Lampshades made from human skin

The display of the flayed skin of defeated enemies has a long history. In ancient Assyria, the flaying of defeated enemies and dissidents was common practice. The Assyrians would leave the skin to tan on their city walls.[2]

There have been several claims that the binding of some ancient and medieval books may be made of human skin. Along with this hearsay, there are reports of copies of the 1793 French Constitution being written on human skin and 19th-century anatomy textbooks being symbolically bound in skin.[2]

The skin of the Red Barn murderer William Corder was used to bind the notes of the trial in 1828. This book is currently on display at a museum in Suffolk.[3]

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, claims circulated that Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, had possessed lampshades made of human skin, and had specifically tattooed prisoners killed in order to use their skin for this purpose.[4] After her conviction for war crimes, General Lucius D. Clay, the interim military governor of the American Zone in Germany, reduced her sentence to four years' prison on the grounds "there was no convincing evidence that she had selected Nazi concentration camp inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins, or that she possessed any articles made of human skin".[5]

Jean Edward Smith in his biography, Lucius D. Clay, an American Life, reported that the general had maintained that the leather lamp shades were really made out of goat skin. The book quotes a statement made by General Clay years later:

There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the "Bitch of Buchenwald", had written that she had lamp shades made of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lamp shades were made out of goat skin.[6]

The charges were made once more when she was rearrested, but again were found to be groundless.[5] Journalist Mark Jacobson claims to be in possession of this lampshade, but those claims are disputed.[7][8] The Buchenwald Memorial Foundation states that:

In footage taken by American military photographers tasked by then-General Dwight Eisenhower to record what they saw as the army advanced into Germany in 1945, a large lampshade and many other ornaments made of human skin can be seen alongside shrunken heads of camp prisoners in Buchenwald, all of which being displayed for German townspeople who were made to tour the camp. [10]

Ed Gein was a killer and body snatcher, active in the 1950s, who made trophies from corpses he stole from a local graveyard. When he was finally arrested, a search of the premises revealed, among other disturbing artifacts, a lampshade made out of human skin.[11] Gein appears to have been influenced by the then-current stories about the Nazis collecting body parts in order to make lampshades and other items.[12]

In a 1970 episode of the first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "Mr. Hilter and the Minehead by-election", Adolf Hitler (played by John Cleese) says, "If he opens his big mouth again ... it's lampshade time!"[13]

In 1965, Sylvia Plath referred to a "Nazi Lampshade" in her poem, "Lady Lazarus". Plath invoked allusions and images from Nazi Germany to emphasize the speaker's sense of oppression.[14]

In the 1973 London Weekend Television drama The Death of Adolf Hitler, Doctor Karl Gebhardt (played by Ray McAnally) claims to Hitler (Frank Finlay) that the lampshade in his office in the Führerbunker is made of human skin. Hitler is disgusted and flies into a rage, violently throwing the lamp away, showing Hitler's cognitive dissonance between his personal morality and the twisted inhumanity of his orders.

In 1979, the band Dead Kennedys made reference to the idea of Nazi human lampshades in their song California Über Alles, with the lyrics "you'd look nice as a drawstring lamp".

In 1995, August Kreis III was ejected from the set of The Jerry Springer Show after telling the host "Your relatives – weren't they all turned into soap or lampshades?... I've got your mom in the trunk of my car".[15]

The song "Skinned" from the 1995 Blind Melon album Soup is about Ed Gein and contains the lyrics "I'll make a lampshade of durable skin."[16]

A human lampshade appears in Ken Russell's 2007 short satire A Kitten for Hitler.[17] In the film, Lenny, an American Jewish boy, who has a swastika-shaped birthmark, tries to soften Hitler's heart by giving him a kitten, but when Hitler sees the birthmark, he has Eva Braun kill Lenny to make him into a lampshade for their bedside table lamp. Near the end of the film, in what appears to be an act of God, the swastika transforms into the Star of David.

In 2010 author Mark Jacobson published The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans. In it he described how after Hurricane Katrina he uncovered a lamp which he believed to be made of human skin, and which may have come from a Nazi concentration camp. Initial flawed DNA testing appeared to show this was the case,[18] but later more sophisticated testing proved it was cow skin.[19]

In 2012, a human-skin lamp appeared in the I Am Anne Frank episode of American Horror Story: Asylum.

On the TV show Dark Tourist, a Nazi-era lampshade made of human skin that is located at the Littledean Jail Museum is featured on the episode "Europe".

• Books bound in human skin