![]() ![]() Heeb's team is digging through archives, searching travelogues and other historic accounts for clues. 'Skulls shouldn't be returned to the basement' ![]() "We do not have any inventories any more," Bernhard Heeb, who's running the project on behalf of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, told DW. ![]() Most of the skulls are believed to come from what is today Rwanda. A Polish explorer had collected them in the former colony of German East Africa which encompassed today's Rwanda, Tanzania and Burundi. It started a project last year to investigate the exact origin and provenance of some 1,000 skulls in the Luschan collection. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is about to follow suit. Other organizations have also returned the human remains they had acquired. Berlin's Charite university hospital handed back several Herero skulls to Namibia between 20. Mnyaka Sururu Mboro says the skulls must be returned Image: picture-alliance/dpaīut pressure has been mounting for the past few years. "The crimes of the 20th century – World War I, World War II as well as the Holocaust – concealed the colonial past for long," Hermann Parzinger said. German museums ignored the dark remnants of the past that they had stored away in their archives for decades. The Tanzanian-born activist is the co-founder of "Berlin Postkolonial," an association that aims to raise awareness about Germany's colonial past. "For many people that I know, it's a terrible feeling that they have not been given the chance to bury their ancestors in a decent way," Mnyaka Sururu Mboro told DW. The German public largely has no knowledge of this – unlike the descendants in Africa. Thousands of skulls and bones are still being kept in German museums up to this day – not just in the archives of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Colonial soldiers would occasionally also send the skulls of local people they had killed. In addition to the official collectors, missionaries and colonial administrators also joined in and shipped various human remains to German research institutions. "Sometimes, human remains were also found lying in the open, but from today's point of view, it was obviously unacceptable to take them." "In some cases, skulls were taken out of burial sites, sometimes in cloak-and-dagger operations," Heeb said. Hermann Parzinger wants to investigate the skulls' history Image: BARBARA SAX/AFP/Getty Images That's because the collectors often did not bother to ask for consent when they took the human remains. There was a real "collecting mania" in the African colonies at the time, Bernhard Heeb, an archeologist in charge of investigating the story of the skulls, told DW. "It's a difficult legacy," the foundation's director, Hermann Parzinger, told DW. They're now owned by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs a number of museums, archives and libraries in Germany. Some 5,500 human remains from Luschan's collections still exist. Many of the human relics ended up gathering dust in various storerooms for decades. Like other scientists of his time, Luschan wanted to use them to study human development. After the ambitious anthropologist took over the post of assistant director of Berlin's Museum of Ethnology in 1885, he gave the green light for a huge collection campaign: Europeans collected thousands of skulls and bones in various colonies and sent them to Berlin. Felix von Luschan probably didn't think that he was doing anything wrong. ![]()
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