Richter transferred four photographs, presumably taken by concentration camp inmate Alberto Errera, depicting the burning of the bodies of murdered Jews in a forest and naked women on the way to the gas chamber, onto four canvases.

He gradually painted over the figurative images with a brush and the colors black, gray, green and red and further processed them with a squeegee.

"[4] "The pictures have an effect with the structures that intertwine horizontally and vertically darker than many of Richter's other squeegee paintings.

Since then he has repeatedly and artistically dealt with the topics of Nazi terror, extermination camps, victims and perpetrators in different ways.

[4] The four photographs taken in the camp on which Birkenau is based were published in connection with a review of Georges Didi-Huberman's book Images Despite Everything from 2008 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

[10][11] In October 2021, Gerhard Richter decided to make his Birkenau images permanently available to the International Auschwitz Committee.

In the future, the cycle will be on display in a memorial room on the grounds of the International Youth Meeting Center in Oświęcim (Auschwitz).

[12] In 2024 an edition of the works as prints on metal plate, made and donated by Richter, went on display at the Centre.

[14] In February 2016, the series was part of an exhibition at the Museum Frieder Burda [de] in Baden-Baden for the first time under the title „Birkenau”.

[16][17] The exhibition was controversially discussed in the media and Richter et al. the accusation was made that “he would illustrate the Holocaust and thus give the horror an artistic form”.

[15] In 2016/17 the images were exhibited at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, then in Prague and then at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane.

[5] The art critic Hanno Rauterburg [de], on the other hand, complained that the fundamental openness and interpretability of the images made Birkenau a myth.