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The chapter will examine how forensic scientists, including anthropologists, have been exploring the potential of new methods and processes in the resolution of mass grave contexts. The introduction of DNA to contexts where these challenges exist has had some success in the Balkans and in Guatemala, two areas that have experienced brutal civil wars for a number of years. More recently, the analysis of elemental and osteometric measures on the body have demonstrated potential in attempts to re-associate remains. Ultimately however, technological developments complement extensive ante-mortem investigation and the two cannot be utilised independently if the required end result is to successfully identify victims.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, Poland was quite literally a vast Jewish cemetery. In fields, forests, by the side of roads, and in Jewish cemeteries throughout the country, the corpses of dead Jews were buried helter-skelter in mass graves, partially buried in an apparent rush, or even left unburied. Even Jews who had no intentions of remaining in postwar Poland returned to their home towns resolved to fulfill a solemn duty to give the dead a proper burial, if possible in a Jewish cemetery. Using several yizkor books, this chapter will examine the efforts of Polish Jewish survivors to exhume the corpses of their dead and then rebury them with dignity in accordance with Jewish ritual and the role of memory in depiction of this act.

The introduction outlines the book’s interrogation of the treatment of corpses and human remains following mass violence and genocide, focusing specifically on their possible discovery and identification. The study of these two separate enterprises – the search for bodies and their identification – has traditionally remained in the hands of forensic science and has so far only marginally attracted the interest of history, social anthropology or law despite the magnitude of their respective fields of application. In this context, one of the primary contributions of this book is to connect the social and forensic sciences, for the first time, in a joint and comparative analysis of how societies engage in the process of searching for and identifying the corpses produced by mass violence, and thereby to initiate a truly interdisciplinary dialogue.

This paper discusses the search for, exhumation and identification of the remains of victims of mass political repression during the Stalinist Great Terror (1937-1938) in the USSR, concentrating on those who were subjected to the severest form of repression, that is, those who were shot following sentencing during judicial or extrajudicial processes. Even if historians now agree on the number of victims of Stalin's Great Terror (1937-1938) during which nearly 800,000 people were executed by gunshot, we still know little about the ultimate course these victims took as the full trial procedures, executions and burials were marked with the seal of state secrets. By restoring the history of exhumations undertaken from 1989 - quite exceptionally for Russia - in the Voronezh region 500 kilometres south of Moscow, and in focussing more specifically on the discovery of a site where 62 graves were discovered containing the remains of 2,889 individuals, this text lifts the veil on the Soviet logistics of the production of mass death. It sheds light on the human and material resources mobilized by the NKVD for these executions and illegal burials, utilising the repetitive tasks of dozens of individuals.

This chapter examines the commemoration of victims of the Terror. It focuses on the transformation of mass graves into expiatory monuments. This process began in the immediate aftermath of the Terror and continued into the Bourbon Restoration. The chapter shows how the struggle of the families to get closure by providing proper burial to their loved ones clashed with the desire of post-revolutionary regimes to keep at bay memories that threatened to reignite civil discord.

In post-revolutionary Iran, the most important factor in the construction of the state apparatus has been a war waged against twin enemies: the war of "sacred defence" against Iraq (1980-1988), and the elimination of political opponents through a post-revolutionary penal system encompassing prisons, revolutionary courts and Islamic militias. In the context of this repression, based on judicial, para-judicial and extra-judicial structures, several massacres of prisoners have been carried out since 1981, along with routine executions, disappearances and murders. The mass execution of several thousand prisoners in 1988 marked its apogee. The precise number of prisoners executed in the 1980s, and in 1988 in particular, remains unknown to this day, although the testimony of families and survivors, tend towards a figure of several tens of thousands. This article will draw on oral and written testimony, along with digital archive sources to examine how confiscating the bodies of victims of massacres, denying them a proper burial, and forbidding relatives from mourning, all fit into what one could term a "politics of death" covering the range of practices through which the manipulation of the dead has come to constitute a means of social control in post-revolutionary Iran.

This paper uses the treatment of dead bodies in occupied Eastern Europe to argue that the public hangings and mass shootings of civilians committed by German troops reinforced their conceptions of the region as a disordered and barbaric space in need of outside intervention. It also intends to demonstrate how these views on the treatment of the dead later became displaced onto the populations of Western Europe and Germany itself in the last years of World War II. The historiography has overlooked how acts of subjugation, in particular, executions, served to reinforce the German imagination regarding the East and the people who inhabited it. Drawing upon contemporary police and military documents, as well as post-war trial material, this paper contends that the atrocities committed were far from merely arbitrary acts aimed at coercing the civilian population into supporting the goals of the occupation.