The personal belongings of Jews killed at Babi Yar.

Photograph | Digitized | Photograph Number: 99500

Overview

Caption: The personal belongings of Jews killed at Babi Yar.
Photographer: Johannes Haehle
Date: 1941 September 29 - 1941 September 30
Locale: Kiev, [Ukraine] USSR
Event History: According to Operational Situational Report USSR No. 106 of 7 October 1941, elements of Einsatzgruppe C, including Sonderkommando 4a and two Kommandos of Police Regiment South, participated in the execution of 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of Kiev. The author of the report claims that the action was carried out in response to complaints about Jews by the local population and the Wehrmacht which "approved the measures taken." The report also states that both the local population and the Jews were told the action involved the relocation, not the extermination of local Jews. Orders for Jews to assemble at 6:00 p.m. at an unidentified location were posted throughout the city by Ukrainian collaborators on 29 September and the Jews were then brought to the ravine. As a result, public knowledge "that they were actually liquidated has hardly been made known." The action continued throughout the next day as well.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005421.

Photo Designation: EINSATZGRUPPEN/MASS MURDER -- Einsatzgruppen Aktionen -- USSR -- Babi Yar -- Aktion/Victims' Property

Biography: Haehle, a German military photographer, was 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 fall 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 Hamburger Institut fuer Sozialforschung.

[Source: Dr. Andrej Angrick, Berlin, research associate at the Hamburger Institut fuer Sozialforschung]