From jmorris@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca Tue Oct  1 08:20:13 PDT 1996
Article: 70556 of alt.revisionism
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From: jmorris@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (John Morris)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: dig up the bodies and burn them
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 1996 08:00:35 GMT
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mgiwer@ix.netcom.com (Matt  Giwer) wrote:

>On Fri, 27 Sep 1996 07:41:38 GMT, jmorris@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (John Morris)
>wrote:
>
>>mgiwer@ix.netcom.com (Matt  Giwer) wrote:
>
>>>	Ever wonder why the story always includes digging up the bodies and burning
>>>them?
>
>>>	You see jews do not permit even autopsies as the bodies must be complete (save
>>>for the foreskin.)  
>
>>>	So simply killing and burying was not evil enough for true evil.  Therefore the
>>>bodies had to be exhumed and destroyed by fire to prevent complete bodies from
>>>facing Yahweh at the judgement.  That made the Nazis pure, demonic evil.  
>
>>>	And for a superstitious lot of eastern Europeans this was enlightened thought.  
>
>>Nothing to do with Giwer's juvenile "pure evil" strawman at all. At
>>Birkenau bodies were dug up and cremated simply because they stank.
>
>	Excuse me, but just who authorized you to add to the legends?  The only claims
>posted from "genuine, official Nazi sources" have been in reference to getting
>rid of the evidence.  Of that is under the false assumption that cremation would
>leave no evidence.  
>
>	Sorry, but your "steenking jews" fabrication is your own invention, contrary to
>the established stories.  On the other hand, perhaps you notice strange smells
>in cemetaries.  And do not forget lime was added to the burial pit.  Also do not
>forget that the pit has never been identified.  

Pits, plural. They have been identified both at Auschwitz and
Treblinka. As Franciszek Piper notes in his article in Gutman and
Berebaum's _Auschwitz: Anatomy of a Death Camp, p. 179n.:

   In 1965 the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum commisioned Hydrokop,
   a chemical mining company, to carry out geological tests to find
   the location of the incineration pits and pyres. Hydrokop bored 303
   holes up to 3 metere deep at Auschwitz II-Birkenau  and found
   traces of human ashes, bones, and hair at 42 sites. Documentation
   and diagrams of all the holes and their distribution are at the
   Conservation Department of the [Auschwitz State] Museum.

The mass graves are where they are supposed to be: in various
locations from the northwest corner of the camp to Kremas IV and V and
behind the gas chambers known as the Bunkers. As Mark Van Alstine
previously posted, "One can see, on page 5 of the  _Auschwitz
Chronicle_, the locations of the mass grave and incineration pits,
which are clearly marked."

As to the stench of the bodies behind the Bunkers, the order for their
removal apparently came from Himmler during a visit to the camp.

Unfortunately you will not be able to verify the reference as it is in
a book: Pressac's article in the _Anatomy_, to be precise.
>
>	You would have made up a better story if you had pointed out how shallow the
>water table
>
>>In the Ukraine and Russia under a project code-named '13f', they were
>>dug up and burnt in an effort to destroy the evidence of mass
>>shootings.
>
>	And as above, burning leaves evidence even though no one has ever been able to
>find it.  

As for other mass gravesites, I wonder what professor Richard Wright,
an Australian professor of archaeology is on about in the following
lecture:



In this evening's talk I shall introduce you to archaeological
investigations of mass killings in Ukraine. The people were murdered
in 1942 and we excavated the graves 50 years later. Our work was done
to support three prosecutions made in Adelaide under the War Crimes
Legislation. I am an archaeologist. Why was an archaeologist needed at
all?

Well, the Special Investigations Unit of the Attorney-General's
Department was determined to forestall two styles of defence
customarily offered in such cases - that the wrong person has been
charged (mistaken identification), and that the events alleged are
imagined or (if not wholly imagined) so polluted in people's memories
by the lapse of time, and by self-reinforcing narration, as to be
worthlessly distorted evidence. Being an archaeologist, I had nothing
to do with the first strategy - identification of the alleged
perpetrators; but I had much to do with investigating material
evidence for the alleged events.

So, I shall talk to you this evening about how we found the graves,
how we worked out details of the killings, and how we dated events
both by old fashion stratigraphic methods and modern chronometric
techniques.

The events we investigated are shocking and I must warn you that some
of the pictures I am going to show you of the events are themselves
shocking. Those of you in this evening' audience who have perhaps only
thought of the war crimes prosecutions as a political issue, may well
be disturbed by the sight of the events uncovered. I hope these
introductory remarks can also serve as an apology for concentrating on
particulars, and not presuming to give a summary of the holocaust in
Ukraine. My profession is that of archaeologist, not historian. In
Ukraine I did archaeology. Other people (for example, Professor Konrad
Kwiet, Deputy Director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies,
Macquarie University) did the history.

I have one final introductory remark. The events of the holocaust have
never impinged on me personally except for one childhood event which
has become more symbolically important for me since we did our work in
Ukraine. Let me take you through this briefly. 

Just before the Second World War, my father (who was a clergyman in
the evangelical wing of the Anglican church in England) befriended an
Austrian neurologist and his family. The family of Jews had been
thrown out of Austria after the Nazis took over. I suspect that what
was to become a close friendship, gave my father a profoundly new, and
more secular, view of the world. He had taken as a friend, a person
who had not only a foreign nationality, but also a foreign profession
and (what would have been to my father) a foreign religion.

I used to play with Hans, the son of the neurologist. One day we were
playing a game of soldiers in the garden. Hans suddenly broke off the
game and told me how his family was herded to the Vienna railway
station. He was having trouble keeping up with the column. Just before
it reached the station, an old man picked Hans up in his arms. A
soldier shouted and then used his rifle butt to club the head of the
old man who was carrying Hans. He fell to the ground as the old man's
arms opened.

I never found myself dwelling on this story told to me in my
childhood. Indeed I had virtually forgotten it - until we found
ourselves excavating in the grave at Serniki.

Let's talk about Serniki first. Our party consisted of myself as
archaeologist. In charge of the forensic side (for assessing age, sex,
manner of death - that sort of thing) we had Dr Godfrey Oettle who was
then head of the division of forensic medicine in Glebe. Responsible
for collecting details in a form acceptable for a court of law was
Detective Sergeant David Hughes of the NSW police. David had recently
been a member of the taskforce that solved the so-called granny
murders in Sydney. My wife Sonia, who is an experienced field
archaeologist, came as my assistant. She is presently writing up her
experiences at Serniki, using facilities at the Centre for Comparative
Genocide Studies at Macquarie University.

Now even with glasnost (well underway in 1990) you could not just turn
up in Moscow and announce you were going to do amass exhumation in
Ukraine. No, our efforts had been arranged with officials within the
Soviet government. The Soviet officials had already experienced the
professionalism of the Sydney based Special Investigations Unit,
because (apart from what we were to do) the Australian team had
virtually wound up its investigations at the village of Serniki. When
we turned up, we inherited much of the goodwill that the SIU had built
up with both the Soviet and Ukrainian authorities. Responsibility for
ensuring we had what we wanted was given to the procurator for the
whole western half of the Soviet Union, Madam Kalashnikova - a person
who we found at times lived up to the Western metaphor of a
Kalashnikov, but who could at other times be immensely helpful.

Serniki is on the southern margins of the Pripet marshes, which Hitler
in his table talk said he would, after the war, retain as an area for
Wehrmacht manoeuvres. The area we were working in was well within
German lines in this area of Ukraine. When we turned up it was high
summer and a fantastic growing time of the year in fields and gardens.
The locals were not used to tourists and we were stared at a lot.
The area of the grave is now in an ominous-looking dark pine forest,
but feelings of that sort are illusory. At the time of the killings
this was open country. At the site in the forest, the Soviet
authorities has set us up with a telephone, tents, electricity,
bulldozers, and a contingent of Red Army soldiers. Only the telephone
didn't work.The local officials wanted to find bodies as soon as
possible, and did so at what turned out to be the end of the grave.
However my interest, as an archaeologist, was first to remove the soil
feature that might be interpreted as a grave and only then look for
bodies. In this way damage to contextual evidence would be minimised.

We were fortunate in finding a marked contrast in colour and texture
between the natural soil and the filling of the grave. This contrast
came right to the base of the existing humic zone at the surface, so
we were able to delimit one whole half of the grave before disturbing
anything. To do our work, we divided the grave into two halves. The
Australian team took charge of the end located by archaeological
methods, and the Soviets took the other.

Our first job, having delimited the boundaries of the grave as some 40
metres long and 5 metres wide, was to bulldoze down two metres to
within 20 centimetres of the bodies. Then, together with the soldiers,
we used shovels to remove the sand until the tops of the bodies were
exposed.
 
We then used paint brushes to do the final exposure. At the end of
five weeks of gruesome work, our count of skulls indicated about 550
bodies in the grave. There may have been a few more skulls where
bodies lay more than two deep, but the torsos had too much surviving
soft tissue to make feasible the task of any further exposure.

An awful scene had unfolded. As the eyewitnesses had said, they were
mostly women and children. The men were old men. They had been herded
down a ramp into the grave. One lot had gone to the left and been shot
while lying down within the grave; the others had gone to the right.
The majority had entry and exit wounds of bullets in their skulls.
Some of them had been clubbed.

At the end the Soviets were working on, the bodies lay face down,
parallel and in rows. At our end the bodies were much more
disorganised. There seemed to have been panic at our end.
 
In a generally empty area at the middle of the grave we found bodies
that had fewer bullets to the head. Some had been clubbed.
 
These people had surviving bits of clothing, whereas the main mass of
people at each end had been stripped before being shot. We found items
of clothing right through the filling of the grave, suggesting that
people had picked through a pile of clothing, throwing in what was
unwanted while the grave was being filled in. One boot contained a
pocket watch secreted in the heel.

We felt a grim satisfaction in revealing that the massive grave was
much too large for the number of people in it. The Nazis had obviously
hoped for many more victims.

One of my duties was to concentrate on dating the event. After
cleaning up some of the corroded machine pistol cartridge cases, and
examining them with a lens, my colleagues found that the killers had
used German ammunition stamped with the place and date of manufacture.
The cases dated from the years of 1939, 1940 and 1941. These cases
were like coins found in conventional excavations. We thereby had a
date of 1941, later than which the killings must have taken place.

It proved more of a problem to get a date earlier than which the
killings took place. The fir trees grew in parallel rows and were
clearly a plantation. Some fir trees grew in the filling of the grave.
We examined the growth rings of the trees. The greatest number of
rings we could find was 29, indicating that the killing had taken
place before 1961.

We were able to narrow dating down significantly once we got back to
Sydney. Radiocarbon dating of hair showed that the individuals showed
no trace of the so-called hydrogen bomb effect in their proportion of
carbon isotopes, so the killing took place before hydrogen bombs
started to be let off in 1952.

Now we turn to the work in Ustinovska, a year later in 1991. Here we
had Sergeant Steve Horne in place of David Hughes. Dr Chris Griffiths,
a specialist in forensic dentistry at Westmead Hospital, joined
Godfrey Oettle on the forensic side. He was needed because of a
particularly awful allegation about the killings there. It was alleged
that after a hundred or so adults had been marched two kilometres to a
grave and shot, a fellow had asked where the children were. "We didn't
think you wanted to shoot the children", the organisers of the
round-up had said.  At that, some fellows returned to the village,
commandeered a cart, and drove the children back to the grave. They
then, so the allegations went, threw the children off the cart and
into the grave, and shot them. I was told that the SIU investigators
had interviewed the mother of three of those children (the father was
a Jew, she wasn't). She said she had returned home from the fields for
lunch one day. Her children were not in the house. She asked her
neighbors whether they had seen the children. The neighbors told her
they had been taken away to be shot.

Dr. Griffith's services were required because of the need to work out
the ages of the children, if indeed we found them, from the stages of
eruption of the milk teeth and permanent teeth.

Ustinovka is 500 ESE of Serniki, in the fertile black soil loess belt.
Unlike at Serniki, the locals had only a vague idea of where the grave
might be.  There was no sign on the surface.

Standing in a vast paddock of 10cm tall peas and maize, I felt
helpless. How were we to start looking? Where were we to start
looking?  The rest of the team looked confident, expecting Sonia and
myself to perform some sort of archaeological divination.

I remembered back to my textbooks. Young crops like disturbed ground,
trenches showing up from the air as greener features. This gave us an
idea. Back in town we had seen an ancient biplane on an airstrip. We
asked if we could use it.

Permission to use the biplane was readily granted, but - NO PHOTOS. As
it turned out photos would have been impossible out of the scratched
perspex windows of this crop-dusting biplane, stinking of chemicals.
Even looking for cropmarks was impossible. So we asked for a better
plane.

Next morning we returned to the site. In the middle of the peas and
maize stood a Soviet army helicopter, rocket pods protruding. What
about photos? The crew seemed annoyed with the question. There were no
problems with photos from the helicopter, of the helicopter, of the
crew (in particular there was no problem with colour Polaroids of the
crew).

The flight was to no avail. Nothing showed up. So we had to use
mundane methods.

We put a shallow trench with backhoe across a likely area, examining
the scraped walls for lateral discontinuities in colour and texture.
In this way we found the sides of a deep cutting, which turned out to
be the grave. At Ustinovka, unlike at Serniki, we succeeded in
defining the whole area of the grave before we disturbed any of its
contents. When you are looking for a buried body your archaeological
objective should be first to find the grave and only then bother with
the body. This is a fundamental principle of conserving evidence that
Australian police should pay more attention to. Archaeologists too
rarely get called in to assist police in their investigations.

Remembering the story that children had been killed after the adults,
our stratigraphic evidence provided stunning support for this story.
We came down on the children's skeletons first, and then what seemed
to be the bottom of the grave. But 20 centimetres below the children
lay the adults. The witnesses did not actually mention that the grave
had been partly filled after the adults were killed, but obviously our
strategraphic observations provide important material evidence for
their statement that children were killed later.

Their were about 20 children. The youngest one was about six months
and virtually destroyed in the soil except for teeth. The oldest one
was about 12 or 13 years old.

Thus we were able to get evidence that would have been missed without
paying attention to scientific methods of excavation. At Ustinovka,
maybe even the grave itself would have been missed.

I want to finish this evening by looking more widely than at Ukraine.
As you might expect, I am not alone in thinking that archaeological
methodology has a role in the investigation of killings. The
University of Bradford has a postgraduate diploma that majors in
forensic archaeology. I hope to visit John Hunter there when I go over
to the United Kingdom later this year.

Closer in topic to what we have spoken about tonight (mass killings)
is the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. They got themselves
together in the mid-1980s, when it became politically possible to
investigate the fate of the so-called "Disappeared" of the 1970s.
Horrified at the shambles the police were making of exhumations, they
formed themselves into a group of archaeologists and forensic
anthropologists. They impressed on the authorities that their methods
would allow better opportunities for identifying specific individuals,
by proving the association between artifacts and particular skeletons.
It wasn't enough to merely dig up the skeletons and take them to a
morgue for identification. This dedicated team has lent its services
to authorities elsewhere in South America and elsewhere in the world.

The Boston based Physicians for Human Rights has been approached by
the United Nations to assist with prosecutions relating to atrocities
in both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. As their title indicates,
they are primarily a forensic team of volunteers. But they routinely
incorporate the services of archaeologists. I am privileged to have
last month been invited to join their group of experts, though I can't
say it is an invitation that I accepted with relish.
 
The primary archaeological interests of my career have been twofold -
environmental changes at the end of the Ice Age and models for
computer aided multivariate analysis of archaeological data. These
remain my two chief archaeological interests. But as you can see, the
invitation to work in Ukraine dragged me away from those worthwhile,
but relatively arcane pursuits, to a nasty awakening in the
archaeology of the 20th Century. Nasty it may have been, but I have
not regretted it. Even though no Australian has been found guilty by
the courts of the atrocities investigated, we have brought forward new
material evidence of three particular episodes in the holocaust that
no persons, even those labouring on behalf of Holocaust denial, have
sought to contradict. material evidence is harder to contradict than
memories.



Courtesy of the HOLOCAUST listserv

--
 John Morris                               
 at University of Alberta     
-- 
The Nizkor Project     | http://www.nizkor.org/


From John.Morris@UAlberta.CA Tue Dec 31 12:10:18 PST 1996
Article: 90119 of alt.revisionism
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From: John.Morris@UAlberta.CA (John Morris)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Nazi Mass Mass Murder in the Ukraine
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 01:41:42 GMT
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The following article was sent to me by Dr. Richard Wright who
conducted forensic examination of two mass graves in Serniki and
Ustinovka, Ukraine. It is a more complete version of the article which
has appeared here before, courtesy of Darren O'Brien, and it contains
some additional notes on the use of forensic anthropology in Bosnia,
Rwanda, and Argentina in uncovering evidence of mass murder.

Since it addresses itself specifically to the claims of the so-called
revisionists, it is worth posting in its entirety.

---------------------------------------------------


UNCOVERING GENOCIDE: WAR CRIMES - THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

by Richard Wright

[Richard Wright is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Sydney. The original text of this lecture first appeared
in The Sydney Papers, Vol. 7 (3), Winter 1995, following a lecture
delivered to the Sydney Institute on 23 May 1995. The following text
is taken from an edited reprint appearing in International Network on
Holocaust and Genocide, Volume 11, Issue 3, 1996.]

This lecture will introduce archaeological investigations of mass
killings in Ukraine, perpetrated in 1942 and excavated 50 years later.
The work was done to support three prosecutions made in Adelaide,
South Australia, under the War Crimes Legislation. The question is why
was an archaeologist needed at all?

The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the Australian
Attorney-General's Department was determined to forestall two styles
of defense customarily offered in such cases - that the wrong person
has been charged (mistaken identification) and that the events alleged
are imagined or (if not wholly imagined) so polluted in peoples
memories by the lapse of time, and by self-reinforcing narration, as
to be worthlessly distorted evidence. Archaeology had nothing to do
with the first strategy - identification of alleged perpetrators - but
much to do with investigating material evidence for the alleged
events.

Thus this discussion will be about how the graves were found, how the
details of killings were worked out, and how the events were dated,
both by old fashioned stratigraphic methods and modern chronometric
techniques. As an archaeologist my analysis concentrates on the
particulars and does not presume to give a summary of the holocaust in
Ukraine.

The first grave was at Serniki, where the excavation party consisted
of, on the forensic side (for assessing sex, age, manner of death of
the victims), Dr Godfrey Oettle, head of the division of forensic
medicine in Glebe, Sydney. Responsible for collecting details in a
form acceptable for a court of law, Detective Sergeant David Hughes of
the New South Wales Police. My wife Sonia Wright, an experienced field
archaeologist, and who is currently writing up her experiences at
Serniki, was my assistant.

There were some preliminary problems. Even with glasnost (well under
way in the summer of 1990) one could not just turn up in Moscow and
announce you were going to do a mass exhumation in the Ukraine. With
this in mind, the trip had been arranged with officials within the
Soviet Government. The Soviet officials had already experienced the
professionalism of the Sydney-based Special Investigations Unit, as
the Australian team had virtually wound up its investigations at the
village of Serniki. Thus the archaeological team inherited much of the
goodwill that the SIU had built up with both the Soviet and Ukrainian
authorities. Responsibility for ensuring the second team's needs were
fulfilled was given to the procurator for the whole western half of
the Soviet Union, Madam Kalishnikova - at times a hindrance, at times
immensely helpful.

Serniki is on the southern margins of the Pripet marshes, which Hitler
said, in his table talk, would be retained for Wehrmacht manoeuvres
after the war. The work area was, in 1942, well within the German
lines in this area of the Ukraine. The area of the grave is now an
ominous-looking dark pine forest, but feelings of that sort are
illusory. At the time of the killings this was open country. Now in
the late twentieth century, at the site in the forest, the Soviet
authorities had set the team up with a telephone, tents, electricity,
bulldozers, and a contingent of Red Army soldiers. Only the telephone
didn't work.

The local officials wanted to find the bodies as soon as possible, and
did so at what turned out to be one end of the grave. However, the
archaeological interest was first to find a soil feature that might be
interpreted as a grave and only then look for bodies. In this way
damage to contextual evidence would be minimised.

The team was fortunate to find a marked contrast in colour and texture
between the natural soil and the filling of tne grave. This contrast
came right to the base of the existing humic zone at the surface, so
delimiting one half of the grave was possible before disturbing
anything. To do the work, the grave was divided into two halves, with
the Australian team at the end located by archaeological methods, and
the Soviets at the other.

The first job, having delimited the boundaries of ths grave as some
forty metres long and five metres wide, was to bulldoze down two
metres to within twenty centimetres of the bodies. Then, together with
the soldiers, shovels were used to remove the sand until the tops of
the bodies were exposed. Paint brushes were then used to do the final
exposure. At the end of five weeks of gruesome work, the skull count
indicated about 550 bodies in the grave. There may have been a few
more skulls where bodies lay more than two deep, but the torsos had
too much surviving soft tissue to make feasible the task of any
further exposure.

An awful scene unfolded. As the eyewitnesses had said, they were
mostly women and children. The men were old men. They had been herded
down a ramp into the grave. One lot had gone to the left and been shot
while lying down within the grave; the others had gone to the right.
The majority had entry and exit wounds of bullets in their skulls.
Some of them had been clubbed.

At the end the Soviets were working on, the bodies lay face down,
parallel and in rows. At the Australian end the bodies were much more
disorganized. There seemed to have been panic at our end.

In a generally empty area at the middle of the grave, bodies were
found that had fewer bullets to the head. Some had been clubbed. These
people had surviving bits of clothing, whereas the main mass of people
at each end of the grave had been stripped before being shot. Items of
clothing were found right through the filling of the grave, suggesting
that people had picked through a pile of clothing, throwing in what
was unwanted while the grave was being filled. One boot contained a
pocket watch secreted in the heel.

There was grim satisfaction in revealing that the massive grave was
much too large for the number of people in it. The Nazis had obviously
hoped for many more victims. 

One of my duties was to concentrate on dating the event. After
cleaning up some of the corroded machine pistol cartridge cases, and
examining them with a lens, my colleagues found that the killers had
used German ammunition stamped with the place and date of manufacture.
The cases dated from the years 1939, 1940 and 1941. These cases were
like coins found in conventional excavations. Thereby the team had a
date of 1941, later than which the killings must have taken place.

It proved more of a problem to get a date earlier than which the
killings took place. The fir trees grew in parallel rows and were
clearly a plantation. Some fir trees grew in the filling of the grave.
The growth rings of the trees were examined. The greatest number of
rings found was 29, indicating that the killing had taken place before
1961.

Dating narrowed down significantly on return to Sydney, Australia.
Radiocarbon dating of hair showed no trace of the so-called hydrogen
bomb effect in their proportion of carbon isotopes. So the killing
must have taken place before hydrogen bombs were first detonated in
1952. 

Turning now to 1991, when work commenced at Ustinovka, a year later
than Serniki. Sergeant Steve Horn replaced David Hughes, and Dr Chris
Griffiths, a specialist in forensic dentistry at Westmead Hospital,
Sydney, joined Godfrey Oettle on the forensic side. He was needed
because of a particularly awful allegation about the killings there.

It was alleged that after a hundred or so adults had been marched two
kilometres to a grave and shot, a fellow had asked where the children
were. 'We didn't think you wanted to shoot the children', the
organisers of the round-up had said. At that, some of the men returned
to the village, commandeered a cart, and drove the children back to
the grave. It is then alleged that they threw the children off the
cart and into the grave, and shot them. Apparently the SIU
investigators had interviewed the mother of three of those children
(the father was a Jew, she was not), who had said she returned from
the fields for lunch one day, and her children were not in the house.
She asked the neighbours whether they had seen the children. The
neighbours told her they had been taken away to be shot.

Dr Griffith's services were required because of the need to work out
the ages of the children, if found, from the stages of eruption of the
milk and permanent teeth.

Ustinovka is 500km east-southeast of Serniki, in the fertile black
soil loess belt. Unlike at Serniki, the locals had only a vague idea
of where the grave might be. There was no sign on the surface.

Standing in a vast paddock of 10 cm tall peas and maize, I felt
helpless. How were we to start looking? Where were we to start
looking?

One idea was to look for evidence of disturbed soil -young crops like
disturbed ground, trenches showing up from the air as greener
features. However, even from the air this proved fruitless, and thus
more mundane methods were initiated. 

With a backhoe, a shallow trench was put across a likely area. We
began examining the scraped walls for lateral discontinuities in
colour and texture. In this way the side of a deep cutting was found,
which turned out to be the grave. At Ustinovka, unlike at Serniki,
there was success in defining the whole area of the grave before
disturbing any of its contents. When looking for a buried body your
archaeological objective should be first to find the grave and only
then direct attention to the body. This is a fundamental principle in
conserving evidence that Australian police should pay more attention
to. Archaeologists too rarely get called in to assist the police in
their investigations. 

Remembering the story that children had been killed after the adults,
the stratigraphic evidence provided stunning support for this story.
The team came upon the children's skeletons first, and then what
seemed to be the bottom of the grave. But twenty centimetres below the
children lay the adults. The witnesses did not actually mention that
the grave had been partly filled after the adults were killed, but
obviously the stratigraphic observations provide important material
evidence for their statement that children were killed later.

There were about twenty children. The youngest one was about six
months and virtually destroyed in the soil, except for the teeth. The
oldest one was about twelve or thirteen years old.

Thus evidence was gathered that would have been missed without
attention to scientific methods of excavation. At Ustinovka, maybe
even the grave itself would have been missed. I conclude that
archaeological methodology has a role in the investigations of
killings.

I want to conclude by looking more widely than the events in the
Ukraine. I am obviously not alone in thinking that archaeoogical
methodology has a role in the investigation of killings. The
University of Bradford has a postgraduate diploma that majors in
forensic archaeology. I hope to visit John Hunter there when I go over
to the United Kingdom later this year [see 'Investigating War Crimes -
An Update' at the end of this article).

Closer to the topic of what I have been discussing in this lecture is
the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. It was formed in the
mid-1980s, when it became politically possible to investigate the fate
of the so-called 'Disappeared' of the 1970s. Horrified at the shambles
the police were making of the exhumations, they formed themselves into
a group of archaeologists and forensic anthropologists. They impressed
on the authorities that their methods would allow better opportunities
for identifying specific individuals, by proving the association
between artefacts and particular skeletons. It was not merely enough
to dig up the skeletons and take them to a morgue for identification.
This dedicated tearn has lent its services to authorites elsewhere in
South America and the world. 

The Boston based Physicians for Human Rights has been approached by
the United Nations to assist with prosecutions relating to atrocities
in both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. As their title indicates,
they are primarily a forensic team of volunteers. But they routinely
incorporate the services of archaeologists. I am privileged to have
been invited last year to join their group of experts, though I cannot
say that it is an invitation that I accept with relish.

The primary archaeological interests of my career have been twofold -
environmental changes at the end of the Ice Age and models for
computer aided multivariate analysis of archaeological data. But as
you can see, the invitation to work in the Ukraine dragged me away
>from  those worthwhile, but relatively arcane, pursuits to a nasty
awakening in the archaeology of the twentieth century. Nasty it may
have been, but I have not regretted it. Even though no Australian has
been found guilty by the courts of the atrocities we investigated, we
have brought forward new material evidence of three particular
episodes in the Holocaust that no persons, even those labouring on
behalf of Holocaust deniers, have sought to contradict. Material
evidence is harder to contradict than memories.

[Editor's addendum: AUSTRALIAN WAR CRIMES - A BRIEF OVERVIEW. In April
1987 the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) was formed under the
directorship of Robert Greenwood within the Australian Federal
Attorney-General's Department to investigate all aspects of
Australia's Nazi past. In its five-year life the SIU examined
allegations against 814 individuals. From substantial research,
proceedings were commenced against three men: Ivan Polyukhovich,
Mikolay Berezovsky and Heinrich Wagner. The archaeological material
excavated by Richard Wright from the Serniki mass grave was submitted
as evidence in the trial of Polyukhovich, who was acquitted. The
Berezovsky case was dismissed by the magistrate. The case against
Wagner was stopped by the Director of Public Prosecutions due to
Wagner's ill-health. The case against a fourth, Konrads Kalejs, was
handed over by the then Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, to the
Australian Federal Police after the closure of the SIU in 1992. No
other proceedings have taken place in the ensuing years.]

----------------------

INVESTIGATING WAR CRIMES - AN UPDATE

The editors of International Network on Holocaust and Genocide kindly
asked me if I would like to append a note to the reprinting of my
lecture to the Sydney Institute.

I did visit John Hunter at the University of Bradford and found he is
doing an excellent job teaching forensic archaeology. Readers
interested in the technicalities should consult his book Studies in
Crime: An Introduction to Forensic Archaeology, Batsford Books (1996).
He has been particularly concerned to build up a good relationship
between the profession and the British police, one that persuades the
police that archaeologists should be called in as a matter of course.
A case study, where they were not called in, is that of the Harry West
murders in Gloucestershire. The investigators publicly claimed to be
using archaeological methods to recover evidence but they did not use
archaeologists. Hunter reproduces a photo of the Gloucestershire work.
It looks like a preparation of the Fields of Flanders. 

In April I went to the Middle East to work on skeletal remains from
the University of Sydney's excavations in the Bronze Age of Arabia.
Sonia and I had a round the world ticket to return to Australia, one
that would have taken us through the United States in mid-May. So I
asked Darren O'Brien (Assistant Director of the Centre for Comparative
Genocide Studies) about institutions in the US that might be
interested in hearing of our Ukrainian work. He circulated my
'Serniki' article on the Holocaust internet list. [The list in
question was H-Holocaus issuing out of the University of Chicago
which, at that time, had 677 subscribers - Ed.]. Disappointingly,
there was virtually no interest - certainly no constructive interest.

So we routed our return to Australia via Argentina. Last month, in
Buenos Aires, we met with members of the Argentine Forensic
Anthropology Team. We were both moved by the meeting. They operate
with a threat to personal safety that I have never had to come to
terms with. 

During a seemingly carefree lunch in the middle of Buenos Aires, one
of the Argentine investigators told us that her husband would be sorry
not to meet us. He was at that moment in Brazil, investigating the
shooting murders by the police of thirty landless peasants.

Someone asked whether we have children. Yes - our children are grown
up. We then asked (with that automatic reciprocity that characterises
polite restaurant conversation) whether she too had children. 'No, we
don't'. Then she added laconically: 'In South America, if you do our
type of work it's best not to have children'. 

Before breakfast in our Buenos Aires hotel room, and on the very day
we met with the Argentine forensic team, I turned on CNN television to
see what was going on in the world. I was non-plussed by the
coincidences. I had tuned in to the opening speech for the prosecution
in the Bosnian war crimes trial at The Hague. It was Grant Niemann
making his opening speech. A wheel had come full circle. Grant was the
Adelaide based prosecutor of our Ukrainian cases.

So far as I know, Holocaust deniers have shown a total avoidance of
our Ukrainian evidence. Yet (and, again, so far as I know) the deniers
have not been directly confronted with it in any arena of debate. I
want to say that I found it unnerving that even the well-disposed have
shown so little interest in our Ukrainian work. I hasten to mention
exceptions, and acknowledge the interest of the Centre for Comparative
Genocide Studies at Macquarie University, and of the Australian Jewish
Historical Society in Canberra. But that is it.

Perhaps the reason is this. Material evidence may be harder to
contradict than memories, but memories are more potent and demanding
of attention - and, of course, more fleeting than archaeological
evidence. But then again, perhaps what we did in the Ukraine is just
too nasty, immediate and confronting. As a Jewish colleague said to
me, we have forced ourselves to get familiar with the grainy black and
white photos of Belsen. Now you are wanting us to look at the
Holocaust in colour.

-Richard Wright-

******************************************************

--
 John Morris                                
 at University of Alberta  
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