Omega-Farce wrote:
Are the barbaric things captured on film enough? or is it a lie?
The only item relevant to this discussion on the site linked is number 17, the photograph of a sgrunken head found in Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
The caption to the photograph states:
The shrunken head of a prisoner, discovered at the Buchenwald camp. To terrorize the other prisoners, the SS guards hung two shrunken heads in the middle of the camp. Source: Trials of Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1946, Vol. XXXII.
The photograph itself merely shows a shrunken head. Other photographic evidence shows that two shrunken heads were put on display in the grounds of Buchenwald Camp by United States soldiers; the shrunken head in this photograph may well be one of them.
But the photograph alone does not demonstrate the origin of the shrunken head. The statement that it was the head of a prisoner is simply an unverified claim.
Questions that need to be answered, before the claim can be accepted, are:
1. Did any member of the Buchenwald Camp staff have the knowledge of the methodology of shrinking heads?
2. Was any individual member of the camp staff identified as having had such knowledge? If so, was that individual identified?
3. Was there any actual investigation of the claim that the head was that of a prisoner? For example, was the prisoner in question identified? Were members of the camp staff interrogated on the question, and if so, where are the records of the interrogation?
It is noteworthy that the claim is made that the two shrunken heads were hung in Buchenwald Camp for the purpose of terrifying the prisoners. That claim sounds quite reasonable and rational, but it says nothing about the origin of the heads themselves, which might well have been taken from an anthropological museum somewhere and brought to the camp for the above purpose. If that was the case, it is possible that camp staff had spread the tale that the heads were those of prisoners, either as a cynical joke or else for the purpose of increasing the terrorising effect.
It is also noteworthy that the above claim is quite different from the more sensational claim that the heads were prepared at the request of Ilse Koch, for the purpose of decorating her house.[/quote]