One characteristic of the Holocaust is the absence of the victims’ bodies. In fact, this very absence is communicated through the term ‘Holocaust’. However, their bodies – the number of which remains unknown – were not destroyed. Some bodies of Jewish victims, most of whom were killed at the very start or at the very end of the Holocaust, were not burned. Rather, they were buried in mass graves. The purpose of this article is to describe the efforts of survivors to locate, exhume and identify these bodies and to move them to a Jewish cemetery. To describe and analyse this phenomenon, we use a selection of Memorbikher, some of which have already been described by Gabriel Finder, and a few articles from secondary literature sources. In particular, we use many cases identified during our research, such as seventy examples of exhumations described in the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s testimonies. The article examines the conditions surrounding the exhumations, and in particular the chain of custody for human remains. It then discusses whether or not these exhumations can be considered unique and examines their ability to symbolically replace collective burials, which were impossible due to the absence of physical bodies.

This article revisits how the poor and destitute were treated in the waning years of the churchyard-based burial system. Working-class families increasingly risked funeral destitution as changing norms increased the expected cost of burial and mourning. A death in the family meant lost revenue and possibly debt. New goalposts for respectability and 1830s utilitarian reforms worsened the outlook for the dead poor, exposing their corpses to physical destruction through dissection – once the punishment of executed murderers. Poor families often preferred pauper burials, paid for by parishes and Poor Law unions at the cost of most funerary furnishings, the choice of resting-place and, on occasion, even the basic dignity of individual funerals, creating symbolic violence. Paternalistic ideals expressed by key institutional actors often concealed economic self-interest, while the working-class’s infantilisation undermined their identity. Lastly, lack of parliamentary will to endorse radical reform compromised Britain’s funeral transition, leading to an extraordinarily heterogeneous burial system.

Despite recent technological and methodological progress in the field of forensic sciences, their application is often rendered impossible in the context of humanitarian crises due to insufficient infrastructure, time and trained personnel, among other factors. Based on the account of a forensic odontologist and an interdisciplinary study combining forensic and social anthropology, this article describes the way in which the victims of the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and tsunami were managed and identified. The article exposes various challenges and issues that were encountered by professionals and non-professionals who managed the deceased. Additionally, this research highlights the importance of adjusting international forensic protocols to meet local needs, allowing affected communities to mourn their losses and reduce psychological stress for those handling the bodies. Overall, this study demonstrates the importance of an interdisciplinary approach that includes social anthropological expertise at the beginning of disaster victim identification operations and humanitarian forensic action.

The University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum holds the skulls of 185 individuals from Africa, removed from the continent by a range of individuals and organisations predominantly in the nineteenth century. The entrance of these ancestral remains into the University’s collection depended in no small part on conditions of acute physical colonial violence, which are nevertheless tactfully obscured by the Museum’s spatial and architectural qualities, and by the database it uses to catalogue the remains. Focusing on the acquisition of a number of ‘trophy’ skulls, removed as a direct result of frontier violence in Southern Africa, it becomes clear that the perpetration of settler violence on the continent, and the development of racist scientific theories by anatomists in Edinburgh, were symbiotic processes, each group providing the materials and prejudices necessary for the other to thrive.

In Peru, in September 2021, the death in prison of Abimael Guzmán, founder of the PCP-Sendero Luminoso and the issue of the ‘terrorist’s’ funeral represented the climax of media and political indignation. The State therefore proceeded to dispose of the unwelcome remains, revealing that funeral rites for subversives and public mourning for their families are hardly conceivable here. This article shows how the denial of funerals and burials has been legitimised by a complex process of exclusion, dehumanisation and even discarding of the deceased’s body. It examines the trajectory of Guzmán’s mortal remains to shed light on the necropolitical dimension of the Peruvian State’s actions. In a country supposed to be a post-conflict one, the implementation of a public policy of dignified burial coexists with the deprivation of funerals and even of a grave for some of the former actors of the internal armed conflict, various logics of disqualification playing a key role in these practices of funerary segregation.

This is the first study dedicated to discussing perspectives on proposals to transfuse blood from people killed in conflict zones. It attempts to present a rounded picture of why the idea has apparently failed to translate into practice. Drawing on a range of sources, from scientific research on ‘cadaver’ blood transfusions to discussions around planning for mass casualty events, the article shows how professional interest in the transfusion possibilities of blood taken from the battlefield dead evolved from Soviet research in the 1930s, spread internationally and endured after the Second World War. It then demonstrates that a range of issues, from taboos to practicability, require consideration if past challenges to utility are to be reliably understood. It notes, too, that some early obstacles may, today, be outdated.

This article shows how the medicalisation of death in wartime can be seen as integral to a broader medicalisation of war that it both stems from and sustains. More specifically, it highlights the pivotal role of post-mortem examinations – which were widely performed in French military hospitals during the First Indochina War – in advancing clinical knowledge and monitoring the quality of care, as the only way of providing diagnostic certainty. Pathology procedures also contributed to the introduction of therapeutic innovations, which were largely the result of ongoing interactions both within the armed forces medical service and with the wider military and civilian French and international medical community.

The area of Germany which became the Soviet Occupation Zone/German Democratic Republic (GDR) bore the brunt of the Soviet offensive of 1945. This last phase of the Second World War on German soil produced a sensational death toll. Yet, a systematic registration of war burials on GDR soil did not take place until the 1970s. This article analyses a particular facet of knowledge production and mass death by turning to the process of accounting for Second World War burials through lists and statistics in the socialist GDR, with a particular focus on key policy changes in the 1970s. Unpacking the reasons which prompted a large-scale registration of war burials some twenty-five years after the end of the war, I argue that the process of accounting for war deaths was shaped by both domestic and foreign politics, and in particular by evolving relations with non-socialist countries. I also demonstrate that international requirements for the visibility and accountability of war burials, as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, generated tensions with a domestic ‘politics of history’ which required the invisibility of particular categories of dead.

This article intends to shed light on the influence of gas warfare on the management of dead bodies of violence. It shows that this new type of weapon prompted the setting up of new military centres dedicated to forensic research within the French army. This work notably involved carrying out numerous autopsies on the bodies of deceased intoxicated soldiers. By looking at the reports produced and the work of forensic pathologists, the article demonstrates how dead bodies became a site of knowledge production. It also investigates the tensions related to the treatment of dead bodies resulting from this widespread practice of autopsy. The reports produced also provide precise descriptions of the last moments of the soldiers who died in ambulances or hospitals. Finally, by cross-referencing these sources with soldiers’ grave registers, it is possible to grasp the afterlives of autopsied bodies and the diverse fates of soldiers who fell at the front.