After pulling on white cotton gloves, Arthur Bondar carefully takes a handful of 4cm by 9cm negatives from an old cigarette box and holds them up to the light of his study window. Inverted images of a woman on a horse, a group of women tending cabbages in a field, laughing figures at the seaside, a woman posing as a military ship sails by, hover in front of him, almost ghostlike. Although they are tiny, he is able to make out key details such as the insignia on a uniform, or the name of a ship, that trigger his curiosity and give him a starting point for his research.

He bought the images depicting women from the Reichsarbeitsdienst, a female labour force that served the Nazi Reich, from a German seller online. It is the latest addition to a burgeoning collection of about 35,000 negatives from the second world war that the Ukrainian-Russian photojournalist and publisher has been amassing since 2016.

He has uploaded the photographs to a carefully curated website, published hardback books with them and held numerous exhibitions, such as the one now running at a museum dedicated to the Battle of the Seelow Heights, the most vicious and bloody episode in the operation to seize nearby Berlin from Nazi control in the spring of 1945.