car will start and come to you. German engineer Peter Lehman took us for a test drive at an old naval base on San Francisco Bay. The car's radical design was shaped by expectations of life in the future. You turn your back to the steering wheel. Mercedes is planning for overcrowded cities, perpetual gridlock, and an autonomous car to drive the stress away.

Now you can relax or you can look at a movie. So you have really gained time. I feel like I'm driving into the future right now. Yes. A future, Google's Chris Urmson says, is coming. And coming fast. So how long before that day? So I talk about this as I have two children, 11 and 9-year-old.

And the 11-year-old is going to be able to get a driver's license in about four and a half years. And my mission is to make sure that doesn't happen. You want him to have a driverless car. I want him to have a driverless car. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast

chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. The youngest child of Senator Ted Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy, was supposed to be the heir apparent to a political dynasty. But after his father died, Patrick resigned from Congress and is now leading a political movement to change the way people view and talk about mental illness and addiction that he himself suffers from. He says they're medical issues, not moral issues or character flaws,

and he wants them treated with the same urgency we treat cancer and heart disease. Now nearly five years sober, he has written a memoir, A Common Struggle, in which he traces not only his struggles, but those of his famous father and mother, revealing details about them that not everyone in the family wants revealed and some may dispute. His purpose, he says, is to show that when people have these illnesses, being silent

about them is almost as bad as the disease. It's a conspiracy of silence, not only for the person who's suffering, but for everyone else who's forced to interact with that person. That's why they call this a family disease. And you're trying to take the stigma away. Well, I'm trying to figure out how do we move this away from shame and stigma into an honest-to-God political movement. This isn't something esoteric about trying to take care of that alcoholic,

God, don't tell me those people need us to spend money on them. It's about taking care of all of us because these are Americans. They're dying every day and they're our brothers and sisters. He says there's a pathology of silence about mental illness and addiction within families, especially his. In his book, he breaks what he calls the Kennedy Code of Silence. I don't tell in this book about my family stories as some way to talk about their story. This is my story. These experiences are embedded in me. They're who I am.

You're right. I'm going to quote you from the book. My father went on in silent desperation for much of his life, self-medicating and unwittingly passing his unprocessed trauma onto my sister, brother, and me. That's right. Self-medicating. Yeah. So that was the alcohol. Yeah, that was the alcohol. Do you think he was an alcoholic? You know, I think he definitely had a problem with alcohol. Yeah, that was the alcohol. Do you think he was an alcoholic? You know, I think he definitely had a problem with alcohol.

I still, right now, Leslie, have trouble talking about this. This is like breaking the family code here. I am now outside the family line. Outside the line, talking about his dad, but also about the silence surrounding his mother Joan's alcoholism that he says he inherited. What was it like growing up with your mother? It was so tense.

My mother clearly would be inebriated and under the influence. She would walk around in the middle of the day, you know, in a terry cloth bathrobe. And the amazing thing is, here you have all of these leading policymakers in the country, in and out of the house, coming in and out, watching this, and no one's saying a word. The shame just becomes... You felt the shame. Oh my God, I felt like, oh my God, they're going to see. Mom, quick, let's get back into your room. Don't let any, you know, I just understood this was not something that you want anyone to see. You write as a Kennedy and it's a unique position that you're in.

I kept thinking, you know, probably most families would have acted the way your family did. Oh, I know so many of them who can't talk about their own family's illnesses. You get infected by the pathology of silence, and that is sickening to your soul. He writes that while his mother was crippled by her drinking, his father was reeling. President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time. Teddy was devastated by the assassinations of his two brothers. When my Uncle Bobby was killed, it was like absolutely the floor dropped out for my father. Absolutely the floor. Because they got to be buddies in the United States Senate. Those were the glory days for my dad.

You ever ask anyone, my dad was the happiest he ever was when he had his brother. Then his brother was killed. Boom. Over. Show over. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us, what he wished for others, will someday come to pass for all the world. My dad never got to grieve. He had to be there for the country. He had to be there for my family. He had to be there for my Uncle Bobby's 11 children and John and Caroline. Tell me what's welling up in you. You didn't know Bobby. You were one years old. Yeah, but I knew the pain that came from his having been killed because I saw my father kind of live in silent desperation for most of his life. Are you weeping for him?

Oh, of course I do. No, I absolutely grieve for him. To this minute. Yeah. As people across the country wept for Bobby, the second Kennedy brother assassinated in five years, Patrick writes that the family itself dealt with Bobby's death the only way they knew how. If you think we couldn't talk about my mom, we couldn't talk about my Uncle Bobby. And the fact that his murder was still so present, you know, in all of our lives because it was unprocessed. You actually say that because nobody talked about these things in the family, you were all kind of like zombies. You use that word, zombies. Well, we were living in a limbo land where all of this chaos, this emotional turmoil was happening. And we were expected just to live through it. This is the first time a Kennedy has been this open about the family secrets, these particular secrets.

Are you worried about how the family's going to react? I know how some of them are going to react because I've already... Oh, they've seen the book? Yeah, I've showed the book. They're not pleased? No. They're angry? They're angry.

Chappaquiddick was something else they couldn't talk about. A year after Bobby's assassination, Teddy drove a car off a wooden bridge, drowning his young passenger, Mary Jo Kopechny. He abandoned the scene and didn't tell the authorities till the next morning. This is where you had the conversation with your dad? This is where I had a, I guess you could call it a conversation. On the 10th anniversary of the tragedy, Teddy brought Patrick, then 12, to this beach in Hyannisport specifically to talk about Chappaquiddick, but then didn't. I learned more about this by, you know,

looking in the books and newspapers and articles and on TV. Do you think Chappaquiddick had an impact on you? I couldn't even talk about it. I was hostage to the family code that, no, don't say anything about it. Anything you say, it's disloyal. It's against the family code. And it doesn't matter whether it's in a private therapy session.

That psychiatrist could go out and tell somebody. The way Patrick dealt with it was to drink. He was heavily into alcohol by the age of 13. And nobody in the family either knew or did anything? It was ubiquitous. There was alcohol and there was parties all the time. It wasn't like, oh, I stood out. By the early 1990s, his father's drinking had become so heavy, the family decided to stage an intervention.

I remember him closing the sliding doors and then sitting down in his big blue suede chair, and we all said, we big blue suede chair. And we all said, we're worried about your drinking. You need to get help. It's affecting us. It's affecting the family. And he stood up, you know, opened the sliding door and walked out.

Not a word. And then he wrote me a letter, and he basically said, you know, for the time being, you know, don't think of coming by to, you know, visit. Oh, my word. Yeah, yeah. He stopped talking to you. That's the way it came down. He felt that we really had no place, no place whatsoever to question him.

That's the defensive position of every alcoholic. Go mind your own business. Back off. That was the message. You know, there are people who thought of your father. He thinks the rules don't apply to him, that he can drink and carouse as he was doing because, you know, he's a Kennedy. Yeah, there's no partying in there. There's no enjoyment.

There was no enjoyment? This is about relieving the pain. People have this mistaken notion that you get high. What you're really getting is relief from the low. When he was elected to Congress in 1994, Patrick was struggling not only with alcoholism, but with mental illnesses, anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. He was drinking and popping pills at the office. You put vodka in water bottles. I put

vodka and Poland spring water bottles, and I put Oxycontin in bare aspirin bottles. It all came to a crashing halt, literally, in May of 2006, when he plowed his car into a Capitol Hill police barricade at 3 in the morning. The TV cameras start piling up outside my congressional office. I'm thinking, this is over. The next day, he broke through another barrier, the Kennedy Wall of Silence, going public with the fact that he was an addict.

His father was furious. He just lashed out, and these aren't things we talk about in public, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Teddy Kennedy's son is the poster boy for addiction. Oh, no. No, no, no. Teddy's attitude that addiction was shameful was far from unusual for his generation. But his attitude changed when Patrick gave an impassioned speech on the House floor in support of his bill to expand health insurance coverage for addicts and alcoholics. Let's pass mental health parity. The speech persuaded Teddy to support the bill.

Patrick writes that his father didn't feel he measured up until then. This is a huge moment in your life. In my life. I mean, who gets to have this experience of coming full circle? After his father died in 2009, Patrick, at age 43, retired from Congress. A year later, he got married for the first time to Amy Savelle, a middle school history teacher. Hold on to her heart. They have three children and one on the way. It wasn't until he committed to stop drinking that she agreed to marry him.

Well, welcome to my house. Today, they live here in southern New Jersey, where he directs his new political movement, what he calls the Kennedy Forum, from his study sitting at President Kennedy's old congressional desk. His regimen for staying sober includes an hour-long swim every morning, taking medication for bipolar disorder, and daily 12-step meetings. He'll celebrate his fifth year of sobriety next February on his father's birthday. You're my man. But he doesn't kid himself. He realizes his diseases are chronic and not curable. I am an addict. I'll always be an addict. But I'm an addict in recovery. I count my days. It's one day at a time. Is it hard? Oh, yeah. Every day? Every day.

Some days more than others, but today's a good day. The Holocaust is marked and memorialized at places like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, but nearly half of the six million Jewish victims were executed in fields and forests and ravines, places that were not named and remain mostly unmarked today. They were slaughtered in mass shootings and buried in mass graves in the former Soviet Union, where until very recently, little had been done to find them. Our story is about a man who's brought these crimes of the Holocaust to light. He's not a historian or a detective or a Jew. He's a French Catholic priest named Father Patrick Desbois,

and for the past 13 years, he's been tracking down the sites where many of the victims lie and searching for witnesses who are still alive, many of whom had never been asked before to describe the horrors they had seen more than 70 years ago. The general order was to eliminate the last Jew, even the baby, even the old mummy. They never let anybody. So it was a policy of total annihilation. Total annihilation. And if Hitler didn't lose the war, I think today there will not be one Jew alive.

Father Patrick Desbois is on a mission across Eastern Europe to find Hitler's hidden killing fields. Before him lies a continent of extermination. These mass graves and extermination sites, many of them are invisible. Yeah, totally invisible. Under cornfield, under house, under tomato field. Yeah, yeah. And many of them would never be recorded. Never be recorded and still buried like animals. We traveled with Father Dubois to the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, where in one day he took us to four unmarked mass graves. In this field, he told us, 60 Jews.

Beneath this farm, 100. Above this city, under this hill, 1,000. 1,000 bodies. Do you think they're still here? Yeah. Yeah, they're still here. Thousands of eyewitnesses, millions of documents, and 15 years of investigating have led him to more than 1,700 execution sites. Once in Ukraine, under the supervision of a rabbi,

he excavated one. Jewish tradition forbids moving the dead once buried, and the evidence was just beneath the surface. It was officially a place where no Jew had been killed, and we found 17 mass graves. And what did you find when you excavated? You find everything. You see a mother who is handling his boy until the end, and the boy tried to go out. You see that another one was

buried alive, so she had the mouth open because she was buried with the hearth. In June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Just behind his frontline troops were mobile death squads known as the Einsatzgruppen, whose job was to hunt down every last Jew. They methodically entered villages, rounded up Jewish families, and marched them to freshly dug graves. Some of the remains are buried beneath this mound in Lithuania. The assassins reached even the most remote corners, like Hirshini, a tiny village in Moldova. So when the killers came here, they really had only one purpose. Only one goal, kill the Jews and the gypsies.

Only one goal, always. The village is virtually unchanged since the Nazis stormed through here. Father Dubois' team had gone ahead of us, searching for eyewitnesses to a 70-year-old crime. They were led to an 85-year-old named Gheorghi, still working in this vineyard. Father Dubois told us the first question they ask is always the same. Why are you here doing the war? And if the person says yes, say, oh, you can help us. Gheorghe was 11 years old then, and he still remembers what he witnessed. As soon as they came, they locked everyone up.

I saw them taking them away. He asked him where the Jews were killed. It's a ravine over there. Come and see if you want. So what you're learning here is completely unrecorded. Yeah, if we didn't come, we'd never know they killed Jews. These Jews would have never been counted as dead, never known, and Zomar's grave is totally unknown. Gheorghi brought us down this road, where he said all the Jewish families from the village were taken. He told us the day of the shooting, he was tending to cows nearby.

Now, 70 years later, we watched as he traced the victim's steps to the edge of the ravine. The Jews were facing the ditch, so they were shooting them in the back of their heads, or their backs, to fall into the ditch. They were shooting them as if they were shooting them in the back of their heads, or their backs, to fall into the ditch. They were shooting them as if they were dogs. He said it was a beautiful day, exactly like this one.

A beautiful day like today, yeah. With the sunshine. With the sunshine, yeah. When you're doing this, when you're here in a place like this, do you ever stop and think, how did I get here? No, always I say to the people, finally we found you. Finally we came back. Father Dubois leads no congregation. He considers his search for these Jewish victims his calling. You're not your typical priest. I don't know if

there is a typical priest. I think everybody has to make his way. The Pope also is not a typical Pope, but he's a Pope. And I'm not a typical priest, but I'm a priest. With the blessing of his cardinal and the Vatican, he created in 2004 the organization Yihad in Unum, together as one. Based in Paris, his team begins by combing through millions of pages of German documents, comparing them to Soviet archives that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They search for clues that lead them to villages, where witnesses point them to mass graves. They always record and archive the witness testimonies. When we were young, we saw a lot of Jews on that day.

To date, they've recorded over 4,000 witnesses who were children at the time. Many were recruited by the Nazis or local police to dig the mass graves or to take the gold teeth, jewelry and clothing of the victims. They shot here. And then they threw a little, and then even legs and hands were visible. From Tardes to Pinchencha, people here fell into one house. They cried, screamed, hugged children. I can't. They covered a little with earth. And three days after that, or more, it was like this. It was alive, you know how it was.

What have we learned about the Holocaust that we didn't know before you began your investigations? I learned a lot about humanity. I learned everybody can be a killer, anybody can be a victim. I learned that you like to see other people dying in front of you, killed by other people, when you're sure you will not be killed. It was a dramatic finding that villagers chose to watch people being lined up and murdered,

a revelation he would never have come to were it not for his grandfather, Claudius de Bois. He was held as a prisoner of war in a Nazi camp in the Ukrainian village of Ravaruska. But he never wanted to talk about it. Father de Bois was drawn to the village to find out what happened there. He made repeated trips, but no one would talk to him. Until one night, when the mayor took him to the edge of the forest where 50 elderly villagers were waiting. And he said, Patrick, I bring you at the mass grave of the last 1,500 Jews of Havaruska. How like in a movie. One by one, they told you

their stories, what they witnessed. 50. 50 of them. And me, I couldn't bear. I stopped them in everyone in the middle. I said, ah, it's enough. It's enough 50. 50 of them? And me, I couldn't bear it. I stopped everyone in the middle. I said, ah, it's enough. It's enough. The pieces of woman in the tree, it's enough. It's enough for you. And they cried, and they went. I found, finally, what my grandfather never said.

I said, oh, I shot the Jews in public, and everybody knew. Surely my grandfather saw that. But that's it. I was in total shock. You believed that the Jews were killed in secret? Yeah, because everybody told me, and I have read many books about the secret of Holocaust, and in Soviet Union everybody told me they knew nothing

because it was secret. What he learned disturbed him. The killings were spectacles. They took place in broad daylight, in front of entire villages. They were fighting to have a good place, like for circus. There's no way you couldn't have known. Not only that, but they were running when they heard they were killing Jews, to see, to try to catch a coin, to try to catch a clove, to take a picture.

They wanted to be there. This photo of a mass shooting is from the Imperial War Museum archives in London, dated September 14th, 1941. And it's a ditch. Here you have a woman with a child. You don't see any spectators, but Father Dubois suspected the crowd was just outside the frame. He followed the picture to the town of Dubissari, and it brought him to the home of 81-year-old Anatoly, who was eight back then. He said he was at the massacre alongside his mother.

We were standing somewhere here, and here were the trenches. Here they were falling. The carnage lasted two weeks. Dmitry, then 16, said he was there too. He told us he watched from a tree as the Nazis and collaborators fired on groups of 20 people at a time. And he thinks how many Jews have been killed like that? 18,500. It was about 18,500 people. A number much higher than the official records, which doesn't surprise Father Desbois, who says the death tolls are often underreported.

The bodies are right behind Dmitry's house, in these 11 mass graves, one of the few Jewish sites in Eastern Europe that's marked and protected. I never saw one like that among the 1,700 extermination sites where I've been. No one has shined more light on this dark chapter than Father Desbois, according to Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who also sits on Yahad's scientific board. The method that he's used, extraordinary. We can understand minute by minute what happened in hundreds of localities where before we just had fog. How reliable is his work?

He has opened the door to the use of multiple sources to understand what really happened on the ground in a big part of Europe. We found Father Desbois a cautious and skeptical interviewer. When a woman with a baby would approach the pit, they forced her to hold the baby in sight. First they shot the baby, and then her. He never judged or showed emotion, as he listened to the darkest accounts of humanity.

Here is Amar's grave. Father Debois insists that every killing site they find is memorialized by recording the GPS coordinates. They never physically mark the graves because, he says, people would loot them. Father Dibois believes when his work is finished, the number of Jewish victims will total more than has been previously documented. But the number, he says, is less important than giving meaning to their lives sometimes in a small village he'll find a witness like 80 year old

Anatoly who remembers not only the death of his Jewish neighbors but their names brick who roach Sherman it's like if he was waiting for us in 70 years and now Brick, Gourovic, Schurman, and Folch. It's like if he was waiting for us in 70 years, and now we are here. Every time I come with my team, I say, they are waiting for us. It did seem like he was waiting for you. Like the dead. In the mail this week, comments on a man who would be president and one who already is. Kudos for giving President Putin an opportunity to speak.

For better or for worse, he is the leader of a very powerful country. Charlie Rose was unacceptably rude in his tone of voice and questions toward President Putin. Scott Pelley's interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump also had critics. Maybe someone should remind Scott Pelley that he's an interviewer for 60 Minutes, not the star prosecutor of his guests. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.