Death masks

One such mask, known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, recorded the face of an unidentified young woman who, according to one oft-repeated story, had been found drowned in the Seine River at Paris around the late 1880s. A worker at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face. She was considered so beautiful that in the following years copies of the mask became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society.

The face of Resusci Anne, the world's first CPR training mannequin, introduced in 1960, was modeled after L'Inconnue de la Seine.

The ancient Greeks for making death masks used wax, which even then was attributed with the magic power.

The most famous and scandalous cast was the death mask of the bank robber John Dillinger, who died on July 22, 1934.

But, certainly, there is no other nation as respectful towards the mystery of death as Germans. Death masks have been taken of virtually of all notable German personalities. The tradition of death mask was still in place when Hitler came to power.