Sonderkommando photographs taken in KL Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Summer 1944 [Negative nos. 277, 278, 282, 283: Burning of corpses in the open air; Women driven to gas chambers; Tree branches]

The only four known photographs to depict the process of mass murder in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps, these images were taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau by a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of mainly Jewish prisoners forced to help carry out the atrocities. Showing the burning of corpses and a group of women being driven toward death, the photographs bear evidence of the clandestine and dangerous circumstances of their taking: the blackened edges, blurred focus, and skewed angles are a result of the photographer being concealed inside a gas chamber entrance, in motion, and unable to aim the camera properly. Smuggled out of the camp and into the hands of Polish resistance fighters, the images would become powerful testimony to the horrors of the Holocaust for generations.

Richter encountered a detail from one of these photographs in his youth and later included all four, along with other documentary pictures from the camps, in his Atlas. The images haunted him for decades before he was finally able to address them in the Birkenau cycle, on view in this gallery. The artist received permission from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, where the negatives are archived, to reproduce and exhibit these photographs alongside the paintings and their duplicates.