Mass grave

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Grave in Sarajevo during the siege in 1992-1993. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

Mass grave at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in May 1945

Supervised by American soldiers, German civilians from the town of Nordhausen bury corpses of prisoners found at Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in mass graves. Rare colour photograph taken in 1945. Photo credit: USHMM

A mass grave of the Polish officers murdered in the Katyń massacre of 1940

A mass grave is a grave containing multiple unidentified human corpses. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave. The term is generally used when a significant number of bodies have been buried. A mass grave may hold the bodies of a dozen, hundreds, or even thousands of people.

Mass graves are usually created after a large number of people die or are killed, and there is a desire to bury the corpses quickly. In disasters, mass graves are used for infection and disease control. The motivation for using mass graves in war and genocide is usually to conceal the existence of war crimes. Exceptions to this rule include the various mass graves created by Allied soldiers to bury victims of Nazi war crimes, where the motivation was disease control and no attempt was made to hide the existence of such graves.

The debate surrounding mass graves amongst epidemiologists includes whether or not, in a natural disaster, to leave corpses for individual traditional burials, or to bury corpses in mass graves: for example, if an epidemic occurs during winter, flies are less likely to infest corpses, reducing the risk of outbreaks of dysentery, diarrhea, diphtheria, or tetanus, so the use of mass graves is less important. Recent research indicates that the health risks from dead bodies in mass casualty events are very limited and that mass graves might cause more harm than good.

One of the largest wartime mass graves is from World War II, at Belzec, in southeastern Poland, one of the 3,300 concentration camps. At this concentration camp, it is estimated that 300,000 corpses were burned, ground up and mixed into the camp's soil by the Nazis in an attempt to cover up a war crime.

Although mass graves can be used during major conflicts, they are more usually seen after natural disasters such as a major famine, epidemic, earthquake or tsunami etc. In such cases, there is a total breakdown of the normal social infrastructure that would enable disposal of bodies according to conventionally accepted mores.