From Arts & Letter Daily comes a fascinating article, Mengele’s Skull, that details “…the value of forensic anthropology to human rights…” An excerpt:
It was during the Mengele investigation that the procedures and techniques of forensic identification of human remains were methodologically developed. “That was one of the things we came away from the Mengele case with—a dynamic, ongoing, simultaneous interdisciplinary approach to the problem of identification. A certain analytical method has been effectively developed.”32
Snow’s trip to Brazil came immediately following the start of his work with the group of young Argentine anthropologists just beginning to investigate the remains of the disappeared in the “dirty war.” As he tells the story, his bags were not yet unpacked.33 It was the team in Argentina that would go on to conduct the first large-scale and systematic exhumations in the context of human rights work, producing over many years important evidence in the trials of the junta leaders and developing a pioneering professional expertise in forensic anthropology. Later, they helped disseminate this competence in the killing fields of the 1990s, in places like Guatemala and Chile, but also in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Where there was a dispute around a war crime, the graves that had once simply been the space of memory became an epistemic resource.
Modern human rights forensics began in Argentina with the victims, and in Brazil with the perpetrator. And it began with the same question asked of the bones: “Who are you?”
Read it all: Mengele’s Skull.
