Arts & Crafts in the Third Reich
Docent Guide
Ilse Koch (aka, "The Bitch of Buchenwald), the wife of concentration camp commander Karl Otto Koch, shared her husband's hobby of collecting patches of tattooed human skin and shrunken human heads. It was she who selected the living persons with the interesting tattoos whose skin she wanted. After they were killed, she had them skinned and used the tattooed patches of skin to fashion lampshades. The issues raised may seem macabre, but reflect back on body parts taken by conquerors in other times and places against their victims. This was true on both sides in the American frontier experience, as well as in other acts of genocide. Ilse Koch was first released, then re-arrested by the Allied Control forces and sentenced to life imprisonment and committed suicide in 1967.
Hirschberger shows the Kochs with their collectibles, as well as items of punishment on the wall. The lampshade in the center is based on an actual item using human tattooed skin.
Information Concerning Ilse Koch
This information can be found at it's original source on the Nitzkor Project.
Deceit & Misrepresentation - The Techniques of Holocaust Denial
Researchers:, John Drobnicki, Stephan Bruchfeld, Mark Van Alstine
This page contains exerpts from sources concerning the case of Ilse Koch and the the issue of human skin ornaments at Buchenwald.
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:
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.
Page 44:
Frau Koch took baths in Madeira that was poured into the bathtub.
Page 64:
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.
Individual Reports Section
Page 143: Excerpt from "The Early Years of the Camp," by Fritz M"annchen, Dresden:
...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.
Page 337: Excerpt from "Valet for Koch," by Kurt Dietz, Tiefenau über Riesa:
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.
Page 338: Excerpt from "Sidelights on the Koch Affair," by Stefan Heymann, Manheim:
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 tattoo [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.'
For an interesting article on this macabre side of Nazism, see Lawrence Douglas' article, "The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremberg," in Barbie Zelizer, VISUAL CULTURE OF THE HOLOCAUST (Rutgers University Press, 2001)