On wheelbarrows, naked, emaciated corpses, others wrapped in cloths: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday handed over 23 photos of the Warsaw ghetto to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. These close-ups of horror 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 steps led her with her camera to the ghetto: she had to go there several times,” declared the German president, in a speech delivered during the handing over of these documents. “Why did she do this, what was she thinking, did she consciously want to bear witness to the horror? We do not know it. She did not confide in anyone and lived as a recluse until her death,” he added.
Years later, Helmy Spethmann’s niece, Ingelene Rodewald, discovered these 23 photos hidden in an album left by her aunt, just before her death in 1979.
“The German occupiers locked up the Jewish population of Warsaw, 400,000 people, in the Muranow district (former Jewish quarter of the city, editor’s note) and systematically starved, tortured and mistreated them to deport most of them to camps. of concentration and extermination,” recalled Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, founded in 2005 in Warsaw, will now house the 23 small black and white photos, taken by Helmy Spethmann. “The terrible crimes that the Germans have committed, not only in Warsaw, fill me with deep shame,” the German president said. In April 2023, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Israeli counterparts Isaac Herzog and Polish Andrzej Duda celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They went to the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, opposite the Polin Museum, located on the site of numerous clashes during the uprising. Before World War II, Warsaw was the largest Jewish city in Europe.
