As to whether Nazi human-skin lampshades are only an “urban legend,” I have a personal story to relate.
I'm a 72-year-old Denver resident who, in 1948-52, was a boy in grade school in the small farming town of Las Animas, the county seat of Bent County in southeastern Colorado. My father taught science and coached sports in the Las Animas high school during those five years. He had a teacher colleague, James Dighera, who had fought in Germany in WWII and had been involved in liberation of at least one of the death camps (I don't remember which camp, nor do I know his Army rank or unit, though his enlistment in 1942 is on record in the National Archives).
Mr. Dighera lived a block away from my family. One evening ca. 1950, when I was about 12 years old, he invited us over for a social visit. He showed us some of his war souvenirs. These included an American $20 gold piece he'd "liberated" from some German stash, a German pistol, and photographs of the concentration camp he had entered; I recall in particular a gruesome picture of skeletal corpses at one of the incineration furnaces. Then he pointed to a simple little lamp on a table in the room where we were sitting, and said "Know what that lampshade is made of? That's human skin."
Ugly as the pictures had been, that actual lampshade was even more shocking to my theretofore sheltered and naive young mind, and I didn't doubt him for a moment. Even so, I'm not sure that the full horror sank in then and there, but the sight of such an unimaginable thing has stayed with me the rest of my life. Seeing that with my own eyes was certainly all I needed to give me lifelong immunity to any possibility of entertaining Holocaust denial.
As to these macabre craft works being made from tattooed skin, I don't recall any tattooing on that lamp. Nor do I have any way to prove that it was genuine. But I'm quite sure he believed that it was. I have no idea whether James Dighera is still alive, where his "souvenirs" might have ended up later, or whether he ever told his story publicly or put it on written record. However, other eyewitness reports of similar items seen by invading American troops are documented in the recent book *The Liberators* by Michael Hirsh (p. 13, 113, 123-124). Not all of these were from the Buchenwald camp.
MODERATOR NOTE: Please note that this thread is from 2010, with occasional posts in 2013 around Post #60 and some 2014 additions later on. That’s OK, we got no problem with resurrecting old threads when new information is being added, I just want folks who are reading along to understand that these are old posts, so don’t get all riled or worry about replying to something that’s a few years old. – CKDH
Why on earth would he keep it around if he believed it so ? I would really doubt that any cops pilfered small keepsakes from Mr. Ed Gein’s place as memorabilia…
A year or so back I read of one son of some dignitary in the Nazi party — who would have no reason at all to exaggerate the crimes he was virtuously distancing himself from, no sirree — declaring that Martin Bormann had furniture made exclusively from human bones.
Whilst I have no doubt of human wickedness, some alleged propaganda seems to fail the ‘What was the damn point of that ?’ test.
I didn’t ask at the time why he kept it, so I can only repeat that I saw the lampshade and that he said it was human skin. But it has been far from rare throughout history for soldiers to collect macabre keepsakes from their travels.
We must remember that not long before the Nazis came to power, they were basically street brawlers and thugs. The ranks of the SS were filled with the most violent members of this very violent group. When the Nazis came to power, this ultra-violent group was then told they were the ubermensch of all the ubermenschen. You can imagine the lust for violence this could cause.
I have no doubt that the S.S. were a group of sadistic thugs who got their jollies from the most depraved actions you can imagine. Still, there has been no documented human skin lampshades. Most of those claimed to be human skin end up being animal skin. This also includes many books that predate WWII that are supposedly made with human skin.
We have no reason to doubt your recollections, and it is entirely plausible this veteran believed himself it was human skin. All kinds of stuff got passed off to soldiers by desperate (or just desperately greedy) folks in the chaos of the war, and he would not be the only vet to think he returned with such a souvenir. Unless this one could be located and tested, it will unfortunately remain in the realm of folklore.
On the other hand, it points out just how much history is being lost as these vets die out. Who knows what’s lurking in some attic in Peoria waiting to be thrown out by unwitting heirs? It would be nice if there was some national organization trying to collect information and artifacts.
The problem is that after the war people made up all sorts of things and, with the documented atrocities, just about anything was believed. Even 16 years after the end of the war, as a 5 year old at school, children were stating as fact that all German soldiers used babies for target practice.:rolleyes:
Given the care with which things were documented after the war, particularly the atrocities committed by the losing side, it’s safest to assume that if you cannot find any particularly bizarre practices documented that they are almost certainly just myths.
I can imagine that someone might be of the mindset “Hey, I was there, look at how bad things were. See, I have proof.” Some people find all sorts of macabre things interesting. I think I would be simultaneously creeped out and fascinated by a human skin lampshade.
I wish I’d been more reflective at age 12, so I might have thought to ask more about it. But I think your idea is likely to have been at least one of Mr. Dighera’s motives in bringing the lampshade back home–not just as a trophy, but to convince the people here, by showing the proof, that the Nazis had been guilty of barbaric abominations that some of us might otherwise have thought beyond belief, and that justified beyond doubt the sacrifices of the campaign that the Allied soldiers had been fighting and the homebound civilians had been supporting.
I was reading a Holocaust website and was reading about the women guards in the camps. Of course, they were all horribly brutal etc. etc. etc. The website claimed that someof the women had skin lampshades in their possession:dubious::dubious:. I knew that’s a lie and a fabrication, which makes the rest of what they claim to me a bunch of mistruth or exaggeration. Since it is against the law in most European countries to question the validity of these claims, they will never go unchallenged.
I think that you exaggerate the scope of the laws of which you speak.
It may be illegal to deny the holocaust in Germany but that does not mean that you cannot point out that certain facts are not supported by evidence.
Claims made without adequate evidence should be challenged because otherwise their inclusion in the history of a subject diminishes the credibility of all knowledge on that subject, particularly in the minds of non-specialist historians.
To further elaborate on the point, I went to L.A. once and visited the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum. In the window, they had shrunken human heads. Now I can’t guarantee these were authentic, but we know the practice was reality. And while theoretically reading about the practice I am fascinated by how and why it was done, the reality of looking at what appeared to be the real thing was creepy - way creepy. Disturbing.
Why would Westerners collect and bring back shruken human heads? Why would Westerners collect Egyptian mummies, and grind them into medicines? How can people go to BodyWorks type museum displays and not be nauseated and freaked out?
Yeah, Dex, I probably could have cited the article, since that was one of the reasons I payed attention to the shrunken heads in the first place.
I had a similar reaction to reading Broca’s Brain by Carl Sagan. The book contains an anecdote where Sagan when to the French museum of natural science (actual name?) and visited the bowels of the museum. See, Broca was a French scientist who studied human brains, and started the museum’s collection of human oddities. When he died, his brain ended up in the collection at the museum. So Sagan describes visiting the museum and seeing Broca’s brain. I find it simultaneously fascinating and nauseating and disturbing.
He was in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.
Entirely incidentally, I’ve had the similar experience of accidentally stumbling across Broca’s other famous brain tucked away in a Paris museum. A few years back I was trying to systematically go round all the various small medical museums in the city, including the Musée Dupuytren in the heart of the Left Bank. In amongst the jars of preserved extreme tumours and strange deformaties, I suddenly realised from the original label that I was looking at the specimen brain that Broca had noticed Broca’s area in.
Turns out he’d donated some of his research materials to the museum and that’s obviously the one they have on show, though the display doesn’t particularly draw attention to it.
I was going to say; Do you know how many countries there are in Europe? Holocaust denial is (ridiculously) forbidden in two countries as far as I know. :smack:
However, I just looked up ‘Holocaust denial’ on wikipedia and it’s illegal in no fewer than 16 countries.
The sooner the UK distances itself from Europe, the better.
How can people legislate on what we can or cannot believe?
(For the record, I do believe that the holocaust took place, but that’s neither here nor there.)
I have read/heard too many separate eyewitness accounts to make me doubt that a preferred mode of killing Jewish infants by SS troops was to pick them up by the ankles and smash their skulls into the nearest wall, road, etc.
Likewise, a captured British soldier at Auschwitz recounted (in the third person) in this book how he witnessed SS troops murdering Jewish babies by tossing them one at a time onto a large bonfire.
The only reason I might be wary of the target practice story, then, is that it sounds too quick and clean a practice for such beasts (may they burn forever in Hell).
If we lost the war, the Germans would have told tales of American and British atrocities. History is written by the winners and they treat themselves well and their enemies badly. I don’t know if the lampshades are true. But apparently the German doctors used prisoners for experiments.