Doris, Olga, Gladys and Rachel – vital war artists now take their rightful place

On eve of 80th anniversary of VE Day, painters who chronicled conflict marked in new exhibition and film

- Richard Brooks

In April 1945, Doris Zinkeisen became the first female artist to enter the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, just as the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby was making his historic broadcast about the horrors that went on inside its walls.

Zinkeisen was working as a nurse for the British Red Cross, which had also commissioned her to paint Belsen. It was where the Royal Academy graduate did her most famous painting, Human Laundry, showing nurses cleaning emaciated men.