Buchenwald Museum still clinging to human skin lampshades
Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2025 4:35 am
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?
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?