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Human bones find in Berlin points to Mengele era
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ARCHEOLOGISTS in Berlin have unearthed a large number of human bones from a site close to where Nazi scientists carried out research on body parts of death camp victims sent to them by the sadistic SS doctor Josef Mengele, officials said yesterday.
Experts have been examining the site in Berlin’s upmarket Dahlem neighborhood since a small number of bones were found there in 2014 during road works on a property belonging to Berlin’s Free University.
In the dig they uncovered “numerous fractured skulls, teeth, vertebrae” and other bones, including those of children, said Susan Pollock, a professor of archeology at the university.
The bones found two years ago were never identified, and the new discovery provides researchers “a new possibility to illuminate the unusual find and the circumstances under which they were buried,” said Joerg Haspel, the leader of Berlin’s office that oversees memorial sites. Several of the vertebrae found had traces of glue on them, indicating they may have been parts of skeletons on display.
The site is about 100 meters away from what was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Human Heredity and Eugenics in the Nazi era. The renowned institution predated the Nazi era and once counted Albert Einstein among its directors.
During the Nazi dictatorship, however, the Dahlem institute was closely associated with pseudoscientific race research, and the notorious Auschwitz physician Mengele is known to have sent many body parts there for study. Dahlem was also known to have a collection of bones from Germany’s colonial era, among others.
Experts now plan to use osteological identification methods to try to learn more about the newly discovered bones, and should at least be able to determine approximate age, sex and how many different people’s bones were found, Pollock said.
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