Recently my friend Ava sent me a clip from a US television show in what looks like the 1970s or maybe the 1980s wherein a man is being interviewed who makes a rather unusual ‘Holocaust’ claim. (1)
This is that (my transcription):
‘Interviewee: “I was with the 183rd Engineer Combat Detachment and… err… I too saw [intelligible]. This officer showed me through and took me over to the administration building. I also saw the lampshades; though not directly. I looked through a window and saw them.”
Interviewer: “And that was not the only things they had done with the human skin.”
Interviewee: “No. He pulled [something] out from his pocket, and he said ‘Look what I’ve got. I found this in the [intelligible].’ And it was a wallet made out of a woman’s breasts with the nipples on the inside so that when you folded it and unfolded it. It looked like there were two buttons there. Err… there are many others.”’ (2)
The interviewee – as it turns out – was one Leo Pine, who was an officer attached to the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion – an all-black unit of the US Army – whose Headquarters and Service Company – not the whole unit as sometimes claimed – rolled into Buchenwald a few days after it was occupied by the US Army.
We even have a photo of them at Buchenwald that is helpfully provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: (3)
Leo Pine’s ‘human nipple wallet made out of a woman’s breasts’ is included in a transcript of his oral testimony about ‘what he saw’ in Buchenwald.
To wit:
‘Yes. And he took me to the house of the commandant. The front door was locked, I was hesitant to walk in, but I looked through the window, and I saw the magnificent light shades made out of tattoos. He took out of his pocket a wallet made of a woman’s breasts, where the two nipples were like buttons, on the front, and he had been inside and he told me of many of the things, only which I saw from a distance, and this is all that I saw, but he told me about Ilsa Koch… was it Ilsa Koch?’ (4)
Now looking at this we can see that Pine is visiting Buchenwald after it has been ‘liberated’ and clearly is being propagandised by the unnamed officer that is taking him on a kind of camp tour; since the officer deliberately showed him the ‘human-skin lampshades’ – although ‘with tattoos’ this time – through a window as the front door was locked (aka he wasn’t meant to be able to examine the ‘human-skin lampshades’ too closely as clearly the officer would have had access to a key for the door) and then the officer takes a ‘wallet made of a woman’s breasts’ to show Pine.
The problem with this narrative?
Well, no one has ever – to my knowledge – got a photo of the alleged ‘human-skin lampshades’ that Pine claims he saw with only one of the two known alleged examples of these known to have actually been in Buchenwald at the time of the US army’s entry into the camp in mid-April 1945 and that ‘human-skin lampshade’ was in fact made of goatskin. (5) Neither of these ‘human-skin lampshades’ have tattoos on them so they can’t be the ones that Pine claims he saw in Buchenwald when he visited.
As to the alleged ‘wallet made of a woman’s breasts’ that Pine claims he saw; we should note that there are no other records of such a creation in existence that I am aware of let a photograph. Suggesting that either this ‘wallet made of a woman’s breasts’ is a figment of Pine’s imagination or he was indeed shown something that he was told was such a wallet and Pine simply believed what he was told.
My guess is that the second possibility is the truth and that Pine was shown some kind of wallet that looked like it could be made out of ‘a woman’s breasts’ by the officer and he simply believed what the officer told him then he is simply repeating the claim thirty-three years later in an oral history interview concerning his experiences.
It is also worth noting that Pine was both jewish (6) and a Zionist (7) at the time so while I have given him the benefit of the doubt here in regard of the atrocity stories; Pine does have ulterior motives for claiming he saw what he saw and then sticking to it which is indicated by his references to Ilse Koch who hadn’t been in a position of authority in Buchenwald since July 1941 but was the focus of Allied atrocity propaganda about the camp from April 1945 onwards.
However, as there is no evidence – other than Leo Pine’s testimony some thirty-three years after the fact – of a ‘wallet made of a woman’s breasts’ having existed at Buchenwald let alone having been created by the Germans (or more specifically Ilse Koch).
Thus this is yet another piece of ‘Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense’.
References
(1) https://x .com/salt8184/status/2006407053997121729
(2) Transcribed from Idem.
(3) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/african-american-soldiers-during-wwii
(4) Transcript of the Tape of Dr. Leo Pine, 7th September 1978, Emory University Oral History Collection, p. 14
(5) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/remarkable-holocaust-nonsense-76
(6) Transcript of the Tape of Dr. Leo Pine, 7th September 1978, Emory University Oral History Collection, p. 9
(7) Ibid., p. 7
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