Deceit & Misrepresentation Documents concerning Ilse Koch.
This page contains exerpts from sources concerning the case of Ilse Koch and the the issue of human skin ornaments at Buchenwals.
The Buchenwald Report, trans. and edited by David A. Hackett (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
In April 1945, an Intelligence Team from the Psychological
Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Forces
went to the newly liberated Buchenwald Camp, and interviewed
survivors and attempted to document what had happened there. The team was headed by 2nd Lt. Albert G. Rosenberg, and the Main
Report (history of the camp) was written by survivor Eugen Kogon.
Kogon used the report as the basis of his 1946 book, Der SS-
Staat (English ed.: The Theory and Practice of Hell, 1950).
Although the report's existence was known of by scholars, it was
supposed that it was lost or buried in some archive. Kogon had
lost his copy in a flood at his home. But Rosenberg has saved a
carbon copy for himself. This edition is the first time that the
entire report has been published, in any language. The original
plan was that it would be translated into English and published,
but nobody knows what happened to the original report.
Excerpts:
page 43n:
page 44:
page 64:
--From the "Individual Reports" Section of the book:
page 143: Excerpt from "The Early Years of the Camp," by Fritz M"annchen, Dresden:
page 224: Excerpt from "Pathology" by Gustav Wegerer,
Vienna:
...Mueller also gave Stoeckel and Werner Bach the assignment of
producing sheaths for pocketknives and other objects out of tanned
human skin. [Ed. note: Wegerer also mentions that "a sizable number of
heads" were shrunk at Buchenwald.]
page 337: Excerpt from "Valet for Koch," by Kurt Dietz, Tiefenau über Riesa:
page 338: Excerpt from "Sidelights on the Koch Affair," by Stefan Heymann, Manheim:
25 May 1945
SUBJECT: Identification of Tattoed Skin Hides
1. There were submitted to this laboratory section for
examination three tanned pieces of skin by Lt. Col. GIVIN
from Buchenwald Camp with office record designation of
Case 81 T.J.A.
2. The description follows:
......
PIECE C: Is truncated, measures 44 cm. at the base. The
upper portion is 30 cm. long and the sides measure 46 cm.
The skin is transparent, and shows two nipples in the upper
area. These are 16 cm. apart. From the nipple level to the
umbilicus is 23 1/2 cm. ....
MICROSCOPIC: The tissue consists of bundles of collagen
showing occasional epithelial and sweat gland remnants.
Granular black pigment granules are seen between some
of the bundles.
3. Based on the findings in paragraph 2, all three specimens
are tattooed human skin.
For the Commanding Officer,
(signature)
REUBEN CARES
Sir,
Will you please refer to my telegram No. 299, dated 24th
April, which relates to my visit to Buchenwald camp.
2. In company with eight members of the United States
Congress, I left London for Weimar on Sunday morning, the
22nd. April. The names of the Congressmen, and of the States
for which they sit, follow:
:
9. A lampshade was found - and this I saw - made from tattooed
human skin.
:
(Source:http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/diplomatic/georges-vanier.042745)
It is apparent that even some of the SS thought that these
kinds of things are going too far, because a letter to
the Buchenwald Pathology Department asks that the manufacturing of shrunken heads etc. will stop.
See:
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/images/buchenwald-doc01.gif
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/images/shrunken.jpg
[
Index ]
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.
The Techniques of Holocaust Denial
Researchers:,
John Drobnicki,
Stephan Bruchfeld, Mark Van Alstine
Ilse Koch, known in the popular press as 'the bitch
of Buchenwald,' was tried at the Buchenwald camp guards trial.
Her collection of human skin and tattoos received extensive
publicity. She was sentenced to life, but the sentence was
reduced to four years. A public furor resulted, including an
investigation in 1948 by a U.S. Senate committee headed by Homer
Ferguson of Michigan. Koch was released in 1949, rearrested by
German authorities, retried, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
She committed suicide at Aichach prison in Bavaria in 1967. NA,
RG 338, case 000-50-9, box 426, 'Review,' 62-65, 94-95; Frank M.
Buscher, The U.S. War Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 1946-1955, (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 54-55; Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 198.
Frau Koch took baths in Madeira that was poured into the bathtub.
Dr. Wagner wrote a doctoral dissertation on tattooing,
had the entire camp searched for people with tattoos, and had
them photographed. The prisoners were later called to the gate
by Commandant Koch, selected according to the splendor of their
tattooed skin, and sent into the infirmary. Soon thereafter the
best examples of skin appeared in the pathology department, where they were prepared and were shown to SS visitors as special treasures for years. Koch had an 'artistic' table lamp made
for himself out of human bones stretched over with human skin.
Hundreds of prepared human skins were sent to Berlin on orders of
the chief doctor for the concentration camps, SS Colonel Dr.
Lolling.
...One Sunday in February 1938 the prisoners had to
stand naked in the square for three hours while SS men
searched their clothes. During this time the wife of the
mass murderer Koch and four other SS officers' wives
stood at the barbed wire fence and stared lewdly at the
naked prisoners.
Beginning in fall 1940 SS Captain Mueller worked in the pathology
department...On orders from Berlin, Mueller initiated the project of
peeling off the tattood skin from the bodies of dead or murdered
prisoners, tanning it, and producing lampshades out of it. How many
lampshades were produced from human skin I can no longer say precisely
today. But on many occasions several hundred pieces of tattooed human
skin, tanned in various manners, were sent to SS Colonel Lolling, the
chief of Section D III of the Main Economic and Administrative Office
of the SS in Oranienburg.
I was called by Dr. [Konrad] Morgen, who led the
investigation, to make a deposition as a witness. Of
course I avoided all damaging testimony because I knew
that otherwise I myself would be condemned to death. In
particular, I was asked whether Frau Koch had satisfied
her perverse desires with me (she would use a small stick
to beat the penis she forced a prisoner to show her); I
could answer no in good conscience.
The fact that Koch had lamps made of human skin, which
of course had to be decorated with 'artistic' tattoos,
did not distinguish him from the other SS officers: They
had the same 'artworks' made for their family homes. It
is more interesting that Frau Koch had a lady's handbag
made out of the same material. She was just as proud of
it as a South Sea island woman would have been about her
cannibal trophies.
From Laurie, Clayton D. The Propaganda Warriors: America's Crusade Against Nazi Germany (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 285, note 6:
6. Letter, Creedy to Sioux, 27 Apr. 1945, and Creedy to
Wintle, 12 Mar. 1948, both in Box 15, Entry 99, RG 226. In his
27 April letter, Wintle wrote that 'the planning staff in
Washington used to cut out most of the best human sausage meat
and human skin decorations stories as implausible. And yet,
reading the Belsen concentration camp account, I noted some women had made a lamp shade out of pretty tatoo [sic] marks, having preserved the skin of victims. So once again we've turned out to be nearer the truth with out wildest flights of imagination than with some of our more modest creations.'
Seventh Medical Laboratory
APO 403, c/o PK, New York, N.Y.
Section of Pathology
TO : COMMANDING GENERAL, Third U. S. Army
(ATTN: JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL)
Major M.C.
Chief of Pathology
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/buchenwald/images/buchenwald-doc04.gif
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgicamps/buchenwald/images/
buchenwald02.jpg
AMBASSADE DU CANADA CANADIAN EMBASSY
PARIS [Seal] PARIS
27th April, 1945.
No. 548
:
:
:
:
I have the honour to be,
Sir,
Your obedient servant,
[s/ Georges Vanier]
CANADIAN AMBASSADOR