Dig Where You Stand Episode 3: Bordering on a Miracle

Episode 3 of Dig Where You Stand was just published. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the web, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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What’s in Episode 3?

In this episode, we’ve attempted to weave several stories together, but we begin with the reappearance of a huge number of dead bodies. The question of this episode - and it’s a question we’d like to bear in mind across the entire story we’ve told in Dig Where You Stand season one - is: What do we owe the dead? What responsibility do these human remains demand of us?

The story begins on a summer’s afternoon in 2014 in Dahlem, a leafy suburb of Berlin. Workers were digging a trench in order to expand the Free University library when they hit something unexpected - a pit filled with human bones. Immediately, they informed the relevant authorities, the police and the University. And then? Nothing happened.

Perhaps it was because the University knew the likely implications of this find that, fearing negative publicity, they tried to ignore what had been turned up from the earth. But whatever the reason, this refusal to look at what had been discovered had consequences. Six months later, these seven sacks of human remains were quietly burned by the municipal crematorium.

This incident might be one of the clearest examples of how not to deal with our collections of human remains: to bury them, ignore them, burn them without looking any further into the history they represent.

KWI / Eugenics

Back in episode two, we focused on the first time Germany tried to return human remains to the country of origin. That was the Charité Human Remains project, and it involved sending back ancestral remains from Berlin to Namibia, where human corpses where stolen as part of the German genocide of Herero and Nama peoples in the first decade of the 20th century.

Here, we pick up where that left off, turning our attention to the scientific institution which actually bought up the skull collections discussed in episodes one and two. The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics was founded in 1927 by a professor of anatomy called Eugen Fischer. He’d been in Namibia, too. The photo below shows him conducting some research there. His research was going to be furthered at this new institute, the KWI-A, which became central to the new science of racial hygiene. The scientists there wanted to scientifically engineer a genetically “clean” human being.

But the most infamous misdeeds of the KWI-A come in the 1940s, and their work with SS doctor Joseph Mengele. Mengele was the camp doctor at Auschwitz, and sent back human humans to Berlin at the request of researchers there. 

As the episode explains, it remains unclear whether the human remains found in 2014 (or the 16,000 bone fragments turned up on later digs) were from Auschwitz, or if they might have belonged to the other colonial collections housed at this facility at that time.

What we wanted to unpack here was how these buried human bodies present a challenge to Germany’s culture of remembrance. How do we respond to the crimes of the past?

How should we deal with these ancestral human remains?

In the final part of the episode, we attempt to broaden our scope and look at some of the other ways German museums and institutions have been able to deal with human remains, making positive, collaborative returns to countries and communities of origin. There are examples of how it can go - but the reasons why it cannot be done for everyone raise some tricky questions, too.

What’s next for DWYS?

Episode 3 completes the main narrative of DWYS Season 1. We hope to continue publishing extra content and interviews in the coming weeks and months. Season 2 will be released in 2025.

What is Kollo Media?

Kollo Media is a new publishing entity based in Berlin. It works with other publishers to establish multimedia formats with audiences inspired by curiosity, conscientiousness, and quality. You can reach us at [email protected] or @kollomedia.