Lampshades made from human skin

There are two notable allegations of lampshades made from human skin. After World War II it was claimed that Nazis had made lampshades from murdered concentration camp inmates. In the 1950s murderer Ed Gein, possibly influenced by the stories about the Nazis, made a lampshade from the skin of one of his victims.

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.

There have been several claims that the binding of some ancient and medieval books may be made of human skin. Allegedly, a 13th-century bible and a text of the Decretals were bound in 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.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, claims were circulated that Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, had possessed lampshades made of human skin, and that she had tattooed prisoners killed in order to use their skin for this purpose. 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".

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

The charges were made once more when she was rearrested, but again were found to be groundless.

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. 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.

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