Some of the most graphic photographs of the Nazi death camps ever published go on show this weekend in rural Sussex, many years after they were last seen in the UK.

The photographer was Lee Miller, a former Vogue model-turned-war correspondent, who revealed the atrocities of Buchenwald and Dachau in the fashion magazine.

“They are the worst images imaginable. I was weeping as I was hanging them,” says Maya Binkin, the Israeli curator of Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, who selected them for a show focusing on Miller’s friendship with Pablo Picasso.

Although they are not directly linked with the exhibition’s main theme, Binkin felt the shocking images were too important to be excluded.

“I wanted to tell the wider story of Lee Miller, who was robbed of so much by what she saw in the camps,” says Ms Binkin, who lost members of her own family in the Shoah. “I came from a culture where a generation did not talk about the Holocaust. My dad could not get an answer from his own father.”

Shots of piled-up bodies punctuate the Picassos at Petworth, while at Farleys, Miller’s home in East Sussex, even more shocking images that have just gone on show include the un-emptied interior of one of Buchenwald’s furnaces after the camp ran out of coal.

Miller was unflinching in what she captured, says her son, Antony Penrose: “For her the horror of the camps was deeply personal. She gazed into the eyes of dead prisoners searching for one of the many Jews she knew in Paris before they disappeared during the war.”

Her move from model to artist was kick-started by her relationship with the Jewish Surrealist Man Ray, of whom she was both lover and apprentice, and to war photography by another Jew, photojournalist David E. Scherman, who helped her gain accreditation to be present at the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald. .

Mr Penrose says it was learning about the camps in Paris soon after the liberation that made his mother determined to report on them. “Scherman lived long enough to tell me of her rage as she took the pictures and the disbelief of the battle-hardened soldiers beside her who had never witnessed such brutality.

“She implored the editor of Vogue to understand the pictures were real and publish them in a telegram which started ‘Believe It’.” The magazine complied, “and for the first and last time published images of piled-up bodies beside their pictures of bags and hats,” says Ms Binkin.

Bearing witness to the unspeakable robbed Miller of her relationship with her only child, she goes on. “Before the war she had such a sunny disposition. Her New York studio became the place to go to have your portrait taken. What Tony got as a child was the hollowed-out shell of a woman who could not talk about what she had seen and buried all her negatives in the attic.”

Mr Penrose had no idea his mother had been a war photographer until discovering those negatives after her death in 1977. “Vogue made a gift of the war negatives to help launch her archives,” says Ms Binkin.

Lee Miller and Picasso is at Newlands House Gallery, Petworth until 8 January; Her war photographs are at Farleys House & Gallery Thurs and Sun until 30 October