The lampshade myth is one of the most-cited legends of the post-war Holocaust imagination. The claim, which began as a rumour in the immediate post-war months and was repeated for decades after, is that Ilse Koch, the wife of the Buchenwald camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch, had had lampshades made from the tattooed skin of prisoners who had been killed for the purpose. The legend is partially true and substantially false. The true element is that human skin was preserved and made into objects at Buchenwald. The substantially false element is the role of Ilse Koch and the scale of the practice. The mismatch between the documented record and the post-war legend is the documented matter on this page.
What the camp record shows
The medical pathology block at Buchenwald, the Pathologisches Abteilung under SS doctor Erich Wagner, retained anatomical specimens from prisoner autopsies through the camp’s existence. Wagner’s 1940 doctoral thesis at the University of Jena was on the subject of criminal tattoos and used preserved skin samples from Buchenwald prisoners as research material. The thesis was awarded and Wagner’s research collection of preserved tattooed skin pieces remained in the pathology block. The collection was found by American forces on liberation in April 1945. Photographs of the collection, including pieces of preserved tattooed skin, were taken at liberation and entered the documentary record of the camp. The Buchenwald pathology archive is itself a documented atrocity.
The documentary record on lampshades made from human skin is much weaker. American investigators at Buchenwald in April and May 1945 found one shrunken human head and a number of preserved skin specimens. They did not find lampshades. A single lampshade-like object was photographed at the camp during the liberation period, but post-war forensic examination of the object and of similar objects has consistently concluded that the material was either goat skin or unidentified. The story that there had been multiple human-skin lampshades, that Ilse Koch had personally selected the prisoners for their tattoos, and that she had had the lampshades made for domestic decoration, took shape in the immediate post-war months in the American press and at the Buchenwald war-crimes proceedings. Most of the specific claims attached to her name in this period have not survived later investigation.
How the myth took shape
The post-war American military trial of Buchenwald personnel (Trial of Josias Prince zu Waldeck-Pyrmont and others, the Dachau-Buchenwald trial, April to August 1947) included Ilse Koch as one of thirty-one defendants. The trial included testimony from camp survivors who described the human-skin practice. The testimonies varied in specifics. Some described seeing tattooed prisoners selected by Ilse Koch personally; others described the pathology-department use of tattooed skin without naming her. The court convicted Koch on the broader charges of participation in the camp regime and sentenced her to life imprisonment.
The conviction was reduced on review by General Lucius Clay, the American military governor of Germany, in 1948 to four years on the basis that the specific evidence directly tying her to the killing of named prisoners was weaker than the trial verdict had implied. The Clay decision was furiously controversial in the American press, in the United States Senate (which held hearings on it), and in the surviving prisoner community. Koch was retried in West German court in 1950 to 1951 on different charges (incitement to murder of named individuals at Buchenwald) and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She killed herself at Aichach prison on 1 September 1967.
Why the myth persisted
The lampshade legend has survived for several reasons. The Buchenwald pathology archive was real and the photographs of preserved tattooed skin pieces in American hands at liberation were real; the lampshade story attached itself to the genuine evidence and inherited its credibility. The figure of Ilse Koch was useful to post-war popular accounts as a single villain on whom an unimaginable practice could be hung; the substitution of one named woman for the institutional pathology archive made the story tell-able. The Clay decision in 1948, by reducing her sentence, made her a cause célèbre in the United States and produced a wave of press coverage that fixed the lampshade story in American public memory. Subsequent popular treatments, including in fiction, have continued the story; the historiographical correction has been slower.
The honest position is that the Buchenwald pathology block was an atrocity, that human skin was preserved as research and trophy material there, and that the lampshade story as it is most commonly told is a sensationalised post-war legend with a real but smaller core. Ilse Koch was a senior figure in the camp regime, was complicit in killings on charges that were proved at her West German trial, and was sentenced to life on those charges. The lampshades that allegedly stood in her home are not the documented basis for any of those convictions.
Sources
- Arthur L. Smith, The War for the German Mind: Re-educating Hitler’s Soldiers, Berghahn Books, 1996 (chapters on the Buchenwald trial)
- Mark Falkoff, The Witch of Buchenwald: A Reassessment of Ilse Koch, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol 28 no 1, 2014
- Alexandra Przyrembel, “Transfixed by an Image”: Ilse Koch, the “Kommandeuse of Buchenwald”, German History, vol 19 no 3, 2001
- Robert Sigel, Im Interesse der Gerechtigkeit: Die Dachauer Kriegsverbrecherprozesse 1945-1948, Campus, 1992
- Mark D. Janis (ed), Trial of Josias Prince zu Waldeck-Pyrmont and Others (Buchenwald Trial), US Army war-crimes records, NARA
- Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, “Pathological Department” exhibition documentation, https://www.buchenwald.de
- USHMM, “Ilse Koch”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org