Introduction

Following the Second World War, the victorious armies deployed a great deal of energy and resources to find and judge those guilty of crimes committed during the conflict. The need for justice, the eagerness of the victors to see the perpetrators of the crimes punished and their difficulties in speaking with one voice undoubtedly explain the disparate nature of the post-war tribunals.¹ Yet all victorious countries took steps to research and collect evidence of the crimes committed during the war. This included gathering testimonies and written material, but also fieldwork on mass graves and corpses. In this context, the use of forensic techniques and tools has been both widespread and discreet; widespread because several armies took action to collect material evidence of crimes in order to identify human remains whenever possible, and discreet because the results of such practices did not receive much exposure, either at the time or subsequently.

The history of these forensic interventions can be placed within the long history of post-conflict corpse management, health and funerary concerns having become increasingly important. Indeed, the bodies of victims resulting from war and violence, and their fate, have attracted growing attention at least since the French Revolution.² This echoed a transition in the management of corpses that occurred between the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries in the Western world. This shift, which has been studied by many historians and termed the ‘funerary transition’ by Régis Bertrand,³ is characterised by a relocation of funerary activity away from the church, the individualisation of graves and a certain secularisation of funerary practices. This development also reflects a growing concern regarding the hygienic problems associated with the dead.⁴ After the First World War, the public health challenge posed by the management of the huge number of corpses was evident.⁵ Bodies left in conflict zones not only caused logistical and health challenges, but also raised judicial and memorial issues that had political implications.

While the handling of the corpses left by violence has a long history, which has also been investigated by historians of the Second World War, such as Monica Black and Christopher Mauriello,⁶ forensic practices have remained relatively unexplored. This omission can partly be explained by the tendency of scholarship to focus on the judiciary institutions created after the war to judge the guilty. In addition to the International Military Tribunal (IMT), led by the four great powers and held in Nuremberg, which has been covered extensively by the historiography, there were the twelve trials conducted by the Americans in the same city between October 1946 and April 1949,⁷ as well as numerous other proceedings in Germany and elsewhere, that have received less attention.⁸ A milestone in the history of international criminal justice, the IMT of Nuremberg was shaped from the outset by a clear take on the choice of evidence, which left the work of forensic pathologists in the background. The American prosecutor Robert Jackson, who helped to draft the London Charter of the IMT, explained in 1954, ‘The prosecution early was confronted with two vital decisions … One was whether chiefly to rely upon living witnesses or upon documents for proof of the case. The decision … was to use and rest on documentary evidence to prove every point possible’,⁹ a decision that worked well with the bureaucratic structure of the Third Reich.¹⁰ Despite the approach outlined in the London Charter, varying methods prevailed among the nations involved in the establishment of international courts. Several judicial cultures coexisted, and while the American trials tended to rely mostly on documents, British war crimes trials were more inclined to use testimonies.¹¹ However, both the ‘Doctors’ Trial’, conducted in Nuremberg under the auspices of the United States in the wake of the IMT, and the Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials, held by the British authorities, relied on information gathered by pathologists.¹²

The Nuremberg Tribunal had such an impact on historiography that when the Eichmann trial, another landmark in the history of the Holocaust, which took place almost fifteen years later, took the approach to rely primarily on testimony, many historians saw this as a paradigm shift. Several terms to refer to what was seen as the rise of the figure of the witness have been coined. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub chose the ‘era of testimony’, and Annette Wieviorka the ‘era of the witness’.¹³ These phrases were to characterise the period from the Eichmann trial onwards, during which the testimony of Holocaust survivors became central not only to memory, but also to judicial processes.¹⁴ Until then the paradigm of documentary evidence prevailed in the courts established to judge the crimes of the Third Reich, as the historiography centred on the IMT suggests. Notwithstanding these differing approaches to evidence, however, the IMT and the Eichmann trial shared some common features. Specifically, they both neglected corpses and material evidence.¹⁵ These judicial options have contributed to leaving forensic practices in the shadows, both in the trials and in the historiography.

Recently, forensic practices and the fate of corpses after mass violence events have attracted more attention from scholars of various disciplines, such as anthropology, history and sociology.¹⁶ These scholars have identified a new shift in the handling of mass crime corpses and have noted the extensive use of forensic medicine in mass violence cases since the 1980s, to the point of popularising the expression ‘forensic turn’.¹⁷ This has also been used to characterise the use of forensic techniques from the 1980s onwards for much older cases of mass death, such as Robert Jan van Pelt’s work on the gas chambers of Auschwitz.¹⁸ The ‘forensic turn’ that happened in the 1980s is often described as a shift in judicial logics,¹⁹ that followed an ‘era of witness’ (from the 1960s), which in turn came after a period during which documentary evidence was key, from the late 1940s.

This chronology is intriguing for at least two reasons. Firstly, it took a very long time for forensic techniques to become prevalent in cases of mass violence. As Zuzanna Dziuban has pointed out, although the use of forensic technology for criminal law dates back to the nineteenth century, its pre-eminent role in investigations of mass violence came much later.²⁰ Secondly, according to Adam Rosenblatt, this growing presence does not necessarily coincide with the development of new techniques or their appropriate use. As he explains, in the 1980s, a form of amateurism still prevailed. When discussing the exhumations carried out in Argentina, he notes, ‘These initial exhumations … were haphazard efforts, as the forensic authorities and cemetery workers who conducted them had little knowledge of the appropriate archaeological and anthropological techniques of exhumations. For the most part, they destroyed more evidence than they recovered.’²¹

Thus, the ‘forensic turn’ that occurred in the 1980s is characterised more by a shift in the evidential paradigm – and the popularisation of specific techniques – in the field of international justice than by scientific advances. However, as Dziuban notes, it profoundly modified the way mass crimes are proven: ‘Even if this has not necessarily entailed an overall invalidation of human testimony and its disappearance from the courtrooms and human rights activism, forensically acquired and assessed evidence has assumed critical importance in evincing the existence and nature of the crimes …’²²

To understand and nuance this timeline, it is worth looking at the origins of forensic interventions in wartime and the context in which they emerged. The emergence of a more ‘object oriented juridical culture’, as Weizman put it,²³ has a long history. As what follows shows, this history is at least partially linked to the increasing role of scientists and the importance of the expert figure in both the field of justice and that of war and humanitarian practice from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. Indeed, the emergence of an international law of war which provides for the regulation of the use of violence and obligations regarding the treatment of the dead and wounded has led armies in particular to adopt forensic techniques to establish the violations committed by their enemy. In this chapter, I show that a culture of investigation, relying on material evidence, clearly existed among the military command in the aftermath of the Second World War.²⁴ This culture was sufficiently developed to lead to the creation of units dedicated to this task. This was the result not only of the general use of forensic techniques but also of a reflection on the credibility of different types of sources. Furthermore, the use of forensic tools and the debates surrounding them reveal the issues relating to the broader use of forensic techniques in the field of investigation. In its first section, this chapter traces the origins of forensic practices and highlights their long history. In the following sections, it examines more closely some of the work produced by the British Army War Crimes Investigation Unit in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Tracing the origins of forensic practices

The history of forensic practices relating to war and mass violence is linked to the emergence of an international law of war and the willingness to prosecute those who violated it. The armies were certainly the first to act in this direction. By focusing on the simultaneous establishment of a law of war and the practice of establishing evidence of its violations, this section aims to shed light on the origins of forensic warfare practices. The St Petersburg Declaration, which was signed in 1868 and aimed to monitor violence during conflict, forbade the use of weapons that were deemed to cause ‘unnecessary suffering’, such as explosive bullets. This formulation undoubtedly helped to provide opportunities for physicians – and military physicians in particular – to study pain, ways to assess it and to define the thresholds of acceptable destructiveness.²⁵ The Hague Convention, signed in 1899 and 1907, subsequently provided further guidance. Therefore, when the First World War broke out, there were laws that regulated the practice of warfare, the use of weaponry and the handling of corpses. Article 23 of the annex to the Convention (IV) regarding the Laws and Customs of War on Land forbade, among others, the employment of poison or poisoned weapons, the killing or wounding of civilians belonging to the hostile nation or prisoners of war and the employment of arms, projectiles or materiel meant to cause unnecessary suffering.²⁶ At the same time, the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field specified the obligations of the belligerent with regard to the treatment of bodies left on the battlefield.²⁷ Motivated by the rapid development of weapons technology and the willingness to mitigate war violence, this legislation did not prevent the occurrence of atrocities. However, by making the protection of the integrity of the combatants, the wounded and the dead a legal obligation, these texts created, as I will show, the conditions for the emergence of forensic practices in a war context.

The First World War, the brutality of which has been studied by several historians, was to provide the backdrop to these first interventions. In their book, German Atrocities, John Horne and Alan Kramer identify 129 major incidents on the Western Front during Germany’s invasion of France and Belgium. During these incidents, a total of 6,147 people were killed.²⁸ As Annette Becker notes, civilians were not spared violence: ‘From the early days of the war, in August 1914, violence was committed against civilians on all fronts that were invaded, particularly crimes against women, many of which were documented by verified testimonies published during the conflict itself.’²⁹

To facilitate the documentation of atrocities, governments issued guidelines for the military relating to the collection of evidence. An example of this is provided by an instruction from the French Ministry of War issued in August 1914, which prescribed the recording of acts contrary to the laws of war. It recommended that, ‘whenever such an act has been established, a duplicate report should be made, signed by witnesses, military or not, and, if possible, by the perpetrators of the attacks themselves, if they have been captured’.³⁰ It also suggested questioning prisoners to ascertain whether they acted on their own initiative or whether they followed the orders of their superiors. At the very end of the letter, it was further documented that if prohibited weapons and projectiles were to be used by the enemy, these facts should be accurately recorded, and the ammunition confiscated and sent to the Ministry of War.

Besides these military efforts, several countries set up civil investigation commissions, often composed of lawyers and senior officials. They collected testimonies and gathered medical or forensic data. On 6 November 1914, for example, a medical officer of the French Army testified before the commission of his country and detailed the forensic examination he had carried out a few days earlier on two exhumed corpses.³¹ In Eastern Europe, Rodolphe A. Reiss, a criminologist based in Lausanne, took part in a commission, set up by Serbia, to investigate atrocities committed by the invading Central Power. His reports included information on explosive bullets, as well as observations of wounds and bodies found in mass graves.³² However, what is most striking about these reports is that the boundary between testimony and physical evidence is not as rigid as one might think. Testimony, sworn testimony and physical evidence are obviously not mutually exclusive, but they often work together. As Reiss explained, ‘eyewitnesses were examined on the spot and in most cases, they were my guides to the place where the outrages had taken place. Thus, I was afforded the opportunity of verifying the truth of their statements by actual and personal inspection’.³³

Thus, the establishment of an international law of war and its formulation have greatly facilitated the deployment of forensic techniques in the theatre of war violence. However, it would be wrong to link the development of forensic practices solely to these legal foundations. Indeed, military physicians were – and continue to be – also heavily implicated in researching and improving the effectiveness of weapons.³⁴ Ballistic expertise, for example, can serve the purposes of attesting breaches of the law of war or improving a weapon’s destructiveness. Moreover, the forensic medicine of war/mass crimes cannot be regarded completely independently of military justice. Indeed, if the presence of forensic scientists within the armed forces increased, this was mainly due to the needs of the military court. The First World War prompted the reorganisation of military health services and the development of medico-legal practices to help the military justice department detect malingerers or calculate the pension of disabled veterans.³⁵ Besides these tasks, certain military physicians also helped establish the first procedures for the identification of bodies and the recording of possible violations of the laws of war.³⁶ Hence, the First World War was not only a time of formalisation of forensic practices regarding war crimes; a forensic culture in the service of military justice and the draft was also emerging within the armies. Yet, in the aftermath of the First World War, several obstacles prevented the prosecution of crimes committed during the conflict, including disagreements between the victors and the refusal to extradite the Kaiser. Therefore, it would take until after the Second World War for this burgeoning forensic culture to really emerge. At the Nuremberg Trials, the charge included ‘crimes against peace’, i.e. initiating a war of aggression and war crimes, as provided for in the Nuremberg Charter, which used the terminology of the Hague Convention and added conspiracy and crimes against humanity, which ‘seemed specifically created to deliver an idiom of judgment capable of naming, and by extension, condemning the evidence of atrocity so graphically captured in Nazi Concentration Camps’.³⁷ After the war, the question of the punishment of crimes took on unprecedented importance, giving rise to significant investigative work.

The British War Crimes Investigation Unit in the aftermath of the Second World War

After the Second World War, investigative practices into war crimes were further formalised within the armed forces. The development of war forensics stemmed not only from the willingness to prosecute war crime, but also from the greater attention paid to the corpses, the challenges they posed and the high demand for identification. In Berlin, as Monica Black explains, ‘corpses accumulated in every conceivable place: streets, parks, railway stations, air raid shelters, canals, and cellars’.³⁸ The large number of unburied or inadequately buried Holocaust victims also provided the US Army with material to punish the German population, forcing them to give these dead a proper burial, often without protective equipment.³⁹ As Black maintains, ‘to control the disposition of the dead is, in any context, a profound gesture of power’.⁴⁰ Thus, at the end of the conflict, the bodies were far from being invisible objects or ignored by the authorities. They were present in high numbers and sometimes integrated into the occupation policies of the Allied armies as the example of the US Army shows. The legal obligations of belligerents have also further expanded since the First World War. The Geneva Convention of 1929 stipulates among other things that, if possible, death should be ascertained by medical examination and that the belligerents ‘shall organize officially a graves registration service, to render eventual exhumations possible, and to ensure the identification of bodies whatever may be the subsequent site of the grave’.⁴¹ In the interwar period, the identification of bodies – including those of enemies – thus was explicitly mentioned in the legal text. The evolution of these laws reflects the growing demand, often from the public, for the search for, identification and repatriation of soldiers’ bodies. But this is obviously only valid for soldiers, whereas the identification of civilians remains unaddressed. Indeed, in the aftermath of the war identification of civilians proved to be often more difficult,⁴² although Jean-Marc Dreyfus notes that the French search mission for the corpses of deportees in Germany achieved a high rate of identification.⁴³

In 1944, the British created the Missing Research and Enquiry Service within the Royal Air Force, dedicated to the search for overseas casualties. Its work included the tracing of 41,881 missing people and the locations of those who had been buried during the conflict.⁴⁴ Japan began repatriation operations in 1953, while the United States and France took similar steps just after the war.⁴⁵ The United States relied on physical anthropologists to proceed with the identification of the unknown soldiers.⁴⁶

It is in the context of the implementation of corpse management policies that several investigation teams were set up within the British Army. In 1946, these teams and a war crimes specialist pool were united under the name of the War Crimes Investigation Unit. Based in Bad Oeynhausen, near Bielefeld, the unit took over all the records of cases of the earlier team units.⁴⁷ The main tasks of the unit were to exhume the corpses found in mass or isolated graves when a crime was suspected or when there were doubts regarding the identity of the bodies, to identify the corpses and determine the cause of death. The archives of the newly created unit reveal the importance the army command attached to the use of a pathologist for exhumations. When graves were discovered in Bemburg, for example, Colonel A. O. Stott insisted on not proceeding with the exhumations until a pathologist was able to come to the site. He explained, ‘When the remains are exposed to the air, it may happen that valuable evidence, which may be detected and noted only by a SPECIALIST, is lost in a few moments.’ He then added, ‘the function of the graves service is to exhume for identity and to concentrate when necessary; graves service officers are not regarded as competent to report on “evidence of atrocities”’.⁴⁸

The search for the bodies of the missing largely explains the organisation of specific teams dedicated to this mission. Moreover, a form of specialisation was taking place and the establishment of evidence of war crimes was becoming a specific task. Thus, not only did forensic examination take place in the aftermath of the Second World War, but it was also institutionalised with the creation of dedicated teams within the armed forces. This shows that the collection of material evidence was, together with the collection of testimonies and the search for documentary evidence, a means of investigation.

The report on the Ravensbrück concentration camp

The several types of evidence – such as testimonies, documents or material examination – were often used in parallel as the report produced by the War Crimes Investigation Unit on the Ravensbrück concentration camp shows. This camp, situated in the north of Berlin and opened in May 1939, was the largest women’s concentration camp of the German Reich. In 1941, a men’s camp was added before the Uckermark Jugendschutzlager (youth protection camp) was opened in 1942. According to the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück approximately 120,000 women and children were interned in the camp during the war, in addition to 20,000 men and 1,200 youths. Inmates were subjected to forced labour, medical experiments and executions. Between the end of January 1945 and April 1945, these executions were performed in a gas chamber, where 5,000 to 6,000 prisoners were murdered.⁴⁹

In 1946, Keith A. Mant, one of the pathologists working for the British Army, took part in the investigation of the medical experiments conducted at Ravensbrück.⁵⁰ In addition to Mant, seven officers contributed to a report on this issue. Their work is indicative of the prevailing culture of investigation: testimonies were a very important source of information, and the pathologist participated in their collection and analysis.⁵¹ The document details the functioning of the camp and provides general information. The origins of the internees, the structure of the camp and its organisation regarding food, work, punishment, etc., are first described. Then the report details the killing methods, making a distinction between ‘the execution of named individuals and [the] extermination of certain categories’.⁵² The commission found that in January 1945, the Jugendschutzlager (youth camp) was repurposed to execute prisoners. The victims were executed by neck shots from a small-calibre rifle. In March, a gas chamber was built after converting half of one of the barrack stores situated ‘conveniently’, as the report states, close to the crematorium. According to the report, ‘the total number of persons who were burned at the Crematorium was about 6,400 from January until the end of March. […] The gassing lasted for approximately 5 weeks during which time 2,400 to 2,500 were exterminated. The gas chamber closed shortly after Easter 1945.’⁵³

The authors were keen to insist on the application of a certain method. At the very beginning, they state that, ‘In order to establish a definite case and determine both which of the accused were to be included in the major case and the direction in which investigations could be most profitably pursued, all witnesses were interrogated prior to examination of any suspect persons’,⁵⁴ thus revealing an episteme of the investigation. This document suggests that witness statements were used in the report in a compilation mode, in which for each accused, the investigators initially presented their own statement and then the other accused’s statements regarding their co-accused, before finally presenting the witness testimonies. ‘The intention behind their accumulation is simply to serve as a quick reference guide to the most direct a[nd] positive evidence obtained so far against the main accused.’⁵⁵ Thus, witness statements were used cautiously and served as peripheral information by comparison with what was considered more solid evidence. Indeed, a certain suspicion of witnesses is apparent, and the report produced by Mant’s team is obviously not free from stereotypical assumptions. For instance, in the conclusion, the authors remind their readers that, ‘In all, the investigators have attempted to allow for the histrionic exaggerations to be expected from the female sex.’⁵⁶ The objectivity and credibility of potential witnesses was a particular concern, especially when they belonged to minority groups, like the Jews who, like women, were suspected of bias.⁵⁷

The medical experiments carried out at Ravensbrück received significant attention and were mainly judged at the Ravensbrück trial, held in Hamburg between 1946 and 1947, although certain defendants were brought before the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, held at the same time.⁵⁸ Mant’s findings were used in both trials even if, according to Weindling, tensions related to the evidence gathering process arose with the Americans.⁵⁹ Along with the report came a shorter account of the ‘Medical Services, Human Experimentation and Other Medical Atrocities Committed in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp’, written solely by Mant.⁶⁰ Since the camp was situated in the Soviet Zone, Mant could not access it. Therefore, the report is mainly based on an analysis of the statements made by witnesses, including interned doctors and nurses, patients, persons employed in the administration and the accused. This report proved that Karl Gebhardt, Himmler’s surgeon, was personally responsible for all medical experiments.⁶¹ These findings were used in a presentation given by Mant in 1949 and published as an article in the Medico-Legal Journal, along with additional elements taken from the transcripts of trials, which took place in Hamburg and Nuremberg, as well as the discussion that followed the presentation. This reflects a form of normalisation of war forensics that was spreading to scientific networks and bodies of criminal law forensics.

Mant’s work is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it confirms the presence of forensic pathologists in the investigation teams and therefore the interest of the military hierarchy in these techniques. Secondly, it shows that they are not only called upon to analyse material evidence but also to produce reports on the basis of testimony. This ultimately reveals a culture of enquiry that relies on scientific expertise and combines different approaches.

Mant’s work on exhumed bodies

One of Mant’s most important contributions to the field of war forensics is undoubtedly his work on exhumed bodies. This work also constitutes the core material for his doctorate in medicine, submitted in 1950. During this research study, Mant performed more than 150 autopsies and witnessed several hundred exhumations undertaken by the graves service. He explained, ‘the time which had elapsed between the original burial and exhumation varied from eight months to five years, and was known accurately, usually to the day, and often hour, of the original burial’.⁶² Mant’s work was carried out in the context of the investigation of war crimes, as defined by the Royal Warrant, and essentially concerned crimes committed against British or Allied soldiers, excluding those committed in the camps. As he explained, the warrant shapes the investigation: ‘The investigations, therefore, were quite different from those undertaken for the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg, where the evidence was for the most part documentary.’⁶³ This view reflects the various traces left by different crimes; executions committed during combat certainly resulted in less documentation than the organisation of mass extermination policies. As Mant put it: ‘[the war crimes units] had on many occasions to build up the entire case by investigation in the field’.⁶⁴ This also suggests that a different judicial culture prevailed in different spheres, and that supporters of an international tribunal were perhaps, at least initially, less sensitive to forensic evidence than the military, which already had a long history of forensic work and created units dedicated to such practices early on.

As for his work on war crimes committed against British or Allied soldiers, Mant’s main task was to exhume the corpses and to perform autopsies, to identify the deceased whenever possible and to determine the cause of death with all the relevant details: the weapon and its calibre, the number of shots and an estimation of the range.⁶⁵ This involved at least two types of investigative practices, one on objects surrounding the corpses, which would help with identification, a practice that already had a long history within armies. The other was associated with the bodies themselves and was in the process of being formalised at the time of Mant’s work. In addition to marks on clothing (such as name or numbers) and identity discs, Mant used for instance dental charts and tattoo marks. The information was then cross-checked by an estimation of the height, age and build mentioned in the service records.⁶⁶ It should be noted that the armies made their own arrangements, which demonstrated different degrees of preparation. American soldiers could often be identified by their fingerprints, for which the army had records, which was not the case for the British Army.⁶⁷

Mass graves involved special precautions, as the bodies had to be treated individually, while allowing for the collection of information regarding the entire grave and the arrangement of the bodies in relation to one another. In his dissertation, Mant also details several cases of shots to the neck. As Mant explains, although they were called neck shots, ‘the majority of the victims were actually shot through the base of the skull, the exit hole being situated in the frontal bone’.⁶⁸ Interestingly, the work of Mant and his teams involved not only fieldwork, but also laboratory-based practice. When the bodies were in too bad a condition to be examined, the injured parts were removed and sent to the laboratory.

Mant’s thesis is relevant for grasping the issues at stake in the question of testimony versus forensic expertise. Remarkably, Mant was very quickly aware of the changing role of pathologists, whose expertise was increasingly in demand in the years following the war. He writes:

He viewed this increasing demand for pathologists’ expertise as a consequence of a declining reliance on testimony, as he explicitly stated:

However, this opinion must be put into perspective, when we know the precautions taken in relation to the testimonies, which were often used in compilation, and the stereotypical assumptions that surrounded some of them. Mant’s analysis must also be understood in light of the quest for recognition and institutionalisation of his discipline, which was far from assured.⁷¹ Before the Coroner’s Rule of 1953, any qualified medical practitioner could be asked by the coroner to carry out an autopsy.⁷² In the same year, a white paper on mortuaries helped modernise the processes for the management of dead bodies and post-mortem facilities. According to Mant, during the war, bombing raids also led to an improvement of equipment and the building of new mortuaries: ‘Where these mortuaries were erected, they replaced the existing parish mortuaries. These wartime mortuaries were spacious … having both a storage room and a post-mortem room with a standard autopsy table and a gas or electric water heater.’⁷³ Thus, the increasing reliance on forensic pathologists certainly stemmed from the modernisation and institutionalisation of their discipline.

The work carried out by Mant in post-war Germany influenced forensic medicine, as the exceptional circumstances had provided an unprecedented amount of data. In a paper published in 1987, Mant highlights:

At a time when forensic medicine suffered from a lack of recognition as a medical discipline,⁷⁵ studies into the deaths of the Second World War were a great opportunity, both in terms of knowledge and acknowledgement.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that the opposition between testimonies and forensic evidence was thematised very early on by those involved in these investigations. In the aftermath of the Second World War, discussions on the relevance of these different types of sources were already taking place. Forensic investigations did take place, but their use remained limited. Forensic pathologists were crucial for corpse identification and were regularly called to the opening of common graves. However, although their presence in the army was formalised, the options taken in terms of establishing the international tribunals did not leave them much room as documentary evidence and testimonies were the preferred means of evidence.

As the long history of investigation into the Holocaust shows, the culture of evidence not only shaped the judiciary process, but also framed the collective memory of an event. Some are concerned about the death of the last survivors in terms of the transmission of history, others ponder on the means of preserving the material traces, especially former camps.⁷⁶ The infatuation with the IMT and subsequently the Eichmann trial has undoubtedly contributed to the scholarship’s inclination to focus on documentary evidence, before moving on to the testimonies. However, it would be wrong, in my opinion, to take testimonies and material evidence as fixed entities opposed to one other, the meaning of which has remained unchanged for seventy to one hundred years. I would rather argue that there is a continuum in the making of evidence, a continuum that includes a wide range of techniques and discourses, from oral testimony to forensic reports, from children’s drawings to sworn statements. Thus, material evidence never speaks for itself and always needs to be understood in its context, above all in relation to mass violence.