Our next piece of ‘Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense’ is the largely forgotten co-claim along with the claims that Ilse Koch – the so-called ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ – along with her husband Karl-Otto Koch – the first commandant of Buchenwald – used tanned human skin to make lampshades and shrunk the decapitated heads of inmates to use as ‘decoration’.
What you may not know – because it is usually implied that the Allies executed Ilse’s husband Karl-Otto Koch for reasons that will become obvious in a moment – is that Karl-Otto Koch was actually executed by an SS firing squad on 5th April 1945 for the ‘embezzlement and concealing of funds and goods in an amount of at least 200,000 RM’ and the premeditated murder of three concentration camp inmates.
Basically the SS were – contrary to the received wisdom about the ‘Holocaust’ – cleaning up their concentration camp system because significant corruption – in SS and German terms anyway so relatively little in modern terms – had been detected and per Himmler’s demands in his famous Posen speeches of early October 1943; this was completely unacceptable (Himmler was notoriously frugal and non-corrupt to the point where Martin Bormann had to give him a loan from the NSDAP’s party treasury in order to buy a new house) and the SS judges – most famous Konrad Morgen (who actually indicted both Karl-Otto Koch and Isle Koch on 17th August 1944) – were conducting a detailed investigation into the concentration camp system to stamp out any and all abuses and corruption, which also resulted – much like with Karl-Otto Koch – the SS removing and arresting Amon Goth – the commandant of the Auschwitz sub-camp of Plaszow made famous and also horrifically lied about by the film ‘Schindler’s List’ – for similar offences to Koch although the SS were never able to try him due to the collapse of German’s war effort and instead threw him in a lunatic asylum near the SS officer training school at Bad Tolz in Bavaria until they could deal with him.
The important bit of this is the fact that the SS themselves dealt with such abuses and perhaps most interestingly; the SS investigators never mention anything to do with tanned human skin being used for art, human soap factories and the like, which given that they executed Koch for murdering three concentration camp inmates and would have done the same to Goth for similar offenses at Plaszow.
This is in many ways what makes such claims about the lampshades and shrunken heads ridiculous because if this was happened then the SS investigations of 1944-1945 would likely have detected and mentioned it as it was just the kind of abuses they were looking for in order to root out in order to purify the SS of what Himmler referred to as ‘uncomradely behaviour’.
Now what is the specific claim made about Ilse Koch that I have mentioned above?
Well, it appears in the Nuremberg Trial transcripts as the following sentence in document 2340-PS:
‘Large pieces of skin have been used for painting pictures, many of an obscene nature.’ (1)
Now the ‘many of an obscene nature’ qualification is a contemporary way of referring to pictures of a pornographic nature, but what evidence do we have of any such large pieces of skin with ‘pornographic paintings’ on them?
Well, we know that 2340-PS is actually a transcript of an Allied propaganda film titled ‘Nazi Concentration Camps’ by the American film director George Stevens – who also figures significantly in the popularization of the so-called ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ in the 1950s – so we can actually see footage of these alleged ‘human skin canvases’. (2)
This is the sequence that the quoted transcript from the film at Nuremberg refers to:
A close of up of the ‘large pieces of human skin with obscene pictures’ on them from the film:
And another close up still from the film footage:
And another still showing – rather bizarrely – an sketch of an American cowboy on alleged human skin:
And another showing the ‘obscene drawings’ referred to by the film more clearly:
And another example still from the same film sequence:
And one last one:
Now I’ll note that to my untrained eye most of these ‘obscene drawings/paintings’ are in fact drawings/sketches and only two are pornographic. It also looks like that these sketches have largely been done on paper of some kind and while that paper could be a form of vellum – an original form of paper made from tanned animal hide – there is no evidence whatsoever that these sketches actually come from a concentration camp or a German let alone Ilse Koch nor that they are even on vellum let alone vellum made from tanned human skin. In fact, I’d even go as far as to point out that if you look at the different sketches/drawings, they quite frankly look like they’ve been done by different people as they exhibit very different artistic styles in drawing largely the same thing: women.
My guess is that these are likely propaganda creations of the American OSS although the Buchenwald Memorial claims they were ‘verified as tattooed human skin’ (3) which I would frankly dispute because while some of the ‘paintings’ could be cut out tattoos – again this would almost certainly have been done by the Americans and would have been easily achieved as well as covered up – some of them are clearly not (few of them have irregular edges and are writing paper sized pieces in normal rectangles) and look like sketches on actual drawing paper.
You can see this in the below photograph provided by the Buchenwald Memorial:
You can clearly see that most of the material on the left looks like it is actually on writing paper – this is further suggested by using of stones to weigh down the paper as writing paper is very light and liable to blow away in the wind while tanned hide/skin (aka vellum) is actually relatively heavy (as well as rigid) for paper and is far less prone to do so – and despite being claimed as ‘tattoos on human skin’ is likely not.
It is also worth noting that once again there is no evidence whatsoever that any of this was created by Germans in a concentration camp let alone by Ilse Koch in Buchenwald; it was simply just claimed as true by an American propaganda film about the camps and then quietly archived.
Unsurprisingly even mainstream ‘Holocaust’ scholars reject these sorts of claims as a nonsense and – in essence – Allied atrocity propaganda during (and just after) wartime.
References
(1) Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946, Vol. 30, p. 469
(2) You can see this for yourself here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Concentration_Camps_(film); it starts at 32 minutes: 30 seconds
(3) https://www.buchenwald.de/en/geschichte/themen/dossiers/menschliche-ueberreste/tisch-mit-praeparaten
(4) Idem.
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