In 1945, the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau was liberated by soldiers of the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry. A camp survivor gave American serviceman Walter Corsbie a fragmentary disk of solid cement-like material. He told Corsbie that the disk contained human ashes and urged him not to forget what he had seen that day. Corsbie placed the ashes in a cigarette case and brought them back to the United States with him. Late in life, he gave them to his son Joseph Corsbie, who brought the ashes to Sharon Halperin, director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education of North Carolina. She shared the story with her husband Edward Halperin, M.D., M.A., Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer of New York Medical College (NYMC).
Dr. Halperin brought members of the Department of Pathology at NYMC together with staff from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) of the City of New York. Using protein analysis techniques developed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the team of researchers determined that human remains were indeed present in the disk. On May 25, 2014 the ashes were buried at the Hebrew Cemetery in Durham, North Carolina. A permanent memorial was placed at the site shortly thereafter.
Recent discoveries have shed additional light on this horrific chapter in history. In 2022, a team of researchers published a study in Nature Scientific Reports placing the Durham ashes in the context of four similar disks also found at concentration camps. These disks resemble the material which was given to Walter Corsbie and laid to rest in Durham, but unlike the fragmentary material possessed by Corsbie, they are physically intact. Comparison of the Corsbie fragments with these other four disks demonstrates that they share a uniform design: a circular cement disk stamped with numbers.
Two of these disks are now held in the collections of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem. The other two are held by the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Center in South Africa. As with the Dachau ashes now buried in Durham, survivors of the camps stated that these disks were made from crematorium ash.
Using proteomic mass spectrometry, the first time this technique had been applied to cremains, the researchers demonstrated the presence of mammal protein deriving from bone in the five disks. Some of these proteins are human-specific, and in the case of the Durham ashes, the analysis confirmed the likely presence of human cremains. When the Durham ashes were first brought to Dr. Halperin, he believed that the material given to Walter Corsbie was compressed crematorium ash. We now know that the disk given to Corsbie, like the four other disks, is composed of crematorium ash mixed with other materials to produce a hard, stony substance.
Dr. Halperin is currently investigating the composition of the material with which the human protein is mixed. The disks may be composed of cement; the authors of the 2022 study suggested that during a time of scarce wartime resources, bone ash may have been used as a replacement for other sources of "aggregate" in the cement production process. Asked by Dr. Halperin about the feasibility of using bone ash as a source of aggregate, members of the materials engineering faculty at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering confirmed that this could indeed have been the case.
However, the disks may also be composed of a form of clay, known as "fire sand," "fire clay," "grog," or "chamotte." This is a form of calcined clay with a high proportion of alumina. Disks of this form, with a seam around the circumference suggesting that they were produced in a compression press, are present in the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, where they are described as "chamotte rings." Several of these artifacts are also present in the collections of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where they are cataloged as crematorium tags.
Why were disks containing human remains produced in this particular format? The practice may have originated during the early years of Nazi terror, before the concentration camps became death camps, as a medium by which the bodies of deceased political prisoners were "returned" to their families. The testimony of camp survivors, however, describes a horrific repurposing of these disks. Already made from the bodies of victims, the numbered disks were handed as "coat checks" to prisoners who were told, falsely, that their belongings would eventually be returned. In other cases, the disks were covered in fat to be issued to prisoners as "soap" before their entry into the "showers," part of the deception practiced on gas chamber victims to prevent panic. Some of the disks analyzed in the study show visual evidence of having once been coated in fat.
In the absence of written documentation confirming that these objects contained human ash, museum curators had to rely on the eyewitness testimony of survivors to identify the nature and purpose of these artifacts. This recent study, using cutting-edge scientific methods to demonstrate that these remains contain what is likely human bone protein, corroborates the testimony of these survivors. These findings remind us that even now, more remains to be discovered about the scope of the atrocities carried out by the Nazi regime in the name of anti-Semitism and racial hate.
The four additional disks that were examined as part of the 2022 study have been buried in Jewish cemeteries.
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