Buchenwald Museum still clinging to human skin lampshades

[Archie]

I noticed this HC post that was trying to half-resuscitate the human lampshades. It links to some pages from the Buchenwald Museum.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... pdate.html
https://www.buchenwald.de/geschichte/th ... mpenschirm

This "small lampshade" supposedly came from the SS villa settlement and was supposedly recovered by prisoner Karl Straub. In the late 1940s it was in possession of Association of the Persecuted by the Nazi Regime. Then it was in possession of the Marx Engels-Lenin Institute in East Germany.

Let's start with the obvious point. This is NOT the lampshade that was famously displayed in 1945. That one, the famous one, "went missing." Because of course it did.



This very much fits the pattern I have seen with Holocaust Controversies.

1) We have an absurd story that was debunked a long time ago. The Americans were distancing themselves from these lampshade stories already by 1948.

2) Not even HC is generally willing to defend the story in its original version. Rather they will distract you by downplaying the original details and going into long-winded side points. This is to create the impression that the matter is very complicated.

3) Some bit of tangential or equivocal evidence is seized upon to partially salvage elements of the story if you think about it in sufficiently vague terms.

Example: "Human Soap Factory!" becomes 10,000 word essay that says "Well, maybe there was a soap-like substance produced very briefly at this anatomical institute."

In this case, the original story was that Ilse Koch was a Hannibal Lecter-type who had some sort of weird tattoo fetish and she would select tattooed prisoners to be killed so she could harvest their skin for the production of household and personal goods, including the famous lampshade seen in the American camp films. This story was so silly and absurd that the Americans themselves started walking it back by the time Ilse Koch was on trial in 1947/48. Koch's defense requested that the lampshade be produced in court, and the prosecution dithered before claiming that it had gotten lost. Konrad Morgen also strongly contradicted the story, describing on the stand how he had discovered nothing about human lampshades in his 1943 SS investigation.

Now then, with that essential context, can the notorious lampshade meme be salvaged with these new tests? I don't think so. For one thing, the provenance of this "small lampshade" as they describe it is questionable, emanating from Communist entities in East Germany. There's nothing tying this lampshade to Ilse Koch. We have no way to evaluate their 2023 forensic results. Earlier evaluations in the 90s had reached a different conclusion. But okay. For sake of argument, let's take their word for it and assume that they have found an actual human lampshade and that it was connected to some unknown person in the SS. Or suppose that some skin samples were collected at medical institutes and the like. What exactly is this supposed to demonstrate? The uniquely sinister nature of Germans?

[borjastick]

Some years ago there was a tv documentary all about this kind of thing with a search for one or two 'human skin' lampshades which were in the US. One of them was auctioned off and ended up in Florida if my memory serves me well. The whole approach to the production was gloom and dread with low sound voice over and a feeling of disaster throughout.

Eventually one or two of these pieces were found and analysed and oh my, oh dear, what a terrible predicament we find ourselves in, they were goat skin not human skin.

I believe these lampshades then disappeared never to be seen again.

Billy Wilder up to his games and the Psyops Unit plying their trade in and around the camps at the end of the war were to blame for all this manufactured doom. The whole idea, and one could say the whole idea behind the complete holocaust story was to paint the Germans as evil incarnate, capable of all manner of depravity and thus the war was just and correct. Russia of course as we know eagerly jumped into action claiming all sorts and massive extermination death tolls without presenting so much as an ounce of evidence.

[fireofice]

Here's an article by the HC blog that goes over various claims of shrunken heads, lampshades, soap, ect.

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... -skin.html

There is a document ordering the halting of shrunken heads, implying that it was happening. I think such an order is also consistent with the existence of rumors to that effect even if it's not happening.

For soap, there is a lot of stuff about an isolated incident of making soap from humans by a Dr. Spanner. There was also a chemical test of soap in 2006 showing that it could be human, but he said it could also be from a pig. But it seems to be based on "testimonies" for the most part. I guess it comes down to how credible one finds such testimonies.

There's also a "collection of tanned skin fragments with tattoos" that were tested and found to be human skin. In one of the links, you can see nipples, so it clearly is human skin. There is also an order for 142 tattoos from Enno Lolling.

In my opinion, it is very plausible that an allied psychological warfare division or some similar group created such items from corpses themselves as well as created various forgeries. Nothing certain of course.

[TlsMS93]

It has become easy to demonize the defeated enemy, planting evidence of atrocities and even if it is later removed, the damage to the public's mentality will be recorded, "they didn't do it but they were capable of it". So that's it, the Third Reich will never be studied and analyzed without these prejudices and anomalies, there will always be the black magic of the SS, the Thule, relations with aliens, paganism, etc.

[curioussoul]

Some years ago there was a tv documentary all about this kind of thing with a search for one or two 'human skin' lampshades which were in the US. One of them was auctioned off and ended up in Florida if my memory serves me well. The whole approach to the production was gloom and dread with low sound voice over and a feeling of disaster throughout.

Eventually one or two of these pieces were found and analysed and oh my, oh dear, what a terrible predicament we find ourselves in, they were goat skin not human skin.

I believe these lampshades then disappeared never to be seen again.

Billy Wilder up to his games and the Psyops Unit plying their trade in and around the camps at the end of the war were to blame for all this manufactured doom. The whole idea, and one could say the whole idea behind the complete holocaust story was to paint the Germans as evil incarnate, capable of all manner of depravity and thus the war was just and correct. Russia of course as we know eagerly jumped into action claiming all sorts and massive extermination death tolls without presenting so much as an ounce of evidence.

In the popular consciousness, these types of blatant, fake propaganda stories are always going to find an audience, especially in popular media (DailyMail is notorious for its over-the-top, ridiculous stories about WWII). As for Holocaust historians, the guys over at the HC blog realise that completely abandoning these types of stories highlights massive weaknesses in the official historiography of the Holocaust, so keeping remnants of the story alive by claiming soaps and lampshades might have been real in some other, not-quite-Holocaust-related sense, is their way of keeping the narrative under control.

[Hektor]

It has become easy to demonize the defeated enemy, planting evidence of atrocities and even if it is later removed, the damage to the public's mentality will be recorded, "they didn't do it but they were capable of it". So that's it, the Third Reich will never be studied and analyzed without these prejudices and anomalies, there will always be the black magic of the SS, the Thule, relations with aliens, paganism, etc.

Once the claim has been made and has not been defeated in court with a guilty verdict of slander against the lunatics making those claims, the Holocaust Lobby deems it OK to give those claims some credence in various ways... Yes, it's like dealing with a cult there.

[SanityCheck]

Billy Wilder up to his games

Death Mills, the short film Billy Wilder helped edit, doesn't include any footage of shrunken heads or lampshades, nor does the script/voice-over mention them, despite including some scenes from forced tours of Buchenwald. The footage was edited down or out for whatever reason; it wasn't evidently seen as crucial to the 22 minute short film
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000182

There are a lot of things which are wrong with the script/editing starting with the exaggerated total of 20 million dying in Nazi camps (by implication, in 300 of them), but including Buchenwald haberdashery isn't one of them.

The film Nazi Concentration Camps, used at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ran for 58 minutes and does include footage of the 'display table' at Buchenwald, which was separately photographed on April 16, 1945.

An excerpt of this footage is here, filmed by the US Army Signals Corps, the unit under the direction of Lt Col George Stevens, who directed/edited Nazi Concentration Camps; the voice-over is the same as I remember from 'Nazi Concentration Camps'
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1001194

There is a separate voiced-over colour film segment of 13 minutes from Dachau and Buchenwald which spotlights the Buchenwald lampshades and shrunken heads (from six minutes in - the page has links to specific segments).
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004371

The colour footage was recorded by a USAAF film unit, the voice-over was by Norman Krasna, a Jewish screenwriter and playright who had won an Oscar in 1943, receiving this in his USAAF uniform. It would seem this footage was not screened anywhere until 1981 when it appeared in a TV documentary.