Their Provenance a Mystery
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 51
I assumed these landscape photos were pictures of the lovely French Alsace town of Sainte-Marie-Aux-Mines. That is until I turned them over and read, or tried to read, the captions. They describe Markkleeberg, a town in the Saxony region of Germany near Leipzig. It’s now described as a suburb of Leipzig.
According to AI, the captions on the back are in German, written in an old-fashioned cursive handwriting, and the captions read: “General view, War memorial, Old gatehouse, and Richter and Sons in Markkleeberg, December 1940”.
Professionally made photos with numbers in the right lower corner, they could be postcards. I can’t imagine who might have taken them, who wrote the captions, or why Flo put them on a page headlined Sainte-Marie-Aux-Mines. The Third Division had not yet crossed the Rhine into Germany, although Audie Murphy wrote that a number of Allied units had entered Germany by January, 1945.
The other three photos on this page are captioned Marie of Ville France; Lt. Reardon, me, Janet, Lt. Nelson. Fraize, France; and Sgt. Holbrook, St. Die France ad center.
Ch. 52: https://mollymartin.blog/2025/09/03/frontline-news-reaches-the-front-lines/
To return to Chapter 1: https://mollymartin.blog/2024/11/04/my-mother-and-audie-murphy/
tradeswomn musings 