Naked, emaciated corpses on wheelbarrows, others wrapped in cloths, on Wednesday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier handed over 23 photos of the Warsaw ghetto to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
These close-ups of the horror of the genocide were taken in 1941 and 1942 by German nurse Helmy Spethmann, then aged 50, who worked at the Wehrmacht military hospital in Warsaw.
"She took photos of the city and her colleagues. Her footsteps took her and her camera into the ghetto: she must have been there several times," President Steinmeier said in a speech at the handover.
"Why did she do it, what was she thinking, did she consciously want to bear witness to the horror? We don't know. She confided in no one and lived in seclusion until her death," he added.
Years later, Helmy Spethmann's niece, Ingelene Rodewald, discovered the 23 photos hidden in an album bequeathed by her aunt, just before her death in 1979.
"The German occupiers locked up Warsaw's Jewish population of 400,000 in the Muranow district - the city's former Jewish neighbourhood - and systematically starved, tortured and mistreated them, deporting most of them to concentration and extermination camps," said Steinmeier.
The Polin Museum of Polish Jewish History, founded in Warsaw in 2005, will now house the 23 small black-and-white photographs taken by Helmy Spethmann.
"The appalling crimes that the Germans committed, not only in Warsaw, fill me with deep shame," said the German president.
In April 2023, Steinmeier, his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog, and his Polish vis-à-vis, Andrzej Duda, commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
They visited the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, opposite the Polin Museum, on the site of numerous clashes during the uprising.
Before the Second World War, Warsaw was the largest Jewish city in Europe.
