The recent Netflix series ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ has popularized the claim that the infamous serial killer Edward Theodore Gein (better known as Ed Gein) of Plainfield, Wisconsin was ‘inspired by the Holocaust’ to commit his atrocities. It is probably worth noting that the idea that Gein was a ‘serial killer’ isn’t entirely accurate since he is only known to have committed two murders – although there is a suspicion he may have committed up to seven more – but rather spent most of his time digging up and… well… molesting corpses of which we know of nine confirmed instances (although he confessed to eleven) (1) by the time he was arrested in November 1957.
The entire premise of Netflix’s ‘Monster’ (2025) is based on the idea that Gein ‘read about’ the ‘crimes of Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald’ and her ‘human skin lampshades’ and ‘shrunken heads’ (these are now almost universally admitted to have been Allied propaganda and to have been simply made up) then copied them that in turn ‘created’ his crimes; a claim which gets much play in the first two episodes. (2)
The source of this idea is the biography of Gein written by the now respected – then just starting out – jewish true crime writer Harold Schechter in 1989 titled ‘Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original “Psycho”’. (3)
The problem is despite Schechter taking the opportunity provided by the release of ‘Monster’ to lend credence to the idea that Gein was ‘inspired’ by the ‘crimes of the Nazis’. (4) If you bother to read Schechter’s own book about Gein’s crimes; Gein doesn’t seem to have read or known about the so-called ‘Nazi crimes’ till after he had been caught in 1957 and had access to a well-stocked library while was in jail awaiting trials and then in hospital.
To quote Schechter:
‘Lately, he has been studying accounts of Nazi barbarities, and tonight, he pores over a story that relates, in loving detail, the atrocities committed by Ilse Koch, the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” accused of collecting human heads and using the tattooed skin of her victims for lampshades and book bindings. He also likes reading about the deeds of Irma Grese, the angelic-looking nineteen-year-old SS warder who wore a sky-blue jacket that matched the color of her eyes, kept a horse whip stuck in one of her jackboots, and performed her primary duty – selecting enfeebled women and children for extermination at Auschwitz and Belsen death camps – with uncommon zeal and enjoyment.
Eddie’s tastes, of course, aren’t limited to Nazi horror stories. He has a special fondness for South Seas adventure yarns, particularly ones concerning cannibals and headhunters. Only recently, he came across a supposedly true-life narrative that he can’t seem to get out of his mind. It concerned a man who murdered a wealthy acquaintance and escaped on his yacht, only to be shipwrecked on a Polynesian isle, where he was captured, tortured and flayed by the natives. Of particular interest to Eddie was the graphic description of the process used to shrink and preserve the victim’s head, though he also enjoyed the part about the drum that had been fashioned by stretching the skin of the dead man’s abdomen across a hollow gourd.’ (5)
Schechter continues on by stating that:
‘When Eddie can’t find an interesting magazine article about cannibalism, grave robbing, Nazi war crimes, or sexual mutilation, he relies for entertainment on the local newspapers – particularly the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune and the Plainfield Sun – searching their pages for stories about killings, car accidents, suicides, or unexplained disappearances.’ (6)
He then further adds that:
‘And, indeed, Eddie was happy at the hospital – happier, perhaps, than he’d ever been I his life. He got along well enough with the other patients, though for the most part he kept to himself. He was eating three square meals a day (the newsman accompanying Reynolds were struck by how much heavier Eddie looked since his arrest five years before). He continued to be an avid reader (though he’d had to turn to new subjects, the hospital library being ill provided with Nazi atrocity stories and books about South Seas headhunters).’ (7)
The point being that Gein was in no way taking inspiration from ‘Nazi war crimes’ and just had a degenerate urge to engage in/read about sexual sadism and that his crimes – if we follow Schechter’s logic – could much more easily have been ‘inspired’ by stories about Polynesian cannibals and head-hunters as ‘Nazi war crimes’.
This comes out in Robert Golmar’s – the judge at Gein’s trial – book about Gein and his crimes when he notes that people who knew Gein well testified that he’d loved reading (8) and especially loved ‘reading adventure stories about head-hunters and cannibals’. (9)
Ironically this also jives with Robert Bloch’s understanding since when Bloch wrote his best-selling 1959 novel ‘Psycho’ – largely based on Gein and his crimes – he had his protagonist be inspired not by ‘Nazi war crimes’ but rather by the human ritual sacrificial practices of the Incas and specifically the real non-fiction books of the American explorer and writer Victor Wolfgang von Hagen.
Bloch nor Golmar know nothing about the so-called ‘inspiration’ for Gein’s crimes being the ‘crimes of Ilse Koch at Buchenwald’ and while Bloch was merely following it via reports in the newspapers; Golmar was literally the trial judge and read/heard/knew about all the evidence and he doesn’t even mention it. While Schechter is happy to give credence to a lie and contradicts his own earlier work on Gein in order to get positive publicity and/or because he is jewish himself.
So put another way: the entire idea that Ed Gein was ‘inspired by the Holocaust’ is complete and utter nonsense that has been made up in order to try and promote belief in the ‘reality of the Holocaust’ among the populace – one suspects especially among Generation Z as well as the upcoming Generation Alpha – by using their love of true crime to associate what Gein did with what they claim happened in German concentration camps during the Second World War.
References
(1) Robert Golmar, 1981, ‘Edward Gein: America’s Most Bizarre Murderer’, 1st Edition, Pinnacle: New York, p. 48
(2) For example, see: https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/tv/a69025046/ilse-koch-monster-ed-gein-explained/; https://www.biography.com/movies-tv/a68812196/monster-the-ed-gein-story-who-was-ilse-koch; https://variety.com/2025/tv/features/vicky-krieps-nazi-monster-ed-gein-1236538216/
(3) https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/monster-the-ed-gein-story-fact-check-1235443123/
(4) Idem.
(5) Harold Schechter, 1989, ‘Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original “Psycho”’, 1st Edition, Pocket: New York, pp. 49-50
(6) Ibid., p. 50
(7) Ibid., p. 254
(8) Golmar, Op. Cit., p. 170
(9) Ibid., p. 64
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