Nazi photo album made from human skin found in Polish market

March 6, 2020

Warsaw: A photo album made from the skin of a Nazi extermination camp prisoner was spotted in an antiques market in Poland by a collector, who noticed the cover had a “tattoo, human hair and a bad smell”, it was reported.

The collector bought it and handed it to staff at the Auschwitz Memorial Museum who said that it was “without doubt proof of a crime against humanity”, the Metro newspaper said in a report on Thursday.

Analysts suspect that the album was made using the skin of an inmate murdered at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany – notorious for its executions and cruel human experiments.

Ilse Koch, wife of camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch, is believed to have ordered the killing of male prisoners with interesting tattoos before using their skin to make lampshades, albums and table covers, the report said.

Koch even used human thumbs to make light switches. She made so many human skin accessories that she earned a nickname as ‘The Lady of the Lampshade’.

She was thought to have been given free reign of Buchenwald, sexually abusing prisoners and whipping them as she rode past on her horse, the Metro newspaper said in the report.

Her husband was hanged in 1944 and she was sentenced to life in prison in 1947 following the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Speaking on the album’s discovery, head of the Auschwitz Museum Collections, Elzbieta Cajzer, said: “The research suggests that it is very likely that both covers, owing to their technology and composition, came from the same bookbinding workshop.”

“The use of human skin as a production material is directly associated with the figure of Ilse Koch, who, along with her husband, inscribed her name in history as the murderer from the camp in Buchenwald,” the newspaper quoted Cajzer as saying. IANS