“Forensic Restitution” and the Ownership of Memory at Sobibor Death Camp, Poland

The notion of "Holocaust restitution" most often evokes associations with the process of financial repatriation, reversing the confiscation of priceless artworks from Jewish families, or amending the seizure of property or furniture from non-Jewish neighbours.Whilst each respective country sets their own rules or guidance of how to address this, the rules are much less clear for the returning of property robbed from the victims and later unearthed from the ground, and more specifically as a result of archaeological excavations.As such, there has been almost no scholarly research into the many ethical issues that this raises for relevant stakeholders (institutions, archaeologists, and relatives) involved in the discovery of biographical objects of murdered Holocaust victims.My ongoing research, therefore, seeks to address the deeply sensitive issue of memory ownership and material culture in such instances.My work introduces the term "forensic restitution" as a potential solution to this issue, whereby cultural objects uncovered through excavations are returned to an individual or community, rather than belonging to a nation state (Wilson 2024, p. 97).