85 years ago today, on 24 October 1941, the German 6th Army took Kharkov. Two weeks earlier, its commander, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, had sent his troops an order. It said: "The most important objective of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilisation." "For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry." Kharkov found out what that meant. On 14 November, delayed charges left behind by the Red Army blew up buildings in the city center. The Germans arrested about 200 civilians, mostly Jews, and hanged them from the balconies of large buildings. This was the regular front-line army, not the SS. On 14 December, the city commandant ordered every Jew in Kharkov into a shantytown by the Tractor Factory. Within two days, 20,000 people were crammed in. Then Sonderkommando 4a arrived, the unit that had led the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev. Through December and January its men shot Kharkov's Jews at the Drobytsky Yar ravine, and they used a gas van to kill more. Kharkov's archives hold records of about 15,000 victims. The Drobytsky Yar memorial foundation puts the number closer to 30,000. By January 1942, the army had seized so much food that about a third of the city's remaining 300,000 people were starving. The soldiers in this photo are marching into Kharkov in October 1941. The man who took it, army propaganda photographer Johannes Hähle, had photographed the Babi Yar ravine only weeks before.