Thousands of bone fragments, which may include the remains of Nazi crime victims, were buried on Thursday following they were found on a Berlin university campus where an institute for anthropology and eugenics once stood.
Some 16,000 fragments were found on the Free University campus in excavations that began in 2015 following human and animal bones were discovered during restoration work. The site was once the home of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, which operated from 1927 to 1945.
Nazi crimes: thousands of bones buried in Berlin
The university said the fragments recovered are from “victims of criminal contexts” that might include colonial-era events and Nazi crimes. The researchers determined that the bones belonged to people of different ages, men and women.
But the university detailed that, following non-intrusive examinations of the fragments and historical investigations, it was not possible to identify individual victims or link the finds to specific colonized regions or “obvious Nazi contexts”.
Organizations representing potential victims — including Jews, Sinti, Roma, and people with physical and mental disabilities killed by the Nazis, as well as the Herero people of Namibia, many of whom were killed in a colonial-era massacre — agreed on that no further investigation should be carried out. They said the bones should be buried “without religious appropriation or Eurocentric symbolism,” according to the university.
The public burial with some 230 guests was held Thursday at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, near the site where the remains were found. The pallbearers lowered five simple coffins to the ground.