This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so doing, the article examines how disparate desires and memories come together in collective reburial of partially individuated human remains.
representatives of various Jewish communities 39 (Re)politicising the dead in post-Holocaust Poland 39 in Germany and Polish officials actively involved in the local commemoration of the former National Socialist camps. Condemned by the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Paul Spiegel, as an act ‘bordering on blasphemy’, the plan to bury the tooth of the Holocaust victim in the Berlin memorial, as well as the fact that it was left unburied for almost two decades, was a clear violation of Jewish religious law. To take a body part from its place of burial and