Lubny, Ukraine, A mother with her two children awaiting, with other Jews from the town, at the assembly point, 16/10/1941

Close-up of a young mother with her two children, sitting among a large group of Jews from Lubny who have been assembled for mass execution by the Germans.

One of a series of images taken by the German military photographer Haehle, a member of PK[propaganda commando] 637, then attached to the German Sixth Army fighting in the Ukraine. Haehle died in 1944. In the early 1950s his widow sold this collection of photographs to Frau Schulz, the wife of Berlin journalist Hans Georg Schulz. Black and white copies of these original, color photographs were forwarded in 1961 to Herr Wagner, an attorney working in the Landgerichtsrat in Darmstadt, who was investigating war crimes cases related to Sonderkommando actions in the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Lubny in the autumn of 1941.
These copyprints became part of individual war crimes trial records and were subsequently deposited in the Hessisches Hauptsaatsarchiv in Wiesbaden. In 2000 Frau Schulz, who retained Haehle's original photographs, sold them to the Hamburg Institute for Social Reseach.
[Source: Dr. Andrej Angrick, Berlin, research associate at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research]

On October 16, 1941 members of Sonderkommando 4a executed 1,363 Jews, Communists and partisans, among them 53 POWs and a few Jewish rifle-women. Before World War II Lubny had a
population of 35,000, of which 14,000 were Jews.