The air trembles from 800 degrees.

The coffin moves on a conveyor belt into the brick oven, and before the drop gate is completely closed again, the wooden box has ignited itself.

The last thing to see: the “Corona” sticker, pasted across the coffin, bursts into flames.

Theresa White

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

For the last two years, Karl-Heinz Könsgen and his team have been making reference to coffins in the Rhein-Taunus crematorium.

Because among the people who are cremated after death, there have also been corona dead since then.

Not too many, says Könsgen, manager of the private crematorium in the Hintertaunus.

About one percent of the deceased.

It was only different last winter.

There were about 20 percent more cremations than the year before.

And many coffins had the warning label so no one would open them.

Because even the corpses can be infectious.

"You always think that when people die, they breathe out one last time, but that's nonsense.

They take another breath,” says Könsgen.

So the lungs are full.

If a deceased is moved, for example during the second post-mortem examination, highly contagious breathing gas can escape.

Protective clothing is therefore put on at the marked coffins.

A ringing mobile phone in the coffin

It is a legal requirement that a person be examined by a doctor before being cremated.

Because after that there's nothing left but carbon and maybe an artificial hip joint that doesn't burn up.

While a person buried in the ground can still be exhumed, after cremation there are no traces.

According to Könsgen, however, it rarely happens that the medical officer calls the public prosecutor's office again.

Also because the second inquest happens long after death and treatment by an undertaker.

"The way the second post-mortem examination is organized makes no sense," says the head of the crematorium.

The medical officer can only smell poison or see the obvious.

About twice a day something is complained about - usually,

because the death certificate was not filled out properly.

A second body or murder weapon has never appeared in a coffin.

What Könsgen, on the other hand, has often found: crutches or a laptop.

"And you won't believe how many times a mobile phone has rang here in the coffin."

The crematorium is the largest in all of Germany, says Könsgen.

Eight furnaces, four times the number of most plants in Germany and Europe, burn about 30,000 dead people here every year.

Although - the experts do not speak of combustion.

The dead body and coffin vaporize in the oven's incredible heat, and this vapor eventually burns.

A cremation is a technical process.

In four combustion chambers one below the other, the coffin and corpse are reduced to a shovel full of ashes at different temperatures in about four hours.

Using cameras and thermometers, the technicians monitor the progress of each stage while seated behind the control panel on the ground floor of the facility, which is outfitted with as many screens and levers as a spaceship.

Sometimes there is also a smoke.

There is a faint smell of burnt wood in the air anyway.

And there's no one to bother.

From the funeral home to the animal and human cemetery

Karl-Heinz Könsgen likes to smoke himself.

There is a small wooden coffin on his desk next to the ashtray.

After being in the business for a while, you lose your fear of death and all the symbols that go with it.

The boss observed this in himself.

He built up the company with the late Toni Klein.

In 1996, the two started on the site of a former German Army ammunition depot with three employees.

Now there are 60, and in addition to the eight ovens, the offices and cold rooms, the facility also includes a room of silence, a funeral hall, a cemetery, a cemetery for animals and people and wide meadows where urns can be buried.