Abstract：
In the Battle of Crete during the World War II occupation of Greece, the German forces faced substantial civilian resistance. To retribute the numerous German losses, a series of mass executions took place in numerous places in Crete; a common practice reported from Greece and elsewhere. In Adele, a village in the regional unit of Rethymnon, 18 male civilians were executed and buried in a burial pit at the Sarakina site. In this study, the first one conducted for a conflict that occurred in Greece, we identified for humanitarian purposes the 18 skulls of the Sarakina victims, following a request from the local community of Adele. The molecular identification of historical human remains via ancient DNA approaches and low coverage whole genome sequencing has only recently been introduced. Here, we performed genome skimming on the living relatives of the victims, as well as high throughput historical DNA analysis on the skulls to infer the kinship degrees among the victims via genetic relatedness analyses. We also conducted targeted anthropological analysis to successfully complete the identification of all Sarakina victims. We demonstrate that our methodological approach constitutes a potentially highly informative forensic tool to identify war victims. It can hence be applied to analogous studies on degraded DNA, thus, paving the path for systematic war victim identification in Greece and beyond.
摘要：
在第二次世界大战占领希腊期间的克里特岛战役中，德军面临着巨大的平民抵抗。为了报复德国的无数损失，在克里特岛的许多地方发生了一系列大规模处决；据报道，这是希腊和其他地方的常见做法。在阿黛尔,雷希姆农地区的一个村庄，18名男性平民被处决并埋葬在萨拉基纳遗址的一个墓地中。在这项研究中,第一次为发生在希腊的冲突而进行的，我们出于人道主义目的确定了萨拉基纳受害者的18个头骨，根据阿黛尔当地社区的要求。最近才引入通过古代DNA方法和低覆盖率全基因组测序对历史人类遗骸的分子鉴定。这里,我们对受害者的亲属进行了基因组略读，以及对头骨进行高通量历史DNA分析，通过遗传相关性分析推断受害者之间的亲属关系。我们还进行了有针对性的人类学分析，以成功完成对所有Sarakina受害者的识别。我们证明了我们的方法论方法构成了识别战争受害者的潜在信息丰富的法医工具。因此，它可以应用于降解DNA的类似研究，因此，为希腊及其他地区系统的战争受害者身份识别铺平了道路。
