Mark Jacobson - The Lampshade

Passing the empty zoo, the visitor arrives at Buchenwald’s main entrance. At the Auschwitz death camp the sign said Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Will Set You Free,” the sickest of all Nazi jokes. At Buchenwald the message is more subtle, the cast-iron letters on the iron gate reading Jedem Das Seine, or “To Each His Own.”

Again, Kultur, the very mention of which was said to make Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering remove the safety on his Browning pistol, appears to have been at work in the Thuringian hills. Bach, a former Weimar chamber musician, called his 163rd cantata “ Nur jedem das Seine!” . But the phrase dates back to Plato and Cicero, who wrote, “Justitia suum cuique distribuit”: “Justice renders to everyone his due.”

This was the big Nazi laugh at Buchenwald, since the letters of the sign, designed by Franz Ehrlich, an inmate and former Bauhaus student, face inward. You might delude yourself, as so many Jews and others did before the war, that you were as German as anyone else. You might hold on to the fantasy of belonging even as they marched you off to the camp. It was only when the camp gates slammed behind the prisoner that the phrase Jedem das Seine became clear. To each his own. You could harbor whatever illusions you wished about yourself, but it was the Nazis, the Supermen, who decided who you really were.

I was at Buchenwald to see about the lampshade. If you are interested in lampshades allegedly made out of human skin, Buchenwald is the place.

Facts pertaining to the so-called Nazi human skin atrocities remain a topic of debate, yet there is testimony indicating that the practice was widespread. During the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech Communist surgeon arrested by the Gestapo, spoke of his forced participation in various Nazi experiments at Dachau. This included, Blaha said, being made to perform over twelve thousand autopsies.

“It was common practice to remove the skin from dead prisoners,” Blaha testified with clinical precision, saying Nazi doctors like Sigmund Rascher and Klaus Schilling were particularly interested in “human skin from human backs and chests. It was chemically treated and placed in the sun to dry. After that it was cut into various sizes for use as saddles, riding breeches, gloves, house slippers, and ladies’ handbags. Tattooed skin was especially valued by SS men. Russians, Poles, and other inmates were used in this way, but it was forbidden to cut out the skin of a German. This skin had to be from healthy prisoners and free from defects.

“Sometimes we did not have enough bodies with good skin and Rascher would say, ‘All right, you will get the bodies.’ The next day we would receive twenty or thirty bodies of young people. They would have been shot in the neck or struck on the head so that the skin would be uninjured. Also, we frequently got requests for the skulls or skeletons of prisoners. In those cases we boiled the skull or the body. Then the soft parts were removed and the bones were bleached and dried and reassembled. In the case of skulls it was important to have a good set of teeth. When we ordered the skulls, the SS men would say, ‘We will try to get you some with good teeth.’ So it was dangerous to have good skin or good teeth.”

Similar details turn up in the often disputed deathbed “confession” of Franz Ziereis, commandant of the Mauthausen camp, who was shot by American troops in May 1945 while trying to escape dressed in civilian clothes. “I have personally killed about four thousand prisoners,” the suddenly remorseful Ziereis was reported to have said before dying from his wounds. In the realm of “the use of bodies,” however, Ziereis passed the blame to other, otherwise anonymous individuals like “Chemielskwy and Seidler in Gusen,” who, he claimed, “had human skin specially tanned on which there were tattoos. From this leather they had books bound, and they had lampshades and leather cases made.”

Nonetheless, when it comes to Nazi use of human body parts, particularly the flaying, stretching, and tanning of tattooed skin to make lampshades, one name stands out among all others. That is Ilse Koch, aka “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” the red-haired, legendarily hot-blooded wife of the aforementioned Kommandant Karl Koch.

The former Ilse Köhler was born in 1906, daughter of a lower-middle-class factory worker in Dresden, then, as now, a stronghold of rabidly right-wing politics. After studying to be a librarian and working as a secretary, Köhler joined the National Socialist Party in 1932, when women made up only 7 percent of the membership. A picture of the young Ilse taken around this time shows a somewhat zaftig young woman sitting on what appears to be a table in the corner of a wallpapered room. Her wavy, shoulder-length red hair is parted with obvious care on the right side of her roundish face. She wears a billowy white blouse with a ruffled plaid bow, a skirt that falls slightly below her knees, and black pumps. There is little to suggest that this is the woman who would soon be reviled the world over as an evil succubus. On the contrary, the way she leans forward, lipstick on the slightly pursed lips of her smallish mouth, a faint sense of dare in her canny eyes, she appears a slightly naughty 4-H girl, up for coy fun but nothing more.

With Hitler’s rise to the German chancellorship the following year, Köhler took a job as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. It was there she met the camp chief, Karl Koch, a former bank clerk and World War I vet with a reputation as a harsh administrator. A Nazi Party member since 1924 and favorite of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Koch was soon transferred to the Gestapo’s notorious Columbia House prison in Berlin, where he reputedly ordered prisoners to be shackled by the neck and fed from bowls on the stone floor. When Koch entered the room, inmates had to bark and howl like dogs.

Perhaps Koch’s zeal was a compensation for his somewhat deficient pedigree. Considered a vanguard force of the coming racial state, SS men were supposed to be paragons of German masculinity, the cream of the genetic crop. In the early days, no man standing less than six feet tall need apply. Koch was not quite all that. A barrel-chested man with a pronounced, pointed chin who often wore dark glasses over his deep-set eyes, there was a gnomishness about him. Not that this mattered to Ilse Köhler, who, according to her biographer Arthur L. Smith, had a distinct weakness for men in uniform, especially those with the Death’s Head insignia on their cap and collar. Ilse became Karl Koch’s personal secretary, and in May 1936 they married.

Ilse and Karl Koch were wed in a verdant grove outside the Sachsenhausen walls at midnight. Everything was done according to protocols set forth by the 1931 Engagement and Marriage Order aimed at ensuring that the SS would remain “a hereditarily healthy clan of a strictly Nordic German sort” and sanctioned by the Main Office of Race and Settlement. Karl Koch wore his uniform and a steel helmet. Ilse Koch, in a long white dress, was anointed as a “custodian of the race,” from whose womb would come forth genetically pure representatives of the glorious evolutionary future. An eternal flame burned in an urn as the betrothed exchanged rings decorated with runic signs. The newlyweds were given gifts of bread and salt, emblematic of fruitfulness and purity. A copy of Mein Kampf was taken from a wooden box and presented to the groom, after which the couple walked hand in hand past an array of saluting white-gloved SS men.

Koch’s appointment as Kommandant at Buchenwald, the largest and most elaborate of the camps at the time, was a plum. An ugly, vicious man with a beautiful wife, he may not have been popular with his fellow officers, but he was under Himmler’s wing and that was enough. Upon arriving at the new facility, one of Koch’s first orders of business was to confer upon Ilse the title of Oberaufseherin, or “senior overseer,” a rank accorded no other SS frau.