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L'auteur décrit et analyse la mémoire de la période de l'Occupation transmise au sein de sa famille. Juifs alsaciens, les Meyer ont déménagé dans un village de Saône-et-Loire à l'été 1940. Le concept de « mémoire longue », telle qu'il a été développé par l'anthropologue Françoise Zonabend, est ici appliqué, de façon paradoxale, à ces années de guerre. La mémoire transmise est celle d'un passé étale, sans événements, ce qui contraste avec les récits de la persécution des Juifs de France. Seul le placement de la mère de l'auteur, alors âgée de 2 ans, dans une famille amie constitue un trait saillant.

The Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp has been widely described and studied, especially as the images taken by British troops at the moment of the camp's liberation shaped the very representation of Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. Much less-known are the debates about the exhumations of more than 20 000 corpses of inmates, the ones who died in the weeks before or after the liberation. The French mission in search of corpses of deportees, the so-called 'Garban mission', tried to negotiate the access to the camp grounds. After an international uproar and a decade of negotiations, the permission was finally not granted.

Dès la libération du territoire français, des recherches furent engagées pour retrouver les corps des disparus et de nombreuses exhumations eurent lieu. Au moins 70 000 cadavres furent exhumés et réinhumés. Cet article veut décrire ces exhumations et les catégoriser en fonction des catégories de corps telles qu'elles ont été définies à ce moment-là. Les agents de ces exhumations seront ensuite décrits, avec en particulier la recentralisation des décisions d'exhumations au sein du ministère des Anciens combattants et l'intervention progressive des autorités traditionnelles en charge du traitement des cadavres : magistrats et médecins légistes. Enfin des interprétations seront proposées : précédents de l'après-Première Guerre mondiale et rétablissement de la légalité républicaine.

From 1945 until around 1960, similar ceremonies took place throughout Europe to commemorate the deportation of Jews and the Holocaust: ashes would be taken from the site of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to the deportees' country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains) placed within a memorial or reburied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting to analyse it. It analyses the symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also instruments of political legitimisation.

From 1945 until around 1960, ceremonies of a new kind took place throughout Europe to
commemorate the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews; ashes would be taken from the site
of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to
the deportees country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative
ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains)
placed within a memorial or reburied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have,
however, received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to
describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before
drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting its analysis. It investigates the
symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these
transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also
instruments of political legitimisation.