Ed William D Haglund, Marcella H Sorg
CRC Press, £72, pp 636 
ISBN 0 849 39434 1
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Rating: ★★★
On 5 March 1940 Stalin gave the order for the NKVD to execute prisoners of war captured during the combined German and Soviet occupation of Poland. In 1943, 4500 victims were discovered in mass graves in the Katyn Forrest, after the Germans had overrun Soviet territory. The Polish government in exile demanded a commission to investigate, and an international team of forensic investigators under German authority examined the victims. This investigation placed the blame on the Soviet regime. Stalin dismissed this as propaganda. A Soviet investigation the next year blamed the Nazis and the Soviet regime tried (unsuccessfully) to include the Katyn massacres on the Nuremberg indictments. Only 50 years later did the Soviets admit responsibility.
Katyn was an early example of the use of forensic science to investigate war crimes, and of its misuse as propaganda. In the year that Stalin murdered the Polish soldiers, the Russian scientist and fantasist Efremov coined the term taphonomy (from the Greek taphos for “grave”) to describe death assemblages in the fossil records. The term taphonomy is now used to describe the postmortem fate of biological remains. Forensic taphonomy is the application of such processes to assist legal investigations.
Traditionally, the examination of human remains in suspicious circumstances has rested with forensic pathologists, but scientists with knowledge to assist in the recovery of evidence from such cases have an important role. Forensic anthropologists study the skeleton to distinguish injuries from the effects of the environment, postmortem human activity, or animal interference. Forensic archaeologists apply knowledge of the recovery of buried remains to how the victims were placed in the ground. Forensic entomologists apply knowledge of insect succession to the timing of death and may be able to say whether bodies have been disturbed. Ballistic experts can position gunmen at a massacre by the distribution of cartridge shells and identify how many were present.
This book contains much information about taphonomic processes and the investigation of crime. The book details decomposition processes, animal and insect activity, and environmental changes. Case studies vary from an investigation of the killing of Kurds in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign to the investigation of historic Inuit skeletons showing postmortem interference by polar bears. All these forensic disciplines have combined to investigate events from single victim homicides to war crimes involving thousands of victims. An increasingly important role has been in the investigation of war crimes in such places as the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. After Katyn, as Norman Davies quotes in his excellent book on Europe, “those who chose to tell the truth stood to be dismissed as unscientific.” But the truth will out, murder cannot be hid for long.