One of the weirder bits of ‘Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense’ – and happily the last of the Buchenwald Memorial Museum’s physical exhibits of alleged ‘Nazi atrocities’ at the camp – is a largely unknown claim that is relatively recent in its pedigree as it oddly dates from 2015.
As the Buchenwald Memorial Museum explains:
‘The Polish political prisoner Józef Pribula (1919-1984) was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in October 1939. After being deployed in various labour detachments, he worked in the pathology department from January 1944. There, he recognised a fellow inmate among the corpses transferred to the pathology department, prepared his skull and took it home with him after the liberation. In May 2015, “the skull of a friend”, which according to his family Pribula kept in his study, was handed over to the memorial by his grandson along with other documents and objects from his estate.
Despite intensive efforts, the Buchenwald Memorial has not yet succeeded in locating the name of the deceased in order to make contact with his family.’ (1)
Now the problem here is that none of Pribula’s story of how he ‘recognized his friend’s corpse while working in Buchenwald’s pathology department’ – the fact that Buchenwald had a well-staffed and pretty extensive pathology department in and of itself suggests that the alleged ‘atrocities’ and ‘mass killings’ that occurred at the camp under the Third Reich are ipso facto unlikely in the same way that realizing that Auschwitz I and III both had extensive hospital and rehabilitation facilities for prisoners (including the famous swimming pool of Auschwitz I) renders suggestions of ‘mass extermination’ in the Auschwitz camp system unlikely at best – (2) sometime in or after January 1944 and then de-fleshed and prepared it as an anatomical specimen. Then promptly took it home with him – presumably to Poland – in 1945; where it then sat in his study for seventy years or so until his death.
All has absolutely nothing to do with a ‘Nazi atrocity’ – all the Third Reich was responsible for here was allowing Pribula to preserve his dead friend’s skull which was a kindness to him although probably not for his dead friend’s family – and everything to do with Pribula’s odd sense of what was an appropriate way to mourn/memorialize his friend.
It is also worth noting that we only have Pribula’s word that the skull concerned came from Buchenwald in the first place and while I can believe it to be true; without some kind of solid provenance, we simply cannot accept Pribula’s claims on their own strength as they are just… well… rather odd.
Ergo Jozef Pribula’s Skull is not evidence of any kind of ‘Holocaust’ or the maltreatment of prisoners at Buchenwald but rather Pribula’s strange tastes/personality.
References
(1) https://www.buchenwald.de/en/geschichte/themen/dossiers/menschliche-ueberreste/weitere-humains-remains-der-sammlung
(2) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/understanding-the-swimming-pool-of
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