The three photographs have survived as reproductions and show Sinti people who had been arrested arriving at the Cologne-Deutz exhibition center, which had been turned into an assembly camp. They had been told that they were being evacuated to escape the air raids, and that because of this, they should pack the bare necessities and take bedding with them. One of the pictures shows children and adults next to this luggage, another shows people forming a queue under guard in the courtyard of the exhibition center. They had probably just arrived and were waiting to be "deloused" and medically examined. This task was undertaken by student nurses, who pose for a group photo with the staff responsible for guarding the detainees in the third picture. These members of staff include a doctor and two commanding police officers, one in SS uniform and the other in the field uniform of the municipal police.

In 1989, Marielies Herrmann, who had been a 19-year-old nursing student in 1940, recounted that the pictures had been taken by one of the police officers as souvenir photos. He and one of the student nurses had become friends. Subsequently, the student nurse had sent prints to everyone involved, including Herrmann. Survivor and civil rights activist Hildegard Lagrenne spoke publicly on the radio in the 1980s about her experiences, which included the May deportation from Cologne-Deutz. As a result, Herrmann contacted the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma and handed the photos over to Lagrenne. They were shown for the first time in the Cologne exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the deportation. In addition, reproductions of the photos were added to the holdings of the NS-Documentation Center of the City of Cologne and the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg in the 1990s.