Source:
https://codoh.com/library/document/buchenwald-shrunken-heads-and-human-skin-objects-revisited/
By
Germar Rudolf
August 3, 2025
Introduction
Shortly
after the liberation of the Buchenwald Camp by U.S. armed forces in April 1945,
U.S. occupational authorities staged a psychological warfare operation designed
to reeducate the Germans and anyone sympathetic to them. They prepared a table
on a camp square full of items claimed to be, or have been manufactured from,
body parts of deceased or murdered inmates. Most prominently among them were two
shrunken heads, each mounted on a small stand, a table lamp whose lampshade is
claimed to have been made of human skin, and several pieces of tattooed skin,
all of it presumably made from body parts of deceased (or murdered) inmates.
German civilians from the nearby city of Weimar were forced to file by this
table, with a U.S. official telling them gruesome stories on how these items
came to be. These scenes were recorded on celluloid by U.S. cinematographers
under the direction of famous movie maker Billy Wilder, who evidently was flown
in for that occasion, something that required long-term planning.
That
scene was expertly analyzed and scrutinized by Denier Bud, aka Dean Irebodd, in
his 2009 documentary “Buchenwald:
A Dumb-Dumb Portrayal of Evil.” In my book
Lectures on
the Holocaust, I discussed the Buchenwald
lampshade and shrunken heads in some detail in Subchapter 2.7. titled “Jewish
Soap, Lampshades, and Shrunken Heads” (pp. 90-99 in the 4th edition of 2023).
When discussing the claims about objects made of human skin, I relied mainly on
U.S. researcher Arthur L. Smith’s German-language book Die “Hexe von
Buchenwald”: Der Fall Ilse Koch (The Witch of Buchenwald: The case of
Ilse Koch, Böhlau, Cologne 1983). That book never appeared in the author’s
native language, maybe because the topic was too hot for American or British
publishers. As I explained in my Lectures, the analyses carried out
during the 20th Century all seem to have concluded that the material used to
make objects that are claimed to have been retrieved at Buchenwald was not human
in nature.
Ill.
1: Collection of human-derived objects allegedly found in Buchenwald Camp, on
display at a camp square after the camp’s liberation by U.S. troops.[1]
Scientific Advances
During
the late 1940s, when U.S. authorities investigated the matter, DNA had not yet
been discovered, and computers were virtually non-existent. Therefore, any study
of material samples would have been limited to optical comparisons using
microscopes. Since confirmed samples of tanned human skin processed to create
leather objects were probably impossible to come by – other than those
presumably made at Buchenwald – and because there was probably little to no
experienced staff on hand to know what they are looking at, any microscopic
comparison, if at all possible, was not likely to be very revealing either.
While
DNA was well-known at the time when Smith did his research, DNA sequencing was
very onerous and slow, and the data amount needed to patch together fragmentary
sequencing data of DNA or protein fragments was impossible to obtain. The
technology of rapid mass sequencing, together with powerful computers and
advanced software capable of processing the resulting flood of data, became a
reality only in the first two decades of the 21st Century.
Another
somewhat exotic, if not to say grisly progress in this field of pathological
study was made with the submission of a PhD thesis in 2013 that investigated and
catalogued a considerable number of museum collections of preserved tattooed
skin around the globe.[2] In parallel with this
development, more and more museums informed the public about their even
more-obscure collections by mentioning them on their websites, and certain
websites with a focus on this topic mention the collections.[3]
Therefore, researchers could reach out to museums to analyze those preserved
samples of human-skin, and comparisons were now possible as well. In other
words, some 70+ years after the war, forensic experts for the first time had the
tools to verify with a high degree of certainty whether claims of samples made
from human skin were true or not.
So let’s
scrap all the old claims based mostly on speculation, and start over.
Dr.
Benecke’s Research
On the
website of the Buchenwald Museum, we can read the following under the headline
“Piece of a Lampshade”:[4]
“On
21 April 1945, a British parliamentary delegation visited Buchenwald
Concentration Camp to see the conditions in the liberated camp for themselves.
Two of the MPs took objects from the pathology department home with them to
present to the British public.
Colonel William E. Williams, head of the 120th Evacuation Hospital, who was on
medical duty with his unit in Buchenwald at the time, gave a member of
parliament a piece from the upper section of the shade of the desk lamp that had
already been displayed on the table with pathological specimens on 16 April. The
same lampshade can be recognised in a photo album, which the first camp
commandant Karl Otto Koch had made in 1943, on his desk in the camp commandant’s
office.
The
lampshade, which was also intended as evidence, was literally plundered within
days. In a photo from 24 April 1945, only the frame of the lampshade remains.
The
piece of the lampshade was later found in the parliamentarian’s family estate.
In the course of Dr. Myfanwy Lloyd’s research, the family expressed the wish to
hand over the object to the Buchenwald Memorial. The handover took place on 11
April 2023.
An
expert report on the property was commissioned by the Buchenwald Memorial on 19
February 2024. The result is still pending.”
I show
all three images displayed on that webpage here to the right, with the Museum’s
own captions. Click on them to view a larger version.
On
another page of the Museum’s website titled “Case for a Pocket Knife,” we read:[5]
“During his visit to the pathology department in April 1945, a British
parliamentarian received two artefacts from its deputy prisoner chaplain, Dr.
Kurt Sitte (1910-1993). These were a penknife case made from human skin and a
small piece of human skin cut from the edge of a piece of tattooed skin.
Immediately after his return, the member of the British House of Commons asked
the well-known British pathologist and forensic pathologist Sir Bernard
Spilsbury to examine the two artefacts brought back from Buchenwald. After
visual and microscopic examination, he came to the conclusion that both
artefacts ‘resemble human skin’.
In
October 2022, the historian Dr. Myfanwy Lloyd contacted the Buchenwald Memorial.
As part of her research into the work of the British parliamentary delegation
that had visited the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp on 21 April 1945,
she had come across the estate of the British politician at Christchurch College
in Oxford, which included the two artefacts from Buchenwald. The archivist in
charge signalled that the two objects should be handed over to the Buchenwald
Memorial.
The
two objects and the piece of the lampshade, as well as the accompanying
documentation, were finally handed over on 11 April 2023.
An
expert report on all three objects was commissioned by the Buchenwald Memorial
on 19 February 2024. The result is still pending.”
Ill.
2: Office of the camp commandant Hermann Pister [at the Buchenwald Camp]. In the
background is a lampshade made of human skin, 1943. The same lampshade also
stood on the desk of the first camp commandant Karl Otto Koch. © Besançon
Museum.
Ill.
3: Lampshade made of human skin from the office of [Buchenwald] camp commander
Karl Otto Koch, 1945 Photo: U.S. Signal Corps. © Arolsen Archive.
Ill.
4: Piece of a lampshade made from human skin. © Buchenwald Memorial
These
texts were retrieved on July 15, 2025, and had been the same by the time this
paper was posted. Note, however, that the final sentence on both webpages is
wrong: The results are in.
The
researcher asked to analyze the samples mentioned is Dr. Mark Benecke, a
forensic criminologist based in Cologne, Germany. He presented the results of
his research during the 77th Annual Conference of the American Academy of
Forensic Sciences, Baltimore, on 20 February 2025. The presentation was recorded
and then posted on YouTube at https://youtu.be/s1vYgoq5eCs. He also has a blog
post on this on his personal website, although that is much less informative.[6]
So far, there does not seem to have been published a scholarly article by
Benecke layout out the facts of the case in a manner that makes it reproducible
by others. He may just have submitted his results to the Museum, who probably
paid for it and control now what will happen with it.
The
results of Dr. Benecke’s research are as follows:
1.
The shrunken head
submitted was made of goat skin and hair.
2.
The samples taken
from the lampshade section and the pocketknife case were indeed made of skin
from humans.
3.
A heart showing a
bullet wound is also human in nature.
Open Questions
Assuming
that Dr. Benecke’s findings are correct, there are several unresolved issues
which need addressing before we jump to any conclusions:
Shrunken Heads
As the
Buchenwald Museum reports on one of their web pages, the shrunken head they had
analyzed had been donate to their collection in 1985 by the son of a former
Buchenwald inmate. That former inmate claimed to have received it from another
former inmate who stated to have found the head in the Buchenwald Camp’s
pathology department. Research showed, the Museum states on their web page, that
this last person had not been a Buchenwald inmate at all.
In other
words, it all was a prank at best. The Museum knew all along that the head they
handed over for analysis wasn’t one of those put on display by U.S. forces in
1945. A simple comparison of the images of both confirms this, too, see the
illustration.
The
Buchenwald Museum states on the same web page that they know where the two
“original” shrunken heads displayed in 1945 (see Ill. 1) are currently located:
“The
left head is now in the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Silver
Spring/Maryland, the right one in the collection of the German Historical Museum
in Berlin.”
Ill.
5: Left: two shrunken heads displayed at Buchenwald in 1945. Right: Shrunken
head from Buchenwald archive analyzed in 2024.
Analyzing these heads would have been far more important than the one donated in
1985, but there seems to be no initiative to do so. It could be that these heads
are of human origin, indeed, but that would not prove that they have been
prepared from the heads of deceased or killed Buchenwald inmates. I doubt that
anyone in the pathological department of the Buchenwald Camp or anyone else for
that matter had the knowledge and experience to prepare such shrunken heads.
That’s not exactly part of medical education in Germany. It could well be that
these heads have been taken from the collection of some anthropological museum,
and are in fact of Central or South American origin, as German revisionist Udo
Walendy has claimed (without backing it up).[7]
Supportive of this claim is the fact that the right head clearly has warpaint on
its face in the tradition of indigenous peoples of the Americas. Granted, this
body paint may have been applied after the creation of this head, as simple
paint would have washed off the skin during the creation process, one step of
which consists in boiling the head’s skin in water. But why would anyone at
Buchenwald have added warpaint to the head of a former Buchenwald inmate?
Furthermore, the rather long hair on these heads, especially the right one, was
not permitted for German concentration-camp inmates for hygienic reasons. In
other words, if ever these heads were to be tested, clarification about their
origin could be reached only if enough DNA could be extracted to verify not only
that they are human in origin, but moreover what their ethnic background is.
Objects of Human Skin
In his
presentation, Dr. Benecke briefly refers to a case of a different lampshade that
was the center of attention in the U.S. in 2010.[8] I
have described this case in some detail in my
Lectures. That lamp was stolen from an abandoned
house in New Orleans, which means that the manufacturing origin of its shade is
completely unknown. The peddler who had stolen the lamp, managed to sell it for
an excessively high price to a Jew by claiming that the shade was made “from the
skin of a Jew.” While older analytic data suggested that the lampshade was
indeed made of human skin,[9] Dr. Benecke briefly
mentions that it was actually made of calf hide. He did not state what this
claim is based on, so we would have to take his word for it. This means that we
have two contradictory analytical results on that lampshade. At best only one of
them can be correct, and at least one is wrong, if not both. This opens the
possibility that the analytical results for the objects Dr. Benecke investigated
may be wrong, too. Either way, the research results need to be published in a
way that other researchers can verify and perhaps replicate the results.
Ill.
6: The lampshade that drove its owner mad: Jacobson’s obsession with a lampshade
made of calf hide, but for him made of the skin of Jews murdered by the Nazis…
Another
issue is the provenance of the samples Dr. Benecke analyzed. They were submitted
from British sources with a claimed history that may or may not be accurate. The
case of the planted false shrunken head teaches us that there are people with a
sick mind who create and then try to sell to the public as genuine “Nazi
objects” items for whatever reason. While the piece of lampshade seems to fit
into the gap shown on a historic photo of the lampshade, there is no proof
indicating the pocketknife case’s origin. If it is confirmed that either or both
objects were made of human skin, this still doesn’t prove that the skin used was
that of camp inmates. Furthermore, tattooed skin was not used for either of
these items, which is the core of the entire lurid Buchenwald story: The
commandant’s wife Ilse Koch, so the tale has it, chose inmates with “pretty”
tattoos (whatever that means), had them killed, and then had items fashion from
their tattooed skin. But no tattooed skin objects have ever been found. Without
tattoos, the entire storyline collapses.
True Origins
We know
the innocuous background of Buchenwald’s human-skin scandal due to another PhD
thesis dealing with this case, among other things:[10]
“Prof. Timm [of the University of Jena]
assigned a topic for a PhD thesis in June 1940: ‘A Contribution to the Issue of
Tattoos’ to the SS camp physician Erich Wagner on duty at Buchenwald. Already on
November 22, 1940, Wagner submitted his finished PhD thesis.
[…] For his work, Wagner
examined a total of 800 tattooed inmates of the Buchenwald Camp, which was to
clarify questions about the reasons for incarceration, social background, the
motives leading to the tattoos, and the kind of tattoo. In addition, Wagner
wanted to study closer the link between ‘tattoos and criminality’.”
One
would think that such a study would have required taking photos of the tattoos
concerned, but certainly not removing tattooed skin samples from the bodies of
deceased inmates – let along killing inmates for that purpose. Other than
anecdotal evidence from hearsay with its usual unreliability, nothing points to
an inmate ever having been killed to retrieve and preserve a piece of tattooed
skin. But there can be no doubt that pieces of tattooed skin, not processed or
turned into any objects, were indeed recovered from the Buchenwald camp
hospital’s pathology department. Who decided to remove them from deceased-inmate
bodies, and with what permission? The same can be asked about the heart with a
bullet wound, evidently retrieved from an executed inmate or one shot while
trying to flee.
All this
raises the issue of the sizeable collections of tattooed skin that can be found
in museums all over the planet. Some of these items are rather old. Reading
through the various websites cited earlier and through Gemma Angel’s PhD thesis
on this topic gives the impression that, prior to the civil-rights movement of
the 20th Century, it wasn’t just living people who had only very limited rights.
The bodies of dead people, in particular of people who died in prison while
serving time, were often seen as objects at the disposal of whoever had power
over them. Taking pretty skin samples from bodies was evidently no big deal.
National-Socialist Germany isn’t exactly known to have been a champion of civil
rights – neither for the living nor for the dead. A deceased inmate and
perceived enemy of the state was not granted the same respect as dead people are
by law today.
While
that may be so, there is also no doubt that the top echelons of the Third Reich
strongly opposed the usage of body parts of deceased inmates for any purpose.
When rumors of dead or murdered Jews having being processed into soap started
circulating in late 1942, Heinrich Himmler himself issued an order to his
subordinate Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller that expressly prohibited the use of
the bodies of deceased inmates for anything. They had to be either buried or
cremated:[11]
“1.
That such rumors [of Jews turned into soap]
would be circulating in the world at some point does not surprise me,
considering the great emigration movement of the Jews. We both know that the
mortality rate is increased among Jews who are deployed for work.
2.
You must assure me that the bodies of these deceased Jews are either cremated or
buried at every location, and that nothing else can happen to these bodies at
any location.
3.
Let it be investigated immediately whether any misuse such as the one of Point
1) has occurred anywhere, which has probably been spread all over the world as a
lie. Every such misuse is to be reported to me under SS oath.”
We must
also keep in mind that the German SS authorities investigated the Buchenwald
Camp’s commandant Karl-Otto Koch for several irregularities during the war. Koch
got arrested in August 1942, and toward the end of the war he got executed, or
rather lynched, by fellow SS men. Tolerating or supervising the manufacture of
objects from the body parts of dead inmates was evidently not one of the
charges, but it stands to reason that, had there been any reliable evidence to
that effect – other than untrustworthy inmate rumors from hearsay – this would
have been added to the list of infractions he was arrested for.
The SS
judge in charge of the investigations into this case, Konrad Morgen, stated in
an interview granted to U.S. historian John Toland many years after the war that
he had been unable to find any objects made of human skin when searching Koch’s
home during the investigations against him.[12] Maybe
Morgen simply looked at the wrong place, as the lampshade in question was
presumably found in Koch’s office inside the camp rather than in his home, and
the collection of human skin was in the camp’s hospital. But then again, how
would Morgen have been able to determine what the lampshade was made of? Be that
as it may, it is evident that, whatever was going on at Buchenwald, it found the
strongest disapproval of the German wartime authorities, and their legal
interventions in 1942 put an end to it.
It
furthermore needs to be kept in mind that this episode had nothing to do with
Jews. Buchenwald was not a camp for Jews. Jews were lodged in that camp in
considerable numbers only starting in 1944, when more eastern ghettos and camps,
Auschwitz among them, started getting evacuated. Whatever happened running up to
Wagner’s 1940 PhD thesis and under Commandant Koch’s supervision until mid-1942
concerned inmates with a primarily criminal or political background (dissidents,
resistance members, partisans etc.). Not that this makes it any better or worse,
but Jews don’t have any reason to claim this lurid chapter of camp history for
themselves.
Endnotes
[1] US
Army Audio-Visual Agency SC 203584.
[2]
Gemma Angel, In the Skin: An Ethnographic-Historical Approach to a Museum
Collection of Preserved Tattoos, Dissertation, University College London, 2013;
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1416295/3/Gemma_Angel_PhD_Vol_1.pdf.
[3] A
brief list of the sites I found after a quick internet search (last accessed on
July 15, 2025):
https://cvltnation.com/dead-skin-living-art-the-museum-of-tattooed-skin/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/tattooed-skin-shows-exhibition-design-museum-portugal/
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/tag/iconography/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2pfnk8lw44
https://cvltnation.com/dead-skin-new-art-polish-prison-tattoos-preserved/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/tattoos-diseases-and-skin-pickings-a-museum-explores-the-importance-of-skin/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-art-of-preserving-tattooed-skin-after-death-629/
https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/museums/bunshin-tattoo-museum
[4]
https://www.buchenwald.de/en/geschichte/themen/dossiers/menschliche-ueberreste/teil-eines-lampenschirms
(last accessed on August 1, 2025).
[5]
https://www.buchenwald.de/en/geschichte/themen/dossiers/menschliche-ueberreste/taschenmesser-etui
(last accessed on August 1, 2025).
[6] Mark
Benecke, “Biologische Spuren KL Buchenwald,” 21 March 2024.
[7] Udo
Walendy, Historische Tatsachen, No. 43, Verlag für Volkstum und
Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho, 1990, p. 18.
[8]
Mainly due to the obsessive-compulsive reaction of lampshade’s final owner: Mark
Jacobson, The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New
Orleans, Simon & Schuster, New York 2010.
[9]
Robert Chalmers, “The lampshade that drives its owners mad: Strange truth behind
20th century’s most disturbing object,” The Independent, October 31, 2010.
[10]
Christian Bode, Zur Geschichte der Gerichtlichen Medizin an der Universität Jena
im Zeitraum von 1901 bis 1945, Dissertation, Universität Jena, 2007, p. 106.
[11] Jens
Hoffmann,“Das kann man nicht erzählen”: “Aktion 1005”, wie die Nazis die Spuren
ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten, KVV konkret, Hamburg, 2008, p. 84.
[12]
John Toland, Adolf Hitler, Doubleday, New York, 1976, pp. 845f.
