City councils in Germany are recycling gold teeth left after cremations to sell on to fill the public purse.
Some donate the money to charity while others use it to bolster their own coffers.
But the practice has, inevitably, raised painful memories of the Holocaust when it was standard practice for victims to have their gold teeth looted from them after they were gassed. The gold was then used to finance Hitler's war machine. Nuremberg admitted it got some NZ$391,000 of gold a year from the dead, Karlsruhe $136,000, Dortmund $78,000 and Ludwigsburg $48,000.
Only a few areas, such as Saxony, said they did nothing with the metals and put all the ashes in the urn.
Christian Streidt, the president of the German Association of Undertakers, said: 'I find this as bad as the murder of a human being.'
