Museum Wiesbaden will hand back ten human skulls to Indonesia at a formal ceremony on 10 November, in what Hesse's culture ministry says is the first return of human remains by a German museum to the country. The remains, taken during the Dutch colonial era, will be presented to representatives of the Indonesian government in the museum's lecture hall.

The skulls were part of the collection of Ernst Albert Fritze, a military physician who worked for the Dutch East India Company from 1817. They reached Germany in the 19th century and were later donated to the Nassau Society for Natural History, a predecessor of the museum. Their precise origins remain unclear: the German Lost Art Foundation, which is supporting research into the collection, says its project aims to establish where the remains came from and how they should be handled.

Museum curator Andy Reymann has spent several years investigating the collection's history. In 2023 the museum received backing from the German Lost Art Foundation, the Institute of Forensic Medicine at University Hospital Frankfurt and researchers at the University of Cologne to continue the work. The same year, the museum returned a Toi Moko, a specially prepared ancestral skull from New Zealand that also belonged to Fritze's collection, to a Maori and Moriori delegation.

At the November ceremony, Hesse's arts and culture minister Timon Gremmels is to hand the remains to the Indonesian delegation. Out of respect for the dead, the skulls will be covered with black cloth. The ministry said the return forms part of a wider effort by the state's institutions to examine their collections for unlawfully acquired colonial-era objects and to take responsibility for their history.