"The Buchenwald Report" on tattooed skin, lampshades, shrunken heads.

[michael mills]

Did the person who claimed to have taken part in the production of the two shrunken heads found at KL-Buchenwald give a detailed description of the process whereby they were produced?

If not, I think his claim can safely be discarded, since it is a complicated process and known only to the Shuar. The program I saw described the process, and the scientist from Witwatersrand University who was investigating the tsantsa phenomenon was able to replicate it, using a pig's head. However, he had carried out extensive research on the subject, and had been to Ecuador where he had learned the process from a Shuar elder.

Today the Shuar are fairly civilised and no longer practise head-hunting, so they are prepared to reveal the secret of head-shrinking to trusted outsiders. However, that was unlikely to have been the case back in the 1920s and 30s when the Shuar were still fairly wild and were making a lot of profit from the trade in tsantsas.

Is there any solid evidence that anyone who had been present at KL-Buchenwald, either a member of the staff or a prisoner, had visited the Shuar in the jungles of Ecuador and had persuaded them to reveal the technique of head-shrinking to him, such that he could replicate it in the pathology department of the camp? Has any such person been positively identified? If anyone has claimed to be that person, has his claim been thoroughly tested?

If such solid evidence does not exist, then the claim that the two shrunken heads were produced in KL-Buchenwald simply does not have the same level of credibility as the alternative mundane explanation, namely that the two heads had been produced at some time before the Second World War, in the context of the commercial trade in tsantsa, had found their way into a museum collection, very possibly that of the State Ethnographical Museum at Warsaw, and had been brought from there to Buchenwald at some time between 1939 and 1945 by unknown persons, possibly SS-men who had been to Warsaw.

The testimonies by former prisoners mean only that they had seen the two shrunken heads in the pathology department at KL-Buchenwald. There was nothing to prevent them inventing a story about them being actually made there, or about having participated in the production themselves. Those prisoners were highly motivated politically to make use of such sensational objects to denigrate their political enemies who had been keeping them prisoner under harsh conditions.

The document referred to by Sergey Romanov is actually from the garrison doctor (Standortarzt) at Weimar to the head of pathology at KL-Buchenwald, and is dated 7 May 1942. The relevant section reads:

"Es wird darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass mit sofortiger Wirkung die Anfertigung sogenannter Geschenkartikel (Schrumpfkoepfe usw) einzustellen ist."

All that letter proves in itself is that the garrison doctor at Weimar believed that shrunken heads were being made in the pathology department of KL-Buchenwald. How he could have come to that belief is not hard to surmise; there were indeed two shrunken heads of European type in that location, a number of persons, including prisoners, had seen them there, stories had been circulating, possibly made up by the camp staff themselves, that they had been produced in the camp, and those sories had made their way back to Weimar.

[michael mills]

Here is another tsantsa made from a European head, apparently from South America:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dcp-6fCHJPU/hqdefault.jpg

It was shown in this Spiegel-Magazin program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcp-6fCHJPU

Just skip the ad.

[michael mills]

Another view of the same shrunken head:

http://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/wissen/i ... sion=199f5

[wm]

It wasn't that hard. According to the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw before the war the heads were mass produced in Panama using heads of deceased people (frequently stolen). They weren't bad, but lacked a few details.
In the fifties the Shuar and their ilk started producing their own fakes from animal skins.

[Sergey Romanov]

It wasn't only a single person but basically all key workers of the pathology.

The process was described.

Waldemar Hoven, the author of the letter, would have known what was and was not happening in the pathology department. There is nothing to suggest he would have made an assumption of shrunken head production merely from having seen the heads.

[michael mills]

Where was the process described?

[michael mills]

Whoever was producing tsantsa in Panama would have had to obtain the knowledge of the process from the Shuar.

Again I ask whether there is any solid evidence of such knowledge having been possessed by anyone in the pathology department at KL-Buchenwald.

By solid evidence I mean more than just an uncorroborated claim by person X that person Y knew the process for making Tsantsa.

The real significance of the "mass production" of Tsantsa in Panama is that it provided a large number of specimens, several thousand, to many museums, including the State Ethnological Museum at Warsaw, which is an obvious place where an SS-officer could easily have appropriated a couple of Tsantsa for his own private collection.

[michael mills]

According to the interrogation of Hoven on 22 October 1946, he was not Weimar Garrison Doctor on 7 May 1942, the date of the instruction to the KL-Buchenwald pathology department:

http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/docume ... en?q=*#p.9

According to his statements during the interrogation, these were the positions he held in the hospital at KL-Buchenwald:

October 1939: Assistant Medical Officer at SS Hospital 49 (the hospital for camp staff)

1941: Medical Officer, SS Hospital 49

End 1941/ beginning 1942: Assistant Medical Officer, Camp Hospital (the hospital for inmates)

July 1942: Promoted to Chief Physician of KL-Buchenwald.

[Avalancheon]

This is an interesting thread, but it brings an (unrelated) question to my mind. Is there any consensus on when the Holocaust began in earnest? Were there any mass murders of Jews prior to operation barbarossa (mid 1941), for instance?

[Sergey Romanov]

Yes there is a statement by the guy who found the information about the exotic practices of certain peoples that served as inspiration for the Buchenwald attempts. So you're not far off the mark about the ultimate origin of the idea, you just don't know all the evidence.

I'll post the info a bit later.

As for Hoven, I'll check it when I get home, but it's a pretty widespread claim about him, e.g.:

http://bz-ticket.de/wie-ein-freiburger- ... 39938.html
1942 wurde Hoven zum Hauptsturmführer und SS-Standortarzt Weimar befördert, war also verantwortlich für die Truppen wie auch für die KZ-Häftlinge.
-----

Could be a zombie mistake of course.

In any case, whoever signed this was informed about the situation in the pathology (see the second part of the letter). There is nothing to suggest he would have made an assumption of shrunken head production merely from having seen the heads or having heard about them.

[Sergey Romanov]

This is an interesting thread, but it brings an (unrelated) question to my mind. Is there any consensus on when the Holocaust began in earnest? Were there any mass murders of Jews prior to operation barbarossa (mid 1941), for instance?

As you yourself note, the question is unrelated.

[Sergey Romanov]

Nazi shrunken heads, human skin lampshades, human soap, textiles from human hair? Sorting out the truth from the legends.

[Sergey Romanov]

A very curious document with parallels to Morgen's early interrogations (lampshade, "dead head").

https://www.fold3.com/image/115/232072361 (also at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/40948206 )

Neither author, nor date is specified. I suspect it was written by Wehner. Not sure whether "pre-capture" or not.

[michael mills]

The hand-written document appears to have been composed by someone who left Buchenwald while the investigation by Dr Morgen was still ongoing.

The document consists of a series of questions about that investigation, including asking whether Morgen saw a "Totenkopf" in Koch's residence or in the office of the neighbouring officer Pister as a relic from Koch.

The word "Totenkopf" corresponds to the English "death's head", and both words denote the skull-and-crossbones symbol rather than an actual skull, for which the German word is "Schaedel". Thus, the skull-and-crossbones symbol on the caps of SS personnel, borrowed from the insignia of German hussar regiments, was referred to as a "Totenkopf".

There is no way "Totenkopf" can be interpreted as a "shrunken head" or as a real skull. The writer of the document appears to be under the impression that the object alleged to have been found in Koch's residence or Pister's office was some sort of image of a skull-and-crossbones rather than a real head.

[Sergey Romanov]

Most probably the author is Wehner.
Totenkopf is the skull/prepared head that Morgen mentioned in at least one of his interrogations.