Germany sent the heads of Herero and Nama prisoners to Berlin for race research, and the Charité returned 20 skulls to Namibia in 2011

Between 1904 and 1908 German forces put down a Herero and Nama uprising in German South West Africa. About 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were killed. Prisoners were held in a camp on Shark Island, off the coast. About three quarters of them died of malnutrition, poor hygiene and exposure. Severed heads, with skin and hair, were preserved in formalin and sent to Berlin. The anthropologist Paul Bartels studied their facial muscles, and his doctoral students published from 1913 to 1915 to support claims of European racial superiority. The skulls were then stored in the university's medical archives with about 7,000 others. In 2004 a German minister apologised for the war; Germany refused compensation. In 2008 a television documentary showed the skulls in the Charité's vaults, and Namibia asked for them back. No records of the dead's names existed. On 30 September 2011 the Charité handed over 20 skulls: nine Herero and eleven Nama, four women, fifteen men and a boy of three or four. Charité representatives apologised. The German minister of state, Cornelia Pieper, spoke of reconciliation rather than apology. No German government representative signed the joint declaration, and the Namibian minister declined to sign. The skulls were to be shown at the National Museum of Namibia, because incomplete bodies cannot be buried under Namibian custom.