The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans

FIVE

Long before David delivered two hundred severed Philistine foreskins as a dowry for Saul’s daughter—the old king, in the midst of being driven crazy by God, had demanded only one hundred—the removal of large and strategic sections of skin from the human body already carried an extraordinary significance. The protective boundary between the inside and out, the skin is the largest organ and the most personal, the palette of individuality and free will. Without the skin, the rest of the body becomes a dripping pile of anonymous spare parts. Without the skin, the soul is nothing but a vaporous presence on the hunt for a new host.

The skin’s role as the keeper of the self is illustrated by the story of Marsyas. The satyr, finding an aulos, a flute that had been discarded by Athena, recklessly challenged Apollo, god of music and master of the lyre, to what the jazzmen call a cutting contest, to see which one of them was more adept on his instrument. The Muses were called to judge the match. The stakes were high: the winner would be free to do whatever he wanted with the loser. At first Marsyas outplayed Apollo, angering the deity. In response, Apollo turned his lyre upside down and repeated the same tune. Marsyas could not match this on his flute, so the Muses declared Apollo the winner. Punishing the satyr for having the temerity to confront a god, even one who cheated to win, Apollo decreed that Marsyas be flayed from head to toe.

Ovid retells the myth in Metamorphoses. “Why are you stripping me from myself?” the satyr screams. “A flute is not worth such pain.” Marsyas’s skin was hung from a pine tree near the Turkish frontier. Ovid says the satyr, his “sinews uncovered,” his “trembling veins exposed,” became “nothing unless a wound.”

Throughout history people have skinned other people for the purpose of torture, execution, religious sacrifice, battle trophies, or sheer pleasure. Assyrians were known to have flayed their enemies and draped their skin over the walls of their cities as a warning to restive elements of conquered peoples. Michelangelo protested what he felt was Pope Julius’s censoring of his work on the Sistine Chapel by painting his own face onto the flayed Saint Bartholomew in The Last Judgment. A 1661 entry in Samuel Pepys’s diary describes his journey to the cathedral in Rochester, east of London, where “the great doors of the church are covered with the skins” of a Danish pirate who had supposedly plundered the place and was made to pay the price for his misdeeds. The Harvard Library owns a seventeenth-century English volume bearing the inscription “The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. The King did give me the booke, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.”

Scalping—peeling away the skin on the top half of a vanquished enemy’s skull with the hair still attached—is most recently associated with Native Americans but had been customary throughout the world for centuries. Herodotus reported that Scythian warriors, if they planned to share in the spoils of war, were required to deliver a number of enemy scalps to the king. Visigoths, Anglo-Saxons, and Franks also scalped victims, a practice that was brought to the New World by settlers who were just as likely to strip the skin from the skulls of Indian warriors as the other way around.

Various versions of skin removal, including the Semitic practice of circumcision, have been recorded in numerous cultures, but probably the most elaborate of such rituals is associated with the Aztec deity Xipe Totec, whose name means “Our Lord, the Flayed One.” A late advent in the Aztec pantheon, not attaining widespread veneration until shortly before the arrival of Cortés’s conquistadors, Xipe Totec, a.k.a. “the Night Drinker” and “the Red Smoking Mirror,” was usually depicted wearing a coat of freshly severed human skin, symbolic of his status as a fertility god.

Celebrating the spring equinox, Xipe Totec ceremonies began with the sacrifice of several individuals on stone slabs near the Great Pyramid. Victims were slit open with obsidian knives, their skin carefully separated from the body to keep it in one single, uninterrupted piece. These skin suits were then dried in the sun and painted yellow to give them the aspect of sacred “golden clothes.” Priests wore them for a twenty-day period during which they engaged in mock battles symbolizing Xipe Totec’s ethos of change through conflict. When the ritual period ended, the priests took off the now decomposed skin suits, as a snake sheds his skin, to reveal a new body within. The rotting skins, seen as the sacred vehicle of change, were then sealed away in airtight jars in the temple.

While ritual flaying for religious reasons would now be considered the sign of a barbaric culture, the practice is still very much with us in the commercial, pseudoscience realm. Body Worlds is a traveling anatomy exhibition in which skinned human corpses are displayed engaged in various activities, including a number of sexual positions. Relying on an embalming technique called “plastination,” which preserves human organs by the infusion of various silicons and epoxies, Body Worlds has been seen by more than thirty million people, many of them paying as much as forty dollars per admission. The brainchild of Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the son of an SS cook, who famously never appears in public without his trademark black fedora (he once performed a public autopsy in front of five hundred people while wearing the hat), Body Worlds is not without controversy. Questions have been raised about where those skinned bodies come from, and who gave permission for their use. Von Hagens has presented much documentation that his plastination shops in Dalian, China, and Kyrgyzstan are run according to local law, and that the remains were all donated with informed consent. That said, it is doubtful that any high school biology field trip visiting a Body Worlds show (or any of the similar, competing exhibitions) will see a skinless, epoxy-stuffed German, or any white European, exposing his insides while posed in the midst of kicking a brand-name soccer ball.

Perhaps the most influential flayer of human skin was not a bookbinder, shaman, plastinator, or organ dealer but rather one Ed Gein, a diminutive and seemingly unremarkable resident of windswept Plainfield, Wisconsin, population 889. Although he is often mentioned as the father of the modern serial killer, Gein (the name almost rhymes with “fiend”) was charged in the death of only two people, which puts him at the extreme low end of the body count scale. Still, his notoriety—Gein’s macabre deeds served as the basis for such resonant cultural touchstones as the Norman Bates character in Psycho, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, and Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—far outstrips the likes of Ted Bundy, Juan Corona, Wayne Williams, Dean Corll, Richard Speck, and many, many others. Much of Gein’s infamy owes to the time and place of his deeds. Even with the Nazi camps and the mass death at Hiroshima fresh in the mind, it was still considered unthinkable that such insanity lurked in the American heartland. It was shocking to hear that a strange but supposedly harmless little man (as Anthony Perkins said, he “wouldn’t hurt a fly”) kept a supply of severed human noses purloined from graveyards in a water glass and ripped the skin from the dead to upholster the furniture in his sitting room. In Gein’s case, the appalling thing was not the killing but the taxidermy.

There is no evidence that Gein had any knowledge of Xipe Totec when he murdered hardware store owner Bernice Worden, from whom he’d just purchased a gallon of antifreeze, disemboweled her, and began wearing her skin around his soon-to-be-infamous farmhouse. However, local police did find books on Nazi medical experiments, including those done at Buchenwald, along with the lampshade Gein made of human skin.

The Nazi lampshade entered the wider American mind-set in a Billy Wilder production, or at least Wilder gets the director credit.

A true citizen of the bygone century, the director was born in 1906 in Galicia, then part of the teetering Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the late 1920s he was in Berlin, where he made his first films. He fled with the rise of Hitler, arrived in the United States during the middle 1930s, and claimed to have learned English by listening to baseball games on the radio. While Wilder is known for the caustic worldview on display in movies like Ace in the Hole, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard, it is emblematic of his particular American immigrant experience that the murder of his mother, stepfather, and grandmother at Auschwitz did not keep him from winning six Academy Awards and racking up boffo box office with “madcap comedies” like Some Like It Hot, which featured Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis playing cross-dressing jazz musicians.

Wilder’s contribution to lampshade iconography came in the service of the United States War Department, for which he oversaw the editing of Death Mills, a documentary that utilized graphic footage shot inside the liberated camps. Along with other newsreel compilations like Nazi Murder Mills, Wilder’s film played as a regularly scheduled feature at theaters throughout the United States.

“Look! Don’t turn away!” narrator Ed Herlihy commanded from the soundtrack as the camp atrocities invaded the consciousness of the popcorn-munching masses. Much of this early footage was shot at Buchenwald, including a sequence recorded on April 16, 1945, five days after liberation, when the American high command marched some twelve hundred residents of Weimar up the Blood Road through Goethe’s forest to see what their countrymen had wrought.

The march was endorsed by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and his hell-or-high-water four-star general, George S. Patton, whose Sixth Armored Division had been the first to reach the camp. After an April 12 visit to Ohrdruf, a Buchenwald “satellite” camp thirty-five miles to the west, a visibly shaken Eisenhower said, “The things I saw beggar description. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering.” In a much-quoted statement, the future president said he felt he had no choice but to see the camps personally, so as “to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” In contrast, despite such bluster as “We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks,” General Patton (subject of Richard Nixon’s favorite movie) declined to enter the camps. “He indicated that he would get sick if he did so,” Eisenhower said.

A lampshade allegedly to have been constructed on the orders of Ilse Koch appears several times in the footage shot the day of the Weimar march. It is visible as part of what is described by the narrator as “the parchment display,” an array of camp evidence Weimar residents were forced to view. Several views of the lampshade can be seen—a high-angle shot apparently from a rooftop and a number of fleeting close-ups. But the definitive shot is a still photo from that same day. Taken in front of the Buchenwald pathology lab, it shows three men, apparently newly freed prisoners, standing behind a table on which a number of gruesome objects are arranged as if part of a macabre show-and-tell exhibit. In the back row of specimens on what would come to be called the Buchenwald Table, or simply “the Table,” are a number of glass jars in which human organs—lungs, a heart, a stomach—float in formaldehyde. According to the prisoners, these organs were all that was left of the victims of botched SS medical experiments.

In front of the jars, held down by rocks against the wind, sit several pieces of tattooed human skin. Among the tattoos are a cowboy wearing a ten-gallon hat, an Indian chief in a flowing headdress (images of the American frontier were popular in Germany), a pornographic picture of a woman with her legs spread apart, another of a bare-breasted woman sprouting large butterfly wings, and others in a similar mode.

On the Table’s left-hand side sit a pair of shrunken heads. Set on small wooden pedestals, the heads, reduced to the size of a human fist and featuring long, flowing dark hair, were said to have been made from the remains of Polish workers hanged for engaging in racially forbidden intercourse with German women. According to a 1950 article in Der Spiegel, Ignatz Wegener, a prisoner in the Buchenwald medical ward, helped prepare the heads after reading about the process in a book about the South American Jivaro tribe. The heads were then displayed in the camp barracks as a cautionary note to inmates.

In December 1945 one of these shrunken heads would play a dramatic role at the Nuremberg trials. The American assistant prosecutor, Thomas J. Dodd (who became the U.S. senator from Connecticut, a position later filled by his son, Christopher), addressed the court: “We do not wish to dwell on this pathological phase of the Nazi culture but we do feel compelled to offer one additional exhibit.” Then Dodd whisked away the white sheet covering United States Exhibit 254.

“A human head,” Dodd intoned. “A human head with the skull bone removed, shrunken, stuffed, and preserved.” It was, as Dodd said, echoing the words of Marlow upon visiting Kurtz’s upriver camp, “a terrible ornament.” If anyone still needed to be convinced of the barbarism that had seized the land of Goethe and Beethoven, here it was. In their malign, Faustian obsession with perfecting the human race, the Nazis had released the species’ basest instincts. After all, who else but jungle tribes, dark-continent cannibals bereft of contact with a merciful God, would shrink a human head?[10]

The presence of the shrunken head at Nuremberg served as a straightforward example of what was at stake in civilization’s clash with Nazism. In the case of the lampshade, however, this argument is not so clear. Constructed to run on electricity, the lamp on the Buchenwald Table is a thoroughly modern object, something that might be found in any bourgeois home. Rather than “a terrible ornament” harkening back to a savage past, the lampshade is a glimpse of a far more brutal time to come. With their dream of a thousand-year Reich, the Nazis were nothing if not ardent futurists. The stiff-jointed Tomorrowland they envisioned depended on the eradication of Jews and other contaminated beings. This accomplished, it would only be wise state policy (the Nazis being one of the first “green” regimes) to recycle the translucent, warm-toned skins of decommissioned individuals into items like lampshades, in the manner that the hides of cows eventually become leather jackets.

When Jewish skin became too scarce to mass-produce, the shades would become value-added collector’s items, relics of prehistory, exhibits to be gawked at by coming generations of Aryans, admonitory reminders of the times when Hebrews, insectlike carriers of society-destroying pestilence, still walked the earth.

Indeed, Nuremberg might have been the last time someone like Thomas Dodd, a classic morally uplifted Yank, could realistically argue civilization’s side against the forces of atavistic primitivism. With the carnage wreaked by modern weaponry during the war, it was becoming more difficult to consider human progress an unalloyed boon. Science and technology were now the tools of a dystopian world to come; mankind was beginning to be viewed as the planet’s enemy rather than its salvation. (Even 1984 wasn’t written until 1949.) As the innate righteousness of the species was called into question, the argument that one group might be guilty of crimes against humanity was losing credence to the idea that genocidal incidents were really crimes of humanity. In this context, the lampshade, harbinger of a bleaker yet unavoidable technological future, would have proved more philosophically problematic for Nuremberg prosecutors than a shrunken head. The situation never came up, however.

By the time the war crimes trial began, the lampshade on the Buchenwald Table, ballyhooed as the handiwork of Ilse Koch and her paramours, had disappeared.

Shortly before the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Skip Henderson called to exercise his part-ownership rights (by this time I’d given him $17.50, which made us co-owners) to demand that the lampshade be donated to a Holocaust museum. The sooner the better.

“Since this thing appeared, it’s like my face has been shoved into hell,” Skip cried. He recounted an episode that had happened at St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. He’d gone to mass, and while lighting a votive candle for his father, he was overcome.

“Suddenly I felt I was totally attached to everyone who had ever died in a horrible way. All the victims killed for no reason except they were who they were… every innocent, and maybe not-so-innocent person ever murdered on this earth. I started lighting candles. Candle after candle. All these people deserved candles, I thought. I must have lit, like, forty of them before this tourist standing there with his kids says, ‘Hey, buddy, we got people to mourn, too.’ I thought they were going to call the police. I had to go into the park and sit down.”

This was what had convinced Skip that the time had come to turn the lampshade over to “the professionals.”

Really, what else was there to do with it, short of flinging it out the window while doing sixty across the Huey P. Long Bridge? It wasn’t as if you could place the thing on one of those Germania militaria Internet venues that played vintage recordings of “Deutschland über Alles” as web surfers clicked through the usual array of SS Totenkopf Death’s Head Honor Rings, homoerotic Aryan gymnastics manuals, or the thousands of place settings of AH monogrammed flatware.

In Europe, you couldn’t even show much of this stuff in public, much less sell it. Antique toy soldier dealers in Berlin had to blot the Hakenkreuz off the arms of each tiny Wehrmacht man before displaying it. The U.S. market for Nazi collectables, however, was holding “solid.” According to a 2009 New York Times story, Nazi stuff was “recession proof.” Even replica sales were booming. Quick sellers on sites like the Rapid City, South Dakota—based PzG.biz (“Your Third Reich HQ!”) included “museum quality” copies of Zyklon B canisters marked “Konzentrationslager Auschwitz!—for display purposes only!”

People are often shocked to hear that many of the major collectors of Nazi “memorabilia” are Jews, some of them Holocaust survivors or their descendants. But this is not difficult to understand. If Hitler had purposely left Prague unbombed, with plans to make the city into a vast museum of “the extinct Jewish race,” why shouldn’t survivors collect relics of the extinct “master race”? Then again, one could explain the desire to amass Third Reich materials as simply as Lemmy, eternal guitar hero from the metal band Motörhead, did when he said, “Everyone knows the bad guys have the best uniforms.”

Still, you weren’t about to put a human skin lampshade on eBay, even if they allowed Nazi material or human remains, which they don’t. For sure you didn’t want to call up the venerable English Holocaust denier David Irving, who was running his own “Nazi eBay,” offering items out of his “vaunted personal collection” like a lock of Hitler’s hair, supposedly obtained by the Führer’s barber by putting a piece of sticky tape on the bottom of his shoe. Irving also claimed to have a bone fragment from Hitler’s ribs, which was going for a cool $180,000. As for the veracity of his product, he said, “When people come to my website and see the name David Irving, they know they are buying an authentic item. It is the gold standard.”

No, if you were going to entertain selling a human skin lampshade, you would have to reach deeper. You would have to dip into a world like the one depicted by the ever-reliable Don DeLillo in Running Dog, a story in which the writer’s usual cast of oddly associated obsessives compete in a perverted Maltese Falcon hunt for a porno loop featuring Hitler and Eva Braun supposedly shot on that final night in the Führerbunker.

It was a sick little game, but in the interest of journalistic thoroughness, if a black market for Nazi lampshades existed, it would have to be checked out.

A couple of phone calls, arranged by a deep-sea diver I came to know while working on a story on the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, led me to an alternately boastful and paranoidly surreptitious man named Steve. Reached at an undisclosed California locale, Steve, a purported Special Forces marine who claimed to have once ridden with Hells Angel Sonny Barger in the “five-keys-in-the-saddlebag days” and described himself as “a problem shooter” (“You hear of troubleshooting? I find a problem and I shoot it.”), said he might possibly be able to “lay off” the lampshade for me, especially with a copy of the DNA test as corroboration.

The main problem would be deciding how much to ask for. That was always the case with what Steve called “one-of-a-kind specialties.” Unlike the market for smuggled body parts, where costs were established over time and degree of desperation, a human skin lampshade was what Steve referred to as an “item of choice”; the price would depend only on how badly the buyer wanted the thing.

“How much did your friend pay for it?” Steve asked.

“Thirty-five dollars.”

“Then that’s the price,” Steve said without inflection. But in reality there was no price. Not yet. This was why it was a good thing I’d called him. “This could be something, you know. Like a Holy Grail of evil. These things are pretty rare. At least I’ve never seen one. Not a real one.” For his as-yet-undetermined 30 to 50 percent finder’s fee, he would “put out the word” and try to get a couple of collectors bidding against each other.

For argument’s sake I told Steve I didn’t want to sell the lampshade to any neo-Nazi. There was no problem with that, he said. “Those jerkoffs are lucky if they have enough cash to buy a carton of cigarettes. They’re not in the market. They read two pages of Mein Kampf, go on some websites, and are goose-stepping all over the place until the meth runs out.”

Steve had another sort of person in mind. “He’s, like, maybe sixty, loaded, lives in a big house south of Monterey. He comes in the room sweet as can be, wearing a sweater like Mr. Rogers, smoking a hand-carved pipe. His tobacco pouch is made out of a human breast. I know because my friend sold it to him. Some people are just that sick.” The guy was “pretty creepy,” Steve allowed, saying “he made me nervous, which is something because I’m the kind of individual who makes everyone nervous.

“Maybe I can get him bidding against Marilyn Manson,” Steve conjectured with a laugh. The Goth rock star had a well-documented penchant for collecting what was euphemistically called “outsider art.”

Steve stopped short. “But I’m really wasting my time here, ain’t I?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I can tell just from talking to you that you’re never gonna sell this thing. I’m gonna get some people together and then you’re gonna tell me you got cold feet or whatever. Some bullshit story. Then how am I gonna look? My ass out there on the line? That’s bad for business, dude. So tell me, this ain’t really for sale, am I right or am I wrong?”

I had to admit Steve was right. The lampshade was not really for sale, certainly not to Marilyn Manson or some Mr. Rogers impersonator who kept his tobacco in a human breast.

“Thought so, man,” Steve said.

“Sorry.”

“No worries. You’re making the right choice. Take it from me, you don’t need this kind of karma.”

Donating the lampshade to a Holocaust museum was the “right thing” to do, Skip had said. But which Holocaust museum?

In the late 1940s a proposal to erect a modest monument commemorating the victims of the Nazi regime in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one of the most famous Jewish neighborhoods in the world, was rejected by the New York City Art Commission. Such a memorial would be “too tragic for a recreational park,” the commission said. Several Jewish-American groups concurred, saying the proposed monument would be “detrimental to the best interests of Jewry since it would stand as a perpetual reminder” of the tragic recent history of the Hebrew people.

Sixty years later such mnemonic forbearance seems unthinkable. As of 2007 there were more than a hundred major institutions worldwide identifying themselves as Holocaust museums, study centers, or memorials, all dedicated to making sure the Shoah will never be forgotten. The majority of these institutions are in the United States, as befitting the so-called Americanization of the Holocaust. Now, besides the half dozen centers in New York and Los Angeles, Holocaust museums and memorials can be found in Denver, Tampa, Dallas, Miami, New Haven, and Atlanta, as well as the more unlikely locales of Albuquerque, New Mexico; Farmington Hills, Michigan; El Paso, Texas; Terre Haute, Indiana; Richmond, Virginia; and Tucson, Arizona. The most recent addition is the $45 million Illinois Holocaust and Education Center at Skokie, site of a neo-Nazi march in the late 1970s.

Given this plethora of options, it made sense to start at the top, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Opened in April 1993, a few months before the release of Steven Spielberg’s watershed Schindler’s List (Bill Clinton officially proclaimed 1993 to be “the Year of the Holocaust”), the USHMM, with its prime location near the National Mall, is second only to the Air and Space Museum as a Washington tourist attraction. More than 28 million people have visited the museum, an average of 5,000 a day. Its privately raised endowment of nearly $200 million augmented by federal funding, the museum has an annual operating budget nearing $80 million, more than 400 full-time employees aided by several hundred volunteers, and a membership of 175,000. Its archive includes testimonies of nearly 200,000 survivors and their descendants, 49 million written pages, 138 million images, and 13,000 objects and artworks.

Given its size, the USHMM has more or less set the template for a post—Schindler’s List Holocaust museum experience. As if part of a solemn ritual, the visitor is taken through the forbidding, inexorable chronology. It is all here: the dramatization of Jewish life prior to the coming of the Nazis, the ominous run-up to National Socialism with recordings of Hitler’s speeches gnawing through the acoustics, the documents of the Final Solution along with displays of identity cards and yellow stars pinned to tattered coats, the interactive boxcar where the visitor can imagine the nightmare journey, the pile of shoes of the dead, the audiovisual accounts of the survivors, and finally, the contemplative moment in the Hall of Remembrance—all adding up to the impossibly sad but fervent shout of “Never again!”

Some have found fault with the USHMM’s representation of the Holocaust, charging that such institutional installations, especially ones aimed at a wider audience—the USHMM website takes pains to emphasize that 90 percent of the museum’s visitors “are not Jewish”—are, by definition, emotionally manipulative. Much the same was said about Schindler’s List, which film critic J. Hoberman memorably called “the ultimate feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience.” But whatever the overall goal of places like the USHMM and its rival Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there is no denying the visceral effectiveness of the assemblage, the sheer nonstop volume of it. In this onslaught of overwhelming heartbreak, however, one thing that will not be shown to the weeping visitor is the Buchenwald lampshade.

This doesn’t mean the shade is not present. It makes a cameo appearance on one of the many video monitors set up around the USHMM, in the scenes of the Weimar residents filing past the Buchenwald Table. In one particular sequence, the photographer shoots from behind the Table, and the lampshade is visible through the crowd, dead center in the frame.

The lampshade dominates the image for a full three seconds. If you know what you are looking for, it pops right out at you. But chances are that, even though it is reasonable to assume that many of the USHMM’s daily visitors pause to watch the video, few of them are aware they are seeing the famous Buchenwald lampshade. The museum makes no mention of it, either in the footage commentary or with a written explanation. Without context, reduced to an undefined rhomboid shape on the screen, it becomes nearly invisible.

In the Queens schoolyard of the 1950s, decades before the museums and Schindler’s List, the lampshade was our Holocaust, the Shoah we knew. The lampshade and its succubus Bitch of Buchenwald enabler, Ilse Koch, were in the news every day, and deemed worthy of convening a special select committee of the United States Congress. Six decades later, having vanished from the Table at Buchenwald, missing at Nuremberg, never scientifically proven to be real, the lampshade had become an unmentionable ghost, a dybbuk, written out of the Holocaust.

“That is because it is a myth,” said Diane Saltzman, the former head of collections at USHMM.

I was about halfway through an increasingly contentious conversation with Ms. Saltzman about the lampshade’s disappearance from the neo-official version of the Holocaust narrative, and this was perhaps the tenth time she had used the word myth to describe the lampshade.

“Did you look at the DNA report?” I asked. At the request of the USHMM press guy, I’d sent the DNA report and several pictures of the lampshade to Washington.

“I did,” Ms. Saltzman replied. “It was interesting. But inconclusive. Completely inconclusive. It proves nothing.”

Ms. Saltzman apparently had me pegged for something of a nut or, even worse, a reflexively sensationalistic journalist looking to make National Enquirer—style headlines with yet another hoary story about Nazi monsters, always a hardy perennial. Only the week before, one of the supermarket rags had a story about a “Nazi vampire” appearing in a subdivision outside Fresno, California.

I could understand Saltzman’s trepidation. The lampshade had become the creaking flying saucer of the Holocaust, the domain of the huckster and the country bumpkin. People continued to find shades they imagined were made of human skin in attics or, as Skip Henderson did, at rummage sales. Positive of their authenticity, most of these people felt that these objects should be turned over to the Holocaust Museum. Many of these cases came across Diane Saltzman’s desk.

Typical was a 2004 incident in the small town of Lovingston, Virginia. As reported in the Charlottesville Daily Progress, a suspicious-looking lampshade had been found in the voluminous collection of seventy-seven-year-old antique dealer Daniel Avery. “I think it’s real because of what it looks like. It really looks like skin,” said Doris Jones, a local antique shop owner who noted Avery was always coming up with “unusual things. He’s very into snakes. He had snake rings, snake candlesticks.” For his part, Avery, reportedly very ill, said he didn’t want to part with the lampshade. He had a sentimental attachment to it since it was given to him by “my dear Mary,” a barmaid he’d run into at a local saloon forty years earlier and hadn’t seen since. It was Mary who told Avery the lampshade “was from human hide that came from the Germans.”

Reached by the Daily Progress, Diane Saltzman dismissed the possibility that the Lovingston lampshade was made in a concentration camp. “None of the lampshades that have surfaced over the past fifty years have turned out to be real,” she said. Daniel Avery disputed Saltzman’s assessment. “That’s what she thinks,” he said.

As far as she was concerned, Ms. Saltzman told me, the lampshade was “like the soap, which is also unproven.”

It would become a familiar refrain, this coupling of the lampshade with the story about how the Germans had engaged in the mass production of soap from Jewish bodies. Back in Queens, we all knew about the soap.

The “proof” supposedly came from many reported sightings of soap inscribed with the letters RJF, which was rumored to stand for Reichs Juden Fett, or “state Jewish fat.” Many believed the story, including famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who in 1946 wrote, “The General Government [Poland] knew quite well what the ‘RJF’ soap meant. The civilized world may not believe the joy with which the Nazis and their women in the General Government thought of this soap. In each piece of soap they saw a Jew who had been magically put there, and had thus been prevented from growing into a second Freud, Ehrlich or Einstein.”[11] The idea that people could be made into soap carried such a stigma that when the first camp survivors emigrated to Palestine in the late 1940s, the established Zionist settlers, not enthralled to see the peasant newcomers, derogatorily referred to them as sabon, or soap. Later, however, it was pointed out that RJF was actually RIF, initials for Reichsstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung, or “National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning.” From there the soap story began to fade into the realm of folklore, a tale quite possibly left over from World War I, when British propagandists accused the Germans of using dead soldiers to make products for the war effort.

As it turned out, the Nazis did at least experiment with turning corpses into soap. According to testimony at Nuremberg and much subsequent research, in 1944 Professor Rudolf Spanner, the SS doctor in charge of the Danzig Anatomical Institute, was given the assignment to test the feasibility of such soap manufacturing. Reportedly writing letters to local town mayors urging them not to bury the dead but rather send the corpses to the Danzig Institute, Spanner devised a recipe for the process calling for five kilos of human fat to each ten liters of water along with five hundred grams of caustic soda. With the war going badly, however, there was little time or money for soap production. “It never reached the industrial stage, nothing close to the degree many believed,” says Yehuda Bauer, preeminent Holocaust scholar at Yad Vashem.

It was exactly “distractions” like soap and lampshades that “created fodder” for the so-called Holocaust deniers, crazies for whom “no soap meant no Holocaust,” Diane Saltzman said. This seemed a reasonable concern. The Internet had only further enabled the loonies claiming the “faking” of the Holocaust was responsible for everything from the establishment of the State of Israel to continued Jewish control of the planet, from Goldman Sachs on down. These maniacs had to be resisted on every level.

Yet what did that have to do with the lampshade Skip Henderson bought in New Orleans, the one that according to the Bode lab DNA report was real?

“You haven’t presented enough evidence. This report is only one aspect of what must be done,” Saltzman said. I should have examined the age of the thread used to stitch the panels of the shade together. I should have attempted to get a better sense of the age of the metal on the frame itself. “We are talking about specifics,” she chided. “You don’t provide them.”

This was true. Beyond the DNA testing and showing the lampshade to a bevy of curators, I hadn’t done much. But that’s why I was calling her. The five grand I’d already laid out for the Bode report had maxed out the family budget for lampshade testing. My hope was that an organization like the USHMM, with its $200 million endowment, might be willing to share or, better yet, take over the financial burden.

Saltzman put an abrupt halt to that notion. “We wouldn’t be interested in accepting such an object and we would never display it,” she said. “We are an educational institution and this has no educational value whatsoever.”

“You’re saying even if it’s real, it has no educational value?”

“This is a museum dealing with the Holocaust. This object cannot be proved to legitimately be part of the Holocaust, so we cannot treat it as such. Sixty-odd years of research and it has never been proved that a thing like this was Nazi policy or practice.”

“What about all the stories about lampshades? Everyone knows about it; doesn’t that make it at least worth talking about?”

“Not from the point of view of the museum.” Diane Saltzman had about run out of patience. “What I’m saying is even if I could prove its reality, even if you could prove it was made out of the skin of a Buchenwald prisoner from 1943, which you can’t—it would still not be part of the practice of the Holocaust. It would only be an isolated incident, the work of extreme individuals.”

“The whole thing is pretty extreme, wouldn’t you say?” Was Saltzman saying that if a lone lunatic SS man, some Ed Gein—style Nazi, had made a lampshade, that would fall under the heading of personal rather than institutional psychopathy and therefore not fall within the purview of august organizations like national museums? “Listen, all I’m trying to do is find out what it is.”

“I already told you what it is. It is a myth,” said the former head of collections. “Even if you could document it one hundred percent, it would still be a myth.”

“What?”

She was getting ready to hang up.

“So what do you suggest I do with the thing? Just throw it out?”

Diane Saltzman gathered herself. This conversation had come to a close. “I wish you good luck.”

SIX

It made no sense to me. Why would a top-level representative from the leading Holocaust center in the United States be so invested in maintaining that the lampshade was a myth? There had to be more to it than fielding incessant panicked phone calls from poor souls haunted by the specter of a paper shade in their attic.

To call the lampshade a myth was to place it in the class of objects like “the Spear of Destiny,” aka “the Holy Lance,” which John, in his gospel, says was used by the Roman soldier Longinus to pierce Christ’s side as he hung on the cross. From this wound came “a sudden flow of blood and water,” an anointment that, legend has it, imbued the weapon with vast mystical powers. According to the literature on the topic, the spear passed through the hands of many powerful men including the Persian king Khosrau II, Emperor Constantine, the Turkish sultan Bayezid II, along with a number of French kings and popes. It would later play a pivotal role in Wagner’s Parsifal, which was almost certainly how the young Adolf Hitler became aware of it.

While living in Vienna, Hitler, then in his occultist Thule Society phase, saw the alleged spear on display at the Hofburg Treasure House and wrote about it in Mein Kampf. “I knew with immediacy that this was an important moment in my life… I felt as though I myself had held it in my hands before in some earlier century of history, that I myself once claimed it as my talisman of power and held the destiny of the world in my hands.” After the German-Austrian Anschluss in 1938, Hitler took possession of the spear and brought it to Berlin.

What happened after that is unclear. According to a series of books written by Howard A. Buechner, a New Orleans physician and longtime member of the faculty at both the Tulane and LSU medical schools (and also, by chance, one of the first Allied soldiers to enter the Dachau camp, where he witnessed the infamous Dachau Massacre of German guards by American GIs), Hitler, fearing the war was lost, ordered Himmler to dispatch a contingent of SS men to bury the Spear of Destiny in Antarctica. This was done to keep the spear from falling into the hands of General George Patton, who also coveted it. Patton writes of the spear in one of his many warrior poems, “Through a Glass, Darkly,” in which he imagines himself as Longinus: “and I feel the rending spear. / Perhaps I stabbed our Savior / in His sacred helpless side.” After the war the spear was returned to the Vienna museum, where it remains today, although Buechner claims the object is a fake, manufactured by the Nazis as a ruse. The real spear, the New Orleans doctor contends, remains buried under the Antarctic ice.[12]

The lampshade was no Spear of Destiny. For one thing, the lampshade had witnesses, literally thousands of them. There was Ann Stringer, the UPI reporter who broke the story, who wrote that she could “see the pores and the tiny unquestionably human skin lines.” There was the testimony of American soldiers. Harry Snodgrass, an enlisted man from Tennessee, said, “It was in the commander’s office… lampshades made from the skins of Jews.” Warren Priest, another enlisted man, said, “I saw lampshades made of human skin… the commandant of the post collected these as a hobby.” Rudy Baum, of the Sixth Army, said he saw “lampshades and library book covers made from tanned human skin.” Margaret Bourke-White, whose Life magazine photos established much of the visual record of the camp, said she saw “skins for lampshades.” In a report dated April 27, 1945, Georges Vanier, the Canadian ambassador to France, wrote, “a lampshade was found—and this I saw—made from tattooed human skin.” Beyond this is the statement of Adolf Martin Bormann, son of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, who many felt was running much of the Third Reich in the latter stages of the war. A longtime missionary, the younger Bormann recalled a visit to Himmler’s house. “The furnishings were very strange,” Bormann said. “There was a standard lamp, for example, with a lampshade made out of parchment. And this lampshade made out of parchment was made with human skin.”[13]

Were all these statements simply based on misidentification, propaganda, the effect of the shock of seeing what had happened at the camp, or a bout of collective hysteria?

“They won’t take it,” I told Skip Henderson, after my conversation with Diane Saltzman.

“Why not? Didn’t you show them the DNA?”

“Of course I did. They don’t think it is part of the Holocaust.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Can’t you call them back? I got to get this thing out of my life.”

My conversation with Diane Saltzman continued to bug me. There were so many issues to discuss that I never got to. It went back to the DNA test, what could be found and what could not. This was a matter of “markers,” as Bob Bever, the Bode lab vice president explained to me. The degraded lampshade samples yielded only so many genetic markers. There was enough information to certify the skin as human but not enough to determine what kind of human. The full genetic record, including the “ethnicity” of the poor soul who’d been turned into a lampshade, was not obtainable.

I called Bob Bever for some clarification. “You’re telling me that there’s not enough DNA to give a hint of who the person is? That it could as easily be some poor hitchhiker from Arkansas as a concentration camp victim?”

Bever was typically noncommittal. “We’re bound by the results we get. So yes. As of now there’s no way of telling the ethnicity of the lampshade material.”

“So it could be anyone?”

“As far as these results indicate, the answer to that would be yes.”

Asked what I should do next, Bever said, “Well, you can always keep on testing.”

Yeah, sure. But would it be worth it? This stuff was hellaciously expensive. What were the real chances of a more complete finding? If our roles were reversed, what would he do?

“Don’t ask me to advise you not to test,” Bever said. “That wouldn’t be good for business.”

“Come on.”

Bever took a breath. “If it were me I wouldn’t do it. We worked a long time to squeeze out that little drop of DNA. What you have may be all you’re going to get.”

“That’s it?”

“You never say never. But it is highly unlikely.”

This was disappointing news, but the inconclusiveness did place the lampshade in a unique, and possibly illuminating, existential position. Here was an example of an object that, whatever Diane Saltzman said about it, had served as a most repellent symbol of Nazi racial terror, an icon of genocide. Yet it was not possible to know who had died and who had done the killing. Museums judge reality by provenance and dating. But beyond its apparent European origin and turning up in New Orleans after Katrina, the lampshade had no fixed provenance. Beyond its clear modernity, it came from no set time. The skin on the shade could have been made of anyone, come from anyplace.

The lampshade was an everyman, an every victim.

It is one of the oldest of Jewish philosophical arguments, the ongoing dialectic between “particularism” and “universalism”: do Jews have a unique existence and relationship with God, or is the true mission of a Jew to live in “the world” like everyone else? This is, above all, a discussion about the concept of “the chosen people.” Does the “chosenness” of the Jews, granted by the acceptance of God’s Torah, entail an apartness, an eternal special-case condition? Or does it confer, as many liberal, cosmopolitan Jews believe, a unique obligation to reach out and fit in, to offer the not inconsiderable genius of the Jewish people to the larger society? With the Holocaust, the particular/universal dichotomy has been taken further, morphing into an overall theory of genocide itself. The main question from the Jewish perspective is whether the Holocaust was a wholly unique, distinct occurrence in the history of the world, or was it part of the larger circumstance of human nature? Put another way, did those people whose pictures I saw pasted to the walls at Tuol Sleng, or an Armenian killed by a Turk, or a Tutsi hacheted by a Hutu have anything in common with a Jew murdered at Auschwitz? Or is every instance of collective death a separate case, with its own particularized circumstances, disconnected from the general trend of mass slaughter?

It was a dilemma. You had commentary from people like Anti-Defamation League president Abraham Foxman, that old reliable font of Hebraic exceptionalism, who in a 1994 edition of the ADL’s Frontline publication said, “The Holocaust is something different. It is a singular event. It is not simply one example of genocide but a nearly successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and thus on God himself.”

This provincialism aside, there was a compelling truth to the particularist position. Obviously the Nazis, the perpetrators, believed in the singularity of the Jews. Particularism was practical; it defined who was us and who was them; it circled the wagons; it was a way to survive. Universalism, on the other hand, was for simps. Universalism asked you to imagine yourself having as much in common with some Cambodian left facedown in a ditch as you did with your murdered uncle Max. It was a hard argument to swallow. Yet, being the sort of New York Jew I am, from the leafy workers’ paradise of Flushing, Queens, I couldn’t quite buy into being a particular kind of anyone. It wasn’t the way I was brought up.

Perhaps it was a kind of romanticism, but I took the lampshade out of its Sugar Ray Robinson box that night, looked it over. Doña Argentina, the Union City spiritualist, had said it—he—wanted to stay with me. That he trusted me. It sounded insane then and it sounded insane now. But I had hopes, inchoate as they might be, that this purported symbol of racist lunacy, product of the worst humanity could conjure, might through its everyman DNA somehow stand as a tortured symbol of commonality.

It was just a thought.

Ken Kipperman, the world’s best-known lampshade hunter, doesn’t think much about concepts like particularism and universality.

“With my skills, I am not really much of a philosophy student, I’m afraid,” he says in his self-effacing, preternaturally polite way. “It is easier for me to focus on one thing at a time.”

He is a tall, youthful-seeming man in his early sixties, his longish salt-and-pepper hair combed in a semi-bouffant swoop. In the basement of his comfortable Maryland home, where he keeps two decades of research in neat piles on the pool table, Kipperman told me about the first time he became aware of the lampshade.

“I was about eight, after our family came to America,” Kipperman said in the halting, almost disembodied inflection he falls into while reciting the events of his past. “We were living in Coney Island, in a neighborhood with a lot of war refugees like us, and I heard this angry, angry man on the television screaming in a language I didn’t understand. I went to see what it was and I saw my mother and father spitting. They were spitting right at the TV screen! It made me afraid because I’d never seen them so upset. Later I found out it was Hitler on the television. But my parents never told me that. They wouldn’t even speak his name.

“That’s when I saw the Buchenwald Table for the first time. Of course I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know anything. My parents didn’t tell me about the Holocaust, any of it. But I knew there was something terrible on that TV screen. I asked, ‘What is that?’ but my mother told me that wasn’t for me to know. That was how it always was: everything was a big secret.

“That was the first time I really ever thought about it, who I was and where I came from,” said Kipperman, who was born in Poland in 1946 and spent his earliest years in a displaced persons’ camp in Italy. “When you’re a kid, you want to be like everyone else. But when I saw the Table, that was when I began to realize I wasn’t. I didn’t remember it at the time, the lampshade and tattooed skin, but it stayed with me, in the back of my mind.”

Kipperman began hanging out at the Coney Island boardwalk freak show. “It kind of took me over, the idea that something had happened to these people that made them so weird. There’d be the snake lady, the fire-eaters, the guy who made himself into a pretzel. The barker said, ‘You think this is beyond belief? Pay the extra money and come inside if you really want to see the horror of horrors.’ That was me, I always wanted to pay the extra money.”

For Kipperman the most fascinating freak was “the Illustrated Man,” tattooed from head to toe. “It was like he was covered with a whole other language.” Kipperman asked his parents if he could get some tattoos. The answer was “Absolutely not.” It was against Jewish law; it said so right in the Torah, Leviticus 19:28, “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord.” Get a tattoo and you won’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery, you’ll be shunned by your own people for eternity, his parents told him. This confused Kipperman, since during the summer when he went to the beach, he saw people he knew to be Jews, who went to shul every day, and they had tattoos on their arms. Why was that, he asked his parents, and they told him not to ask so many questions, to concentrate on being an American.

An indifferent student except for his budding talent as a Mad magazine—style caricaturist, Kipperman was expelled from Lincoln High School, then a storied bastion of NYC immigrant public education, for poor attendance. His life would change when he signed up for an engraving class. Showing unmistakable aptitude for intricate work, Kipperman was soon admitted to a ten-year apprenticeship sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department for the training of stamp and currency artists.

For someone of self-described “incredible” absentmindedness (he got lost on the way to pick me up at the train station even though it is less than fifteen minutes from his house and he makes the trip all the time), Kipperman’s prodigious ability to concentrate on one thing found a niche in the exacting practice of steel-plate engraving. “You have to have a lot of patience to do this kind of work,” he says. “The details are so small, it can take months to make a small portrait. I’d sit down, start working, and when I looked up it would be tomorrow. There was something very satisfying about that.”

By his early thirties, Kipperman was working for the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, one of sixteen people in the country qualified to make the plates for U.S. currency. Every time you look at the picture of the immaculately handsome Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill, you’re seeing the work of Ken Kipperman.

“It is a little thrilling,” Kipperman says. “I see people buying groceries in the supermarket, handing over those pictures of Alexander Hamilton, and I think how lucky I am, because most artists can’t get anything for their work.”

When Kipperman finally became acquainted with the history of the Holocaust, “It came as a shock to me. I was so angry about not knowing. I screamed at my mother for keeping it from me. I screamed at God, who I thought was supposed to protect the Jewish people. It became an obsession,” Kipperman says, describing a 1987 incident that would become his first of several encounters with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“It was very strange,” Kipperman points out in his straightforward, nearly Aspergerian way, “because the Holocaust Museum didn’t even exist at the time.

“I was surprised when they announced they were going to build the museum right across from my Bureau office on Fourteenth Street,” Kipperman recalled. “There were these old brick buildings there, and in my mind, they looked like Auschwitz… kind of how I imagined Auschwitz would look. In a way, to me, they were Auschwitz. It seemed a good place to have a Holocaust museum. But then I heard the museum people say they needed more space. They were going to demolish the brick buildings to put up a modern one-hundred-sixty-million-dollar I. M. Pei Holocaust museum. This didn’t seem right to me.

“It kind of surprised me one day when I came to work. They’d knocked down the buildings. There was nothing left but a chimney, a brick chimney. It reminded me of the chimneys at the camps. This is a holy kind of structure, terrible but holy. I thought I had to do something.”

Saying he was an artist and wanted to sketch the chimney before it was gone, Kipperman convinced a construction worker to lift him up in a crane, whereupon he launched what he calls “my protest.” He climbed into the chimney and refused to come out.

The police, thinking the sandwich in his paper lunch bag was a bomb, blocked off the entire area, stopping traffic for hours. “I was in there for what seemed like a long time,” Kipperman recalls. “I could hear all the sirens, the helicopters overhead. And I’m thinking, you idiot, what did you get yourself into?” It was only when he peeked from the top of the chimney and saw a police marksman aiming a rifle at his head that he decided he had better come out. The next day a picture of Kipperman, his shirt ripped to shreds, being led away by two policemen was on the front page of the Washington Post Metro section.

Initially charged with a felony that could have locked him away for twenty years, Kipperman was given a battery of psychological tests that bore out his claim that he truly meant no harm. It was decided he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his involvement with the Holocaust, an event that, at least according to the calendar, was over before he was born.

Kipperman received a suspended sentence and was required to perform one hundred hours of community service, helping administer art therapy to state prisoners. About a month later Kipperman came home to hear his wife, Paula, say, “You think we have trouble now, wait until the Bureau calls back.” Shortly before the chimney episode, Kipperman, assigned to make a one-dollar stamp in honor of Yeshiva University president Bernard Revel as part of the Bureau’s “Great Americans” series, had engraved a tiny Star of David within the scholar’s beard.

“It was kind of a private thing. Lots of people at the Bureau have put these little personal marks into their work. Sort of an inside joke. I never thought anyone would notice, the star was so small,” Kipperman says. “But they did.” Over a million of the stamps had been printed before the star was discovered and the run stopped. Again reporters interviewed Kipperman’s neighbors about how Ken was such a nice guy and how surprised they were that he’d ever be involved with something like that.

Amazingly enough—and evidence of how difficult it is to find engravers talented and focused enough to create U.S. currency—Kipperman was again not fired by the Treasury Department. There was some fallout however, as much stricter oversight was introduced at the Bureau, resulting in a long-term review of all projects and creating bad feelings throughout the office. When Kipperman returned to work, a message was taped to his desk. Written in a Hebraic-style font, the note said, “Fuck you very much in spades.” Kipperman, ever the innocent, had to ask what “in spades” meant.

Six years later, in 1993, the chimney incident apparently sufficiently forgotten, Kipperman wrangled himself an invitation to the party celebrating the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. While appalled by the display of wealth and privilege on the part of the well-heeled donors, Kipperman nonetheless got to see the exhibit on camp tattoos. Flashing back to the tattooed numbers he’d seen on his neighbors’ arms in Coney Island, Kipperman started asking questions. There were technical things he needed to know. What kind of ink did the Nazis use, what type of needles?

Finding no one at the museum to provide him with the answers he sought, he turned his attention to the National Archives, where he met Robert Wolfe. A longtime archivist, Wolfe had only a moderate interest in Kipperman’s tattooing inquiry, but he did, almost as an afterthought, mention that the Archives had a number of pieces of tattooed human skin in its collection.

“He said they had the skin and a piece of a lampshade. From Buchenwald,” Kipperman reports. Wolfe believed the objects had come to the Archives following their use as exhibits during the Nuremberg trials.

“I was completely floored,” said Kipperman, who asked to be allowed to see the objects. This permission was long in coming. “I kept calling and writing, asking for an appointment. They kept putting me off. Everyone was always on vacation.” In the meantime Kipperman, his monomania fully engaged, began spending every nonworking hour in the library at the Holocaust museum and in the vast National Archives, compulsively xeroxing and re-xeroxing any and all material pertaining to World War II—era tattooed human skin. Eventually the Archives allowed him to see their holdings, which, contrary to what Robert Wolfe said, consisted of only one piece of tattooed skin, an image of a woman with butterfly wings. Kipperman took a picture of himself holding the mounted tattoo.

Later he traced more artifacts to the Archives’ annex in College Park, Maryland. There he saw three more pieces of tattooed skin and a bisected shrunken head, all labeled as coming from the Buchenwald camp. On one of those long days at the Archives he came upon an oddly familiar picture.

“It was the Table. The Buchenwald Table. As soon as I saw it, I knew that this was the same thing I saw on TV back in my parents’ house in Coney Island. The same picture that had been in my head all these years. The shrunken heads, the lampshade—all of it. After forty years, it came back to me, like a ghost.”

From Kipperman’s point of view, the truly horrible thing was that many of the objects on the Buchenwald Table had been in the United States all along, an hour’s drive from his house. “I couldn’t believe it, these awful, terrible things gathering dust right there in Washington D.C., no more than a few hundred feet from the Constitution, the greatest document of American freedom. It made me so upset, I couldn’t think.”

Soon after, Kipperman began his search for the lampshade. “I knew it was missing, that it had disappeared from the Table and had never been introduced in evidence at the war trials. But it had to be somewhere.”

Kipperman found a clipping from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch headlined “Ex-Officer Has Human Skin from Ilse Koch’s Home.” The officer in question, the article said, was Major Lorenz C. Schmuhl, former commanding officer of post-liberation Buchenwald, who had taken home a number of “souvenirs” from the camp, including “most pieces of the famous lampshade.”

Kipperman tried to make contact with Schmuhl, who was placed in charge of the camp on April 16, 1945, the same day the Table was set up to greet the people from Weimar. A World War I combat veteran, Schmuhl was a good choice to run a former concentration camp. He spoke German and had long been the deputy warden of the Michigan City, Indiana, penitentiary. Apparently he ran a tight ship. When John Dillinger, Schmuhl’s most illustrious inmate, was incarcerated at Michigan City, the erstwhile public enemy number one was quoted as saying, “When I get out of here, I’ll be the meanest bastard the world has ever seen.”

“I knew Major Schmuhl had the lampshade from the Table, but had ‘to prove it,’” Kipperman said as he pulled out a murky photo of Schmuhl’s Buchenwald collection that had been published in a 1949 edition of the Indianapolis Star. “The picture’s not too great, but what you see is that a piece was missing from the top of the lampshade in Schmuhl’s house. In the footage from Buchenwald, the lampshade on the table was missing the same piece.”[14]

You had to admire Kipperman’s legwork and wonder why the Nuremberg and Dachau trials prosecutors, Thomas Dodd included, hadn’t been able to track down the lampshade, especially considering the enormous amount of publicity surrounding the object at the time. Might not someone have thought of asking Schmuhl, who lived in Ilse and Karl Koch’s villa during his Buchenwald tenure, if he had any idea what happened to such a sensational piece of evidence? Also worth asking would have been why Schmuhl, after years in the law enforcement business (he would go back to his warden’s job after the war and become the subject of a TV series called The Man Behind the Badge), removed a critical piece of evidence from what was essentially a vast crime scene, and why he didn’t think to return it when the prosecution failed to produce the lampshade at the trials.

The picture in the newspaper was the closest Kipperman would get to the lampshade on the Table. By the middle 1990s, Schmuhl was long dead. Kipperman reached Henry Lange, author of the original Indianapolis Star piece, but the reporter knew nothing of what happened to the lampshade besides that Schmuhl had subsequently sold it to a collector who later disposed of it because “he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.”

Kipperman pressed on, locating Schmuhl’s son, Robert, then living in Annapolis, Maryland. Robert Schmuhl confirmed that pieces of the lampshade had indeed been in his father’s house, that he’d seen them rolled up in a corner when he was growing up, along with a number of other souvenirs his father had brought home.

As for the lampshade, however, Robert Schmuhl, now deceased, could provide no information beyond what Kipperman had been told by Henry Lange. One day the thing was in his father’s house, then it was gone.

His hunt for the Buchenwald tattooed skin brought Kipperman into another conflict with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “They have no interest in these things,” Kipperman said, inserting a VHS tape into a player. It was a copy of a ten-year-old local news show on which Kipperman appeared with Michael Berenbaum, who served as project director at the USHMM from 1988 to 1997, during which time he played a key role in the institution’s creation and assembly of its permanent collection. With a curriculum vitae that included being a professor of Holocaust studies at Clark University, teaching positions at Yale, George Washington, and Wesleyan, in addition to serving as president of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and overseeing the editing of the twenty-two-volume Encyclopædia Judaica, Berenbaum evidenced no patience for Kipperman’s claim that the Buchenwald human skin objects should be displayed at the Holocaust museum.

“Making lampshades out of human skin is another manifestation of evil,” Berenbaum said. This didn’t, however, mean that the lampshades had to seen, much in the way that one didn’t need to put a corpse on public display because a murder has occurred. To show the artifacts of human skin in the way that Kipperman was advocating, Berenbaum said, was to run “the risk of almost being pornographic.”

Nearly ten years later, the sound of the word still incensed Kipperman. “Pornographic! That’s what they think. Does that mean it shouldn’t be seen, that it should remain hidden? These officials, these big-shot know-it-alls, they think they can decide what can be shown and what cannot.

“That is wrong. I don’t care what anyone says. The Holocaust cannot be censored.”

A few months after first talking with Kipperman, I visited Berenbaum at his home in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. No longer involved in what he called “the office politics” of the USHMM, he was now the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute, a board member of the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, and a rabbi at a Long Beach congregation. Of course he remembered Ken Kipperman, the man who tried to blow up the Holocaust museum even before it was built, Berenbaum said, with a shake of his head.

It wasn’t as if he doubted Kipperman’s passion or his sincerity, Berenbaum said, sitting in his tasteful living room. He could understand the impulse to show everything, to hold nothing back. But it wasn’t that simple. The matter of human remains, Berenbaum said, was “a very problematic, a highly emotional area.” It required a larger understanding of the factors at work. From the religious point of view, Berenbaum, ordained as an Orthodox rabbi when he was twenty-three, said there could be very little debate. All human remains of Jewish origin must be buried. Mosaic law was quite clear on that. It was in the social and political realm that “heated discussion” often arose.

“There was the issue of the hair,” Berenbaum recalled, citing perhaps the most difficult of “representational” disputes at the USHMM: whether or not to exhibit the hair shorn from the heads of the camp victims and later used by the Nazis, in their utilitarian way, to stuff pillows and spin into yarn. Noting that two tons of hair is displayed at the Auschwitz museum, some of the USHMM planners felt that a similar exhibit would be an effective way of telling that part of the story. Others objected, pointing out that since Auschwitz was the scene of the crime, showing it there carried the weight of evidence. In America, however, in a museum geared for an American audience, such a display might seem gratuitous, “an exhibit out of place.”

An early vote among the planners in favor of exhibiting the hair was overturned following a plea by a number of survivors who felt it would be disrespectful to the victims. “In the end this was what mattered most, the wishes of the survivors, whom it was felt had the weight of moral authority on their side,” Berenbaum said. “No one wanted someone to come into the museum and think they might be looking at their mother’s hair.”

I told Berenbaum about my conversation with Diane Saltzman concerning the Katrina lampshade and asked him what he would do if he were still at the museum.

“I don’t know if, in the presence of a DNA report, I would have said it was a myth. But I agree with Diane Saltzman, these types of objects are a distraction. They are a form of pornography because people focus on them to the exclusion of everything else.”

“But if they exist, you can’t ignore them, can you? What should be done about them?”

Berenbaum exhaled. It was Father’s Day. He was looking forward to dinner with his family. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have, not now, probably not ever.

Pressing the issue, I asked Berenbaum about a story I’d heard from E. Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Randol’s wife had coincidentally been a college friend of Skip Henderson’s wife, Fontaine. A well-known Los Angeles attorney, Schoenberg successfully pursued the case in which five Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis that ended up in the hands of the Austrian government were returned to their original owners. Schoenberg told me he’d heard that Berenbaum had once purchased an object purported to be a human skin lampshade off “the black market” and had it destroyed “just so the thing wasn’t out there anymore.”

Asked if this was true, and if he’d bothered to test the lampshade before disposing of it, Berenbaum was noncommittal, saying only that “a lot of junk turns up on these right-wing websites.”

Berenbaum peered across the coffee table and said, “Maybe this will help you. Maybe not. But when we were first making the museum, we acquired a number of canisters that had contained Zyklon B,” he said, referring to the cyanide-based pesticide with which the SS gassed people in the camps.

“At the time I thought this would be no big deal, that it was just another distressing exhibit. But there was a problem. Someone thought the canisters were still dangerous; they called the EPA, who got all excited. These things were fifty-odd years old at the time, they’d been open, exposed to the air. They were harmless. But try convincing anyone of that. It was just the name… Zyklon B… the idea that the label was the same, that was enough. It was the symbol.

“No one wanted to be near these things. I was in charge, so I got stuck with them. They were delivered to me. I put them in my garage until we could have them tested to prove they weren’t dangerous. And let me tell you… that night, the whole time those things were in my garage, that was a very long night. It was enough to send someone to psychotherapy.”

Berenbaum looked at me. “How long have you had this lampshade?”

“Several months.”

“Several months… and it is in your house?” Berenbaum rubbed his forehead.

“Here’s some advice. You can take it or not. What I’ve found is that being around these kinds of things, thinking about them, can drive people out of their minds. I’d get as far away from it as I could.” This was what he was trying to tell Ken Kipperman, Berenbaum said, and this was what he was telling me.

When I visited him in Maryland, Ken Kipperman was entering the second decade of his quest to call attention to the presence of the human skin artifacts at the National Archives and the National Museum of Health and Medicine. In the beginning Kipperman felt his campaign, which consisted of sending identical handwritten letters to newspapers, TV stations, well-known historians, and public figures asking for “respectful treatment for these victims” was having some success. In 2001 an article about him appeared in the Washington Post Style section. This led to a German documentary called Shadows of Silence, in which Kipperman comes off as an earnest if slightly touched Kafka character, attempting to do the right thing in an impossible situation. But the movie received little distribution, making it one more spectral, hard-to-find artifact. By the time I first spoke with him in 2007, Kipperman had all but abandoned his campaign, although not by choice. He had promised his wife he’d stop.

“That’s why I didn’t want you to come down here, so he’d get encouragement,” Paula Kipperman told me in her lingering eastern European accent, as she prepared a deliciously copious lunch in the family kitchen. “I don’t want him to start all this up again, because I can’t take it anymore.

“I love Ken,” said Paula, an upbeat, notably practical-minded daughter of Holocaust survivors who first met her husband when they were growing up in the refugee community in Brooklyn. “We have always been together. Childhood sweethearts. Ken is a very wonderful and talented man, a good husband, a good father, a good son, a great artist. Our daughter has three children. He is a wonderful grandfather. It is just on this one thing—this thing!—that he acts crazy. Nuts!

“I understand why he’s done what he’s done. But this has been difficult for me. I am a businesswoman. Before that protest about the Holocaust museum, I had a shoe business, a high-end shoe company. I had a lot of Jewish customers. After the protest, they wouldn’t buy from me anymore. They said, Paula, we love you, but why did Ken have to do that? I had to close up. Then for years he was in the library. He was spending more time with Ilse Koch than he was with us! It is like an addiction. I made him promise that after the movie he’d stop being involved with this. To let it go! I was very serious. Maybe he heard me, for once.”

As for her concern that her husband would be inspired to start up a new search after learning of the Katrina lampshade, Paula Kipperman did not have to worry.

Kipperman and I spent several hours together, during which time he described, as if by rote, the various aspects of his research, showing me the pictures of him with the shrunken heads, enumerating every step of his dogged search for the lampshade Major Schmuhl took from the Buchenwald Table. As for the New Orleans lampshade, Kipperman listened to me tell my story, about Hurricane Katrina, and how Skip Henderson bought the thing from Dave Dominici, and how Shiya Ribowsky examined it and sent the samples to Bob Bever at Bode, and how the results came back positive, and how the Holocaust Museum said it was a myth. I was getting good at the story by then, having told it so many times.

Kipperman listened, looked at the pictures of the lampshade I had on my computer, glanced at the DNA report. He did all this with polite interest because Kipperman is nothing if not polite. He thanked me for bringing all this to his attention but asked few questions, expressed little wonderment.

Ken Kipperman knew what he was looking for, and this wasn’t it.

SEVEN

If Ken Kipperman was frustrated by his inability to raise awareness about the fate of the Nazi human skin artifacts, there was at least one person who shared his fixation with the Buchenwald Table. This was Denier Bud, as in Holocaust Denier Bud.

I first became aware of Denier Bud, who also calls himself Mike Smith and lives somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, when I saw one of his web videos, Nazi Shrunken Heads. It sounded like one of those movies I used to see at the bottom half of Forty-second Street double bills, but it kept coming up on the search engine, so I clicked and there it was, the same footage of the Weimar people trudging up the Blood Road. That this was going to be a radically different take on the material was announced by Denier Bud’s voice-over, the same lugubrious timbre that accompanies all his work.

“At the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, the Americans set up a display table to show Nazi atrocities,” Denier Bud began miasmically as the camera panned over the familiar objects: “A lot of bogus items, tattooed skin supposedly taken off bodies, a supposedly human skin lampshade, which in reality is just a basic lampshade, but they really went over the edge of dumb when they put this on the table.”

Pausing on a close shot of the shrunken heads, Denier Bud said that “they are being used to frame the Nazis as head-shrinkers. It’s just so dumb.”

Nazi Shrunken Heads then moved to the Nuremberg trials, where prosecutor Thomas Dodd, dramatically whisking the sheet off one of the heads, delivered his line: “The Nazis had one of their many victims decapitated, after having had him hanged, apparently for fraternizing with a German woman, and fashioned this terrible ornament from his head.” This struck Denier Bud as really dumb.[15]

In fact, it was evidence like this, Denier Bud said, that “might make you begin to understand why Holocaust deniers are Holocaust deniers.”

It was through the use of “illusionary symbols” like shrunken heads and lampshades that events like the Holocaust are manipulated by the ruling class to further the unending militarism that inevitably benefits the rich and powerful, Denier Bud went on. The catalyst for these machinations, he said, is the unlimited capacity for human beings “to believe in evil.” In the United States such gullibility “is related to TV, movies, and the Christian religion.”

With a split-screen video image displaying a Bible on one side and a TV set on the other, Denier Bud explained, “Christianity, with its infantile concept of good and evil, and TV and movies, with their infantile characterization of good and evil, serve as the basis for most story lines. Add a dose of testosterone and you have gullible American men easily influenced to be pro-war. All the media has to do is portray someone as evil.”

From there, as an example of how these “managed delusions” work, Denier Bud edited in a clip from the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg. Richard Widmark, in the Thomas Dodd role, is standing in front of the courtroom, showing the actual Buchenwald Table footage to the judges. As the camera moves over the Table, Widmark portentously ticks off the catalog of horrors: “A lampshade made from human skin; skin being used for paintings, many having an obscene nature; the heads of two Polish laborers, shrunken to one-fifth their normal size; a human pelvis, used as an ashtray.”

Denier Bud stops the footage right there to say, “Let’s compare dumb-dumb portrayals of evil which justify war.”

He replayed Widmark intoning “A lampshade made from human skin,” and then cut to a tape of George H. W. Bush giving a speech prior to the U.S. Senate vote on whether to attack Saddam Hussein in retaliation for his invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War. “They had kids in incubators!” blurts the elder Bush in his spazzy, frat-party way. “And they were thrown out of the incubators! So that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.”

Watching this recalled a comment made by the late Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews and the most magisterial of Holocaust scholars. Asked why he spent time monitoring the spoutings of Holocaust deniers, Hilberg said, “You never know, there’s always the chance they might say something interesting.” I wasn’t sure if Denier Bud’s work fit this criterion, but his rinky-dink DIY PowerPoint videos and comic-book-nerd sensibility was a definite switch from the usual White Power rant.

A friendly if secretive sort, Denier Bud was “totally amped up” that a New York Jew, a member of the ever-suspect mainstream media, was interested in his videos. I was “just the kind of person” he felt he should be talking to because conversations with other Holocaust “revisionists” could get “kind of boring because some of these guys haven’t had a new idea in decades.” His web handle aside, Bud did not consider himself a “denier” in the strict sense but rather a “maker of Holocaust denial art.”

Moreover, despite his frequent invocations of terms like group evolutionary strategy, a reference to the work of Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, whose book The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements has become an upscale touchstone of the present-day ZOG/eugenics movement, Denier Bud wanted to make clear he was in no way “a raging anti-Semite or some skinhead.” He knew a lot of “cool Jewish guys” and said that if Hitler walked up to him in the street, he’d “spit in his eye.” Hitler was “a murderer,” one more murderer in an age of murderers. An avowed pacifist, Denier Bud had nothing but contempt for the militarist side of Nazi ideology. All he was interested in was “the truth.” To make sure there was no mistake about it, he inserted a flower-bedecked hippie peace symbol into the preamble of Nazi Shrunken Heads, over which he says he wishes “only good vibes” to the Jews of the world.

“It is my goal to lead the Holocaust denier movement away from the stench of anti-Semitism,” Denier Bud proclaimed. “I don’t think the Jews should be punished or suffer unduly for continuing to spread the lie of what happened to them during World War Two. They were a society under stress, so it is easy to sympathize with their motives. What I’m looking for is a Jew-friendly solution to the Holocaust hoax problem.”

Despite this spirit of outreach, YouTube, in keeping with their policy against Holocaust denying, had banned Nazi Shrunken Heads and several of Bud’s other videos. These included One Third of the Holocaust, a multi-hour attempt to explain away the well-documented history of the Aktion Reinhard camps—Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec—where nearly two million Jews were killed. One Third of the Holocaust, a tedious mélange of hokey computer graphics and half-baked arguments, captures none of the madcap offensiveness of Nazi Shrunken Heads. However, being a Jew of my particular stripe, I was outraged that YouTube, which seems to have no problem showing any manner of degrading imbecility and cruelty, refused to play it.

Denier Bud, who said he’d come to Holocaust denying in his early twenties in the aftermath of 9/11 when he began to realize “people will try to get you to believe anything if the stakes are high enough,” had a far more sanguine attitude toward the YouTube ban of his work. Sure, he said nonchalantly, First Amendment rights should extend to Holocaust denying. But when you were an “outsider artist,” getting banned was part of the deal, right? If it was good enough for Jean Genet, it was good enough for him. When you challenged “the consensus reality on the biggest taboo out there,” you’d be a fool to expect fair treatment.

Far from deterred, Denier Bud said he had just put the finishing touches on what he considered to be his “best work” so far, a twenty-two-episode, two-hour-and-twenty-two-minute opus entitled Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil. The video contained “the most complete analysis” of the Buchenwald Table yet attempted, including “the real story” of Ilse Koch, whom he called “probably the most cruelly lied about woman of all time.”

As far as Denier Bud was concerned, the saga of Ilse Koch and the lampshade story were so inexorably connected as to be “the same thing.” He addresses the issue in episode 5 of Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil, entitled “The Ilse Koch Anachronistic Problem.” Again showing the footage of the Weimar residents filing past the Buchenwald Table, this time with a British commentary referring to Ilse Koch as “a strapping redhead of ample proportions” whose “hobbies included the collecting of lampshades, book covers, and gloves made of tattooed human skin,” Denier Bud disputes the Kommandeuse’s involvement with the atrocities. By the time Americans liberated the camp, his video asserts, “Ilse Koch hadn’t been at Buchenwald for at least a year and hadn’t been in any position of power for much longer than that.” Koch’s absence stemmed in large part from the investigations of Konrad Morgen, the renowned “Bloodhound Judge of the SS,” the supposed straight shooter in charge of rooting out corruption in the Nazi elite corps. It was Morgen who brought Karl Koch to trial and presided over his execution but turned up no evidence against Ilse Koch, acquitting her on all charges. As Denier Bud purports in his narration, “Morgen never found any objects like those shown on the Table.”

So where did the lampshade and shrunken heads come from? Denier Bud asked me, rhetorically, when we spoke on the phone. “How did they suddenly appear the day of the Weimar forced march? Were they stored in some steamer trunk that only the Americans knew about? How convenient is that?

“What was needed was a show to help justify the war by making sure everyone knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Nazis were completely evil,” he went on. “Establishing the Nazi evil was important because the American powers—and in this I would include the Jewish elements of the American government and Zionists—knew the war wasn’t really over. It would never be over. The Soviets were up next. You had to prepare for that. The idea was evil never sleeps, it just takes another form. You had to watch out, you had to keep the country on a war footing, which is what Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles wanted. That’s why they got Billy Wilder and the other top talent to film the camps, to make it convincing. They did a great job but not a perfect job, because anyone looking at those pictures can see you can’t take a lampshade that is supposedly made out of tattooed human skin and let the sun shine through it without revealing that it isn’t a lampshade made of tattooed human skin. The lampshade on the Table doesn’t have any tattoos on it. It is a totally normal lampshade! That’s why it had to disappear after the psychological power of suggestion had created a myth about it.

“That’s the lampshade’s role. It is product placement and the product is dumb dumb evil, the kind of evil that can be manipulated for whatever its creator wants to use it for.”

On a roll, Denier Bud continued: “Buchenwald is where things come together, where World War Two ends and the Cold War begins. It is a junction of history. This was the importance of the Buchenwald Table. It was a trial run in a new kind of American brainwashing; to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, an early model in the postwar manufacturing of evil because everyone knows killing six million people just because they’re Jews is a terrible thing to do.” The mechanisms of the mind game were right there, in Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil, for anyone who cared to have the scales fall from their deluded eyes.

The first and foremost thing to know, Denier Bud claimed, was that the Weimar forced march and the Buchenwald Table were an American intelligence operation run by the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), the official propaganda unit attached to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) under the direct command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. When Buchenwald was liberated, PWD men, a large percentage of them German-speaking Jewish Americans, were among the first of the U.S. forces to reach the camp. Their initial mission, according to Denier Bud, was to “plant” the stuff on the Table—the lampshade, the shrunken heads, all of it—to provide visceral images for the home front, thereby solidifying Eisenhower’s position that would eventually lead to the presidency and forty-five years of Cold War.

If you knew whom to look for, you could see the architects of the deception at work, Denier Bud said. Episode eight of Dumb Dumb Evil focuses on two men seen in the Weimar march footage. One is a general, the star on his hat clearly visible, as he stands in the first row of the crowd mobbed around the Table. This individual, Denier Bud claims, “looks a lot like” Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, head of PWD. To the right of “McClure” is a bareheaded civilian standing in front of the Table holding up a human pelvis that SS officers had supposedly used as an ashtray. This man, Denier Bud claims, is C. D. Jackson, McClure’s second in command.

It is hard to see why the presence of either McClure or Jackson at the scene is so damning, being that SHAEF and the PWD units were clearly, and publicly, running the show at Buchenwald at the time. It is also worth noting that the book Psychological Warfare Against Nazi Germany: The Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day by Daniel Lerner, from where Denier Bud has cribbed most of his information, makes no mention of either man being present at the camp that day. Still, the name C. D. Jackson is enough to perk up the ears of even the most moderate Cold War conspiracy buff.

Born in 1902, a Princetonian, at age twenty-nine chief assistant to Time-Life head Henry Luce, founder of the Council for Democracy (“to combat all the nazi, fascist, communist, pacifist” antiwar groups in the United States), U.S. ambassador to Turkey, appointed managing director of Time-Life’s international division in 1945, president of Radio Free Europe during the 1950s (including the period of the Hungarian revolt), Eisenhower’s speechwriter during both his presidential runs, U.S. delegate to the United Nations in 1954, described by Carl Bernstein as “Henry Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA,” named publisher of Life in 1960, a position from which he would purchase the famous 8 mm Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination but never show it, and buy the life rights of Marina Oswald but never publish anything—this is one hell of a résumé, and that doesn’t even include setting up the American wing of the Bilderberg Conference.

For a paranoid of Denier Bud’s particular persuasion, the notion that the same man who bought and suppressed the Zapruder film had, nineteen years earlier, presided over the Buchenwald Table and handled the famous lampshade was akin to orgasmic. The vast movements of history were drawn in invisible ink. What joy it was to connect the dots, Denier Bud said, to link two of the great plots of the benighted, unlamented twentieth century—the Holocaust and the murder of John Kennedy. Even if it wasn’t C. D. Jackson standing beside the Buchenwald Table that day, the mere suggestion of the cold warrior’s presence at this paradigm-shifting moment in the octopuslike spread of American/Zionist intelligence—and the role of the Holocaust as a justification of much of that policy—that was still news, or art, Denier Bud insisted.

No doubt Denier Bud displayed a manic talent for conspiracy, but what did that say about the lampshade, if anything?

Some light was shed by another video posted on Denier Bud’s site, a tape of a 1994 Phil Donahue Show. With Schindler’s List just out, the relentlessly topical Donahue invited Bradley Smith, a noted “historical revisionist” and founder of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), to talk about a series of ads he’d been placing in college newspapers defying anyone to prove that a single Jew had died in a gas chamber during World War II. Arguing the other side was Michael Shermer, then a professor at Occidental College and executive director of the Skeptics Society, which takes on the claims of “fringe groups” like Holocaust deniers.

To place the discussion in its proper context, it is important to know that 1994 was the undisputed high-water mark of what is generally referred to as “scholarly historical revisionism,” a phenomenon due in large part to the success of, and the resultant backlash to, Schindler’s List. But Holocaust denying can be said to have begun back in the late 1940s with the first published works of the French writer Paul Rassinier.

An enigmatic figure, Rassinier was born in 1906 into a left-leaning family known for their pacifist views. Having joined the French Communist Party as early as 1922, Rassinier served in the Foreign Legion in Morocco, where he witnessed events that strengthened his pacifist and anticolonial outlook. With the Nazi invasion of France, Rassinier joined the Resistance, often risking his life helping Jews escape from German territory into Switzerland. He was captured by the Gestapo in 1944 and sent first to Buchenwald and then north to the satellite camp at Dora-Mittelbau in the Harz Mountains where he labored in the underground work camp manufacturing, among other things, the V-2 rockets Hitler hoped would save his war effort. Returning after the war to France, where he was awarded the Rosette of the Resistance by Charles de Gaulle, a severely disabled Rassinier served briefly as a Socialist Party representative to the French National Assembly and later worked with Jean Cocteau, André Breton, and Albert Camus on various left-leaning political projects. During this time, however, he found himself in sharp disagreement with what he took to be misinformed and exaggerated accounts about the way the Nazi camps were run. Reports of mass gassing of prisoners at Buchenwald especially irked Rassinier. After all, Rassinier said, he was there, he knew that for all the cruelties of the camp—like a winch-driven pulley system devised by the SS to hang large “groups of guilty men at a time”—there were no gas chambers.

Rassinier’s first books, primarily The Lie of Ulysses, written in the early 1950s, established the basic “revisionist” canon: refuting the exterminationist gas chambers, questioning the widely cited death toll of six million, challenging the idea of German “intentionality,” and blaming the so-called genocide myth on Communists (from whom Rassinier had become seriously estranged) and Zionists who would use “a false picture” of Jewish misery to sway public opinion in favor of the creation of the State of Israel.

These views gained wider currency in the late 1970s with the U.S. publication of a number of Rassinier’s works, which were translated into English at the urging of Harry Elmer Barnes, a longtime Columbia history professor whose “America First” isolationist stance during the 1930s and ’40s allied him with Charles Lindbergh and other Nazi apologists. In 1978, with the founding of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) by Willis Carto, a former youth organizer for George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign and would-be right-wing media mogul (he once owned the American Mercury, which years before had employed the journalistic hero and, alas, anti-Semite H. L. Mencken), Holocaust denying reached semi-think-tank status. A photo of an early IHR gathering showing twenty or so faux academics, some smoking pipes, might easily be mistaken for a still from a 1950s Madison Avenue adman convention or an early staff meeting at the Paris Review before the booze started flowing.

With funding provided by a reported $15 million endowment from Jean Farrel Edison, granddaughter of Thomas Edison, the organization’s Journal of Historical Review published “scholarly” articles by well-known deniers like Robert Faurisson, a French literature professor known for challenging the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary. Other regular writers included the British historian David Irving, probably the best known of the revisionist academics owing to his widely publicized unsuccessful libel suit against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

This was the background (Lipstadt’s book had just come out) going into the aforementioned Phil Donahue Show. From the start, Bradley Smith, a former media spokesman for the Institute for Historical Review, tried to set the parameters of the discussion. A motorcycle-riding California libertarian of the old school, Smith wanted to talk only about the gas chamber issue, ignoring the rest of the Holocaust, as if these things could be separated. But Donahue, recognizing the public fervor surrounding the show—it was one of the very first appearances of someone who might be construed as a “Holocaust denier” on national TV—refused to restrict the debate. The topic was too emotional, too juicy to follow any set procedure. Another, younger, denier, David Cole, showed a tape “proving” that the gas chamber doors at Auschwitz opened out, not in, thereby supposedly showing that the victims could have escaped the room if they wanted. This “evidence” was unconvincing and boring to boot, but Cole offered the irresistible tabloid feature of being Jewish. Here was something to grab hold of, that whole self-hating trope, and Donahue pounced, asking, “Were you bar mitzvahed, David?”[16]

Things went off the rails from there, as Smith, frustrated he hadn’t been able to present his gas chamber case, took exception to the idea that most people thought the Holocaust involved “nobody but the Jews.” Lots of people were killed in World War II, Smith said. Why did we have to spend so much time on this one particular segment of humanity? What about the Germans; weren’t they victims, too? Not every German was a Nazi, yet they died, too, in the millions. Wasn’t there “something vulgar about lying about Germans and thinking it is proper”? Smith said. “For example, it was a lie that Germans cooked Jews to make soap out of them. It was a lie—”

Shermer, the skeptic, interrupted at this point. “No, not a lie. It’s a mistake.”

It was an honest if inelegant attempt on Shermer’s part to set the record straight. By 1994, much of the soap research was in. You could understand why victims believed it; sitting in a hellish camp, surrounded by so much death, anything seemed possible. But it wasn’t so. Scholars were very much in agreement on that. History was not the product of a snap judgment, Shermer contended, but rather an ongoing process of discovery. The fact that mistakes could be made did not change the overall picture. There were some questions that might never be answered.

Had this situation been unfolding in a university seminar, Shermer might have been able to carry through on discussing the problems of understanding the past. But this was not a classroom and there was no time, because right then, one Judith Berg, an Auschwitz survivor sitting in the front row of the studio audience, rose to say, “It was true! They made lampshades and they cooked soap! That’s true.”

Shermer turned toward Judith Berg. “Excuse me,” he said, defending rationalism, “but historians make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes.” He attempted to make his case about “refining our knowledge,” but Smith, a raconteur of such moments, saw his opening.

“Ask why they’re doing this to this woman,” Smith demanded. “Why have they taught this woman to believe that Germans cooked and skinned—”

Judith Berg jumped out of her chair. “I was seven months in Auschwitz! I lived near to the crematorium as far as I am from you. I smelled—you would never eat roast chicken if you were there—I smelled—”

“Let’s get to the bottom of one thing,” Smith interjected. “She says soap and lampshades. The professor says that’s mistaken. Which is it?”

“Even the Germans admit it,” Berg shouted, rolling up her sleeve to reveal her camp tattoo. “They admit they had lampshades!”

Trying to regain control of his show, Donahue turned to Smith with plaintive accusation. “Do you have any empathy at all? Are you concerned with the pain that you cause this woman?”

“Me?” Smith replied, with an innocent look.

It went on like this for a few more moments, Smith pleading the case of unfairly maligned SS men, Berg screaming that she was told not to use the soap “because it could be your mother.” Finally, mercifully, Donahue broke for a commercial.

Trying to make sense of the incident in a book he wrote with Alex Grobman, Denying History, Shermer says, “So much for the reliability of Holocaust survivors’ composure on national television.”

Given the venue and the cast of characters, however, what could anyone expect? The event was all emotion, and that is why things like the soap and the lampshade never leave the discourse. The lampshade is more a feeling than a fact: it is stitched into the heart, not the mind. Once it came into the conversation, any pretense of rationality went out the window. Diane Saltzman said the object sitting inside my Brooklyn closet was a myth; Michael Berenbaum said the wishes of the survivors must always be paramount.

But what if the lampshade is a myth that lives inside the survivors? How do you manage that?

It was sometime after watching Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil that I finally mentioned the existence of the Katrina lampshade to Denier Bud. Maybe it wasn’t fair, to have withheld the information until now, but I had feared it would muddy the conversation. Revealing I had a real lampshade in my possession might have given Denier Bud the idea that I questioned his conclusions. Like every scummy journalist, I needed his trust.

“You know, I have this lampshade,” I told Denier Bud. “The DNA test says it is made out of human skin.”

Denier Bud’s reaction was similar to Ken Kipperman’s when I told him the same thing. He said, “Far out,” and little else. I told him the story, as I’d told it to Kipperman, but little of it appeared to register. In fact, Denier Bud seemed more interested in Ken Kipperman than he was in any Mardi Gras—tasseled lampshade found in an abandoned building by Dave Dominici.

Something told me it was a mistake to mention Kipperman to Denier Bud, but it seemed unavoidable, what with their mutual fascination with the Buchenwald Table.

“I can’t believe I missed this guy,” Denier Bud said when he called me back a few days after our previous talk. He’d found the article about Kipperman in the Washington Post and was blown away.

“It is so odd, Kipperman and me,” Denier Bud exclaimed, “the two of us kind of being on the opposite end of things. But I really feel I can understand what he was going through. To be searching for the truth, and to feel you can’t quite grasp it. We have so much in common.”

Denier Bud wanted to contact Kipperman. “The guy has been tricked like so many others. He’s suffering. I think I can help him. If I could only have a couple of conversations with him, it might really clear up a few things. I could be his knight in shining armor, his rabbi.”

This was a nice gesture, I told Bud, offering to explain his “Jew-friendly” version of Holocaust denying to Ken Kipperman. But I didn’t think Ken Kipperman would see it that way.

EIGHT

Denier Bud told me about Albert G. Rosenberg. He said it was Rosenberg, commander of a small group of German-speaking American soldiers attached to the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF, who’d been a chief architect in creating the lampshade myth. According to Denier Bud, Rosenberg had been largely responsible for setting up the Buchenwald Table, personally supplying the pair of shrunken heads, which, according to Denier Bud, the soldier had obtained while manning an Army weather station in Natal, on the northeastern Brazilian coast.

“Rosenberg has the Midas touch, but instead of gold he finds shrunken heads,” Denier Bud chortled.

When I reached him on the phone at home in El Paso, Rosenberg, nearly ninety, remembered speaking with Denier Bud.

“He called up one morning out of the blue and said he wanted to talk about Buchenwald,” said Rosenberg in his faint German accent. “He seemed like a nice fellow and was very knowledgeable about the period. I thought he was working on a college paper of some type. But then he started speaking of these shrunken heads, asking me if I’d brought them to the camp. I was flabbergasted. That I should have carried shrunken heads from Natal, Brazil, taken them across the ocean, and then kept them in my rucksack through Europe in the middle of World War Two for the express purpose of framing the SS for brutality! As if they needed me for that. What an idea!

“Then he told me he was a Holocaust denier. I told him twenty-eight members of my family died in this thing you say never happened and hung up. It was a very strange conversation.”

I knew a few things about Rosenberg, mostly gleaned from the introduction of The Buchenwald Report, an account of life at the camp he had compiled from a series of interviews in the weeks following liberation. The report contained testimony from 104 prisoners and was a key source for the prosecution at both the Nuremberg and Dachau war crimes proceedings, including the trial of Ilse Koch. It was Rosenberg who chose the Buchenwald inmate Eugen Kogon to write the main overview of camp life that Kogon would later expand into The Theory and Practice of Hell.

After the war, the original report dropped out of sight. The two copies given to SHAEF disappeared (“Lost in the fog of the intelligence departments,” Rosenberg said). Kogon’s copy was destroyed in a flood. Rosenberg, however, had kept a carbon copy. He always assumed the government would eventually release the original report but after waiting forty years, he decided to try to donate his copy to several Holocaust museums, including the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

“I couldn’t get anywhere with them. They told me they were swamped with work and I should send the report to a post office box and they’d look it over in due time. I didn’t think it should be sent to a post office box.

“You see, there were problems with the report. Right from the start it was perceived as being too much the product of the Communist groups at the camp, which was true to a large extent,” said Rosenberg, adding that he hadn’t thought all that much about what color triangle was worn by the people who contributed to the document. “It was my job to get the thing done. The Communists had battled it out with the criminals and were on the top of the heap among Häftlingsführung, the system of kapos that the SS depended on to run the place. They were the best-educated people in the camp; they knew the most. Besides, in 1945, the Soviets were supposed to be our allies. Of course, we knew not to believe everything we were told. The Communist kapos were guilty of a lot of crimes. Sometimes they were worse than the Nazis themselves. It was a complicated situation, obviously. But then the Cold War was on, and suddenly no one was supposed to listen to anything a Communist said, right or wrong. I guess they decided the report was too troublesome, so they did what authorities do, which was hide it in a drawer. But I said to myself, I’ve got the thing. How can I die without telling someone about it?”

Rosenberg made contact with publisher Frederick Praeger, whose father, Max Praeger, a noted Viennese bookseller, had been imprisoned at Buchenwald from 1939 to 1945. The younger Praeger, an intelligence officer in Patton’s army, arrived at the camp only to find that his father, like most of the Jewish prisoners, had only days before been shipped to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Praeger told Rosenberg that he would publish the report but that it needed to be translated and edited.

“This wasn’t a task I felt capable of doing,” said Rosenberg, then a professor of social work at the University of Texas at El Paso. “So I gathered up the pages, some of them in pretty bad shape, and walked down the hall to the office of my colleague David Hackett, who was a history professor with an interest in the Third Reich. Hackett was a bright guy and a perfect German speaker, plus I liked the idea that I could keep an eye on him. It was pretty much on the spur of the moment, quite unannounced. I think David was somewhat startled when I dumped this massive stack of pages on his desk, told him what it was, and asked him if he was interested in working on it. After he got over the shock, he said yes.

“That was 1987, I think. Five years later, Hackett finished,” Rosenberg told me during our first phone conversation, adding that Fred Praeger had a stroke and died only moments after writing the foreword to the report. “That was like a Greek play, Fred dying like that.”

I was somewhat leery of telling Rosenberg about the Katrina lampshade, fearful that he’d think I was one more loony. But he was interested. “It was tested and found to be human? That’s remarkable. Well, if you want to know about lampshades, you’ve come to the right place,” Rosenberg said.

“When we first came to the camp—and we were among the very first Americans there—I had a lot of paperwork to do. There was always a lot of paperwork with SHAEF. I needed a place to work and sat down at a desk of what I thought was probably some high-up SS man. I couldn’t have been sitting there very long when a French prisoner came and started shouting at me, saying I was no better than the Germans. That I had no shame. Didn’t I know the light I was using to write my reports had a lampshade made of human skin? How could I use this awful light for mere bureaucratic scribbles? I found another place to do my work. There was plenty of talk about the Nazis and human skin. I saw wallets and gloves and asked, are these skin? The answer was almost always yes.”

Rosenberg was fascinated that a lampshade that might be from Buchenwald would turn up in post-Katrina New Orleans, especially since he himself had once lived in the Crescent City. Family members living in New Orleans’s Jewish community had helped him escape Germany in 1937 after he was almost beaten to death by storm troopers in his hometown of Göttingen.

“It was very terrible,” Rosenberg said. “These heavy boots thudding against my body, over and over again. My non-Jewish friends chased the thugs away. They saved my life. My jaw was broken, my spine wrecked. The pain from those injuries has been with me, on and off, ever since that day, but luckily, these people in New Orleans got me out.”

“Those were some of the best years of my life,” said Rosenberg of his time in New Orleans. He lived “on Johnson Street out by Tulane” and loved to take the streetcar along St. Charles Avenue. The memory of the swoosh of the trolley wheels over the rails along the grassy neutral ground, the branches of the trees making a canopy overhead, always made him smile.

“I spent a long time doing social work at the Desire Projects,” he recalled. “My job was to get people jobs, sign them up for government benefits, work out whatever problems I could. But it wasn’t easy; a lot of the time you’d set up appointments and no one would show up. It was hard to win trust. Everyone simply assumed anyone walking around with a badge or a clipboard was some kind of cop. You felt there was a lot of graft. One weekend I think seven people were murdered at Desire alone. But I must say I enjoyed the place, in spite of everything.”[17]

New Orleans was “full of serendipity, good and bad,” Rosenberg said, remembering the days when he’d leave his office on Camp Street and see “this skinny, somewhat bedraggled figure handing out these leaflets. ‘Fair play for Cuba!’ he’d shout. Then, when Kennedy was shot, I knew right away, it was him—Oswald!—right there, on my lunch hour.

“When the hurricane hit, we were in the middle of a drought here,” Rosenberg recalled. “It hadn’t rained in I don’t know how long. The Rio Grande was drying up to a trickle. I’d watch the drought story on TV, and then they’d show New Orleans and I could see the places I’d enjoyed so much—Canal Street, Napoleon Avenue—completely underwater. Those poor people, on the rooftops. I truly felt like crying. And now you’re telling me about a lampshade made of human skin, from Buchenwald, washed up in the flood. My God!”

I told Rosenberg that I was likely to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico, five hours or so up the interstate from El Paso, within the next few weeks. Would it be all right if I stopped in for a chat?

“Absolutely!” Rosenberg said, there was a very nice Howard Johnson Express just a few blocks from his house if I wanted to stay over. Then he asked me if I knew a book titled Literature or Life, by Jorge Semprún.

“No,” I said, though Semprún’s name rang a dim, unidentified bell.

“You might find it interesting,” Rosenberg said.

Jorge Semprún was the grandson of Antonio Maura, a five-time prime minister of Spain. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Semprún, a young teenager, was out of the country with his father. Refusing to return to Spain after Franco’s Nationalists took over, Semprún, a philosophy student, settled in France and later joined the Resistance. In 1943, the twenty-year-old Semprún was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald, where he spent the rest of the war. In the years that followed, he wrote a number of books and screenplays, including Z, the celebrated Costa-Gavras film about the overthrow of the democratic government in Greece, which won two Academy Awards. He also wrote a number of films for Alain Resnais, maker of both Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour. In 1994 Semprún published the memoir Literature or Life, devoting a full chapter to his encounter with a man he calls Lieutenant Walter Rosenfeld but who is quite clearly Albert G. Rosenberg.

Semprún first sees “Lieutenant Rosenfeld” the day of the Weimar forced march. “In the crematory yard,” Semprún writes, an American lieutenant, speaking German, addressed several dozen Weimar residents, most of them women “wearing spring dresses in bright colors. The officer spoke in a neutral, implacable voice.

“‘Your pretty town,’ he told them, ‘so clean, so neat, brimming with cultural memories, the heart of classical and enlightened Germany, seems not to have had the slightest qualm about living in the smoke of the Nazi crematoria!’”

Two days later, Semprún writes, he found himself sitting opposite Rosenfeld in one of the SS command’s former offices. Semprún knew the Americans had decided to prepare “a comprehensive report on life and death in Buchenwald” and were especially interested in interviewing prisoners who’d participated in “the internal administration” of the camp. They included Semprún, who’d spent time working in the Arbeitsstatistik office, a plum assignment secured by his Communist connections, keeping track of inmate labor assignments. The two young men—Rosenfeld was twenty-six, Semprún twenty-one—hit it off and began a short-lived but highly resonant friendship.

As Semprún tells it, over the next week, Rosenfeld and Semprún, liberator and liberated, spend several hours in what Semprún calls “Goethe’s landscape.” Walking through the Ettersberg woods and hearing the birds in the trees, Semprún is “intoxicated” by “their songs, their trills, their warbles.” He tells Rosenfeld that for two years he rarely heard any birds; the smoke from the crematorium kept them away. They make their way along the Ilm River, to visit Goethe’s forest cottage, the country retreat where the master enjoyed “the twin delights of refreshing coolness and solitude.” Another day they drive in Rosenfeld’s jeep through the bombed-out streets of Weimar to see Goethe’s house, where an old watchman tells them no one is allowed into the great poet’s house without “special permission from the authorities.”

“I am the authority,” Rosenfeld tells the old man. “Authority with a capital A, all the authority imaginable.” When the watchman continues to protest, praising Hitler, saying how wonderful it was the last time the Führer had come to Weimar and stayed at the Elephant Hotel, Rosenfeld grabs the old Nazi by the collar, drags him over to a closet, and locks him inside, allowing the two friends to “complete our visit in peace, out of range of his despairing and malevolent voice.”

Mostly, Semprún and Rosenfeld discuss literature and philosophy. Rosenfeld mentions people like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, names new to Semprún. Rosenfeld also speaks enthusiastically about the German exiles Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, author of The Sleepwalkers, and Robert Musil, who wrote The Man without Qualities. In return, Semprún describes his admiration for Camus, Heinrich Heine, and the “poisonous beauty” of Pola Negri, whose films the SS would sometimes show the Buchenwald prisoners on Sunday afternoons. He mentions to Rosenfeld that he had been looking forward to seeing Jean Giraudoux’s play Sodome et Gomorrhe the evening a Gestapo officer smashed open his scalp with the butt of an automatic pistol, beginning his long journey to Buchenwald.

Semprún writes that it was in one of these conversations that Rosenfeld first told him that Martin Heidegger had been a National Socialist as far back as 1933. Rosenfeld revealed that the philosopher hadn’t lifted a finger to help when his revered teacher, Edmund Husserl, was barred from the university for being a Jew. As a schoolboy, Semprún had spent “long, austere” winter evenings oppressed by Heidegger’s dense prose, hacking his way through “torturing pseudo-etymologies,” “purely rhetorical resonance,” and “assonance.” Completing his assignments, the young Semprún had wondered: did these ideas mean anything in any language other than German? It was almost a relief to hear that Heidegger was a Nazi; in retrospect, this was the only part of the man’s work that made any sense.

Although he never quite comes out and says it, Semprún’s chapter on Lieutenant Rosenfeld is an extended thank-you note. In the measured way the American liberator dismisses the self-serving obliviousness of the people from Weimar, in his manhandling of the old Hitler supporter at Goethe’s house, and most of all in his open-handed intellectuality, it is Rosenfeld who pulls Semprún from what he calls “the whirlwind of nothingness, the nebulous void.”

In Literature or Life, Semprún says it is only when he sees Allied soldiers gazing at him with a kind of morbid curiosity that he begins to realize he is indeed alive and again responsible for all that breathing and thinking entails. Until then he was somewhere in between, which, he says, puts the lie to the statement by Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom Semprún calls “this idiot”) that “death is not an event of life. Death cannot be lived.” To be in the camp was to be in both, to “cross through death,” like the forty-nine-day bardo described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Returning to life is no simple journey, Semprún says. “Many people who will come out of this place will not be survivors, they’ll be ghosts, revenants.” It is Lieutenant Rosenfeld, this German Jew returned “to fight against his own country,” this tough-guy spouter of poetry and philosophy who has arrived, like Charon rowing against the current, to deposit Semprún back on the shore of the living.

The two men spend a lot of time discussing Rosenfeld’s Buchenwald project. To tell the story of the camp, and do it in three weeks, is an impossible assignment, Semprún says. How to speak of these things in a way that both satisfies the moral parameters of the situation and translates it into the crabbed language demanded by SHAEF? Where should the story start? With Goethe? With the birds driven away by the smoke? It is difficult to know, says Semprún, who will spend much of his life looking for a way to tell his own version of the story.

One thing is certain, however, Semprún tells Rosenfeld: the simple chronology, the facts and figures, are insufficient. You could recount the story of “any day at all, from reveille at four-thirty… the fatiguing labor, the constant hunger, the chronic lack of sleep, the persecution by the Kapos, the latrine duty, the floggings from the SS, the assembly-line work in munitions factories, the crematory smoke, the public executions… the death of friends,” and never compile a true history of Buchenwald.

“What’s essential,” Semprún says, “is the experience of Evil… You don’t need concentration camps to know Evil. But here, this experience will turn out to have been crucial, and massive, invading everywhere, devouring everything… It’s the experience of radical Evil.”

Hearing this, Lieutenant Rosenfeld looks at his young compatriot “sharply.” “Das radikal Böse,” he says.

Semprún looks back at Rosenfeld, in amazement. So this man who has pulled him back to the living knows Kant as well?

“Of course,” Rosenfeld says.

“Das radikal Böse…,” murmured Albert G. Rosenberg, as he sat in the living room of his apartment in El Paso, repeating the famous phrase from Immanuel Kant’s 1793 treatise Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. It was sixty-three years since he had discussed these matters with Jorge Semprún inside an SS office at Buchenwald. Now Rosenberg lived a few miles from the Mexican border with his wife of thirty years, Lourdes, in a modest two-bedroom apartment in a hillside subdivision.

He said, “Radical evil was Kant’s term to explain what happens when evil, which he believed was an inherent human trait, is unchallenged by the exercise of free will. Free will, coupled with certain maxims of the good, keeps evil at bay. It is on the state level, such as in the totalitarian, dictatorial society in which the free will of the people is completely oppressed, that evil becomes dominant. It becomes the way of things—das radikal Böse.”

Then, his blue eyes suddenly infused with a mischievous glint, Rosenberg laughed. As sharp as ever, he was nonetheless tickled that he still remembered something about Kant, whom he hadn’t thought about “for decades.” But there was the German educational system for you. Even with the Nazis coming to power, the gymnasium wasn’t the paltry sort of thing that passes for learning in the United States. Drummed into the brain, a German education had staying power.

Who knew how Kant might have chosen to define the word radikal had he been writing in 1945 rather than 1793, but the Prussian philosopher had “come pretty close” to predicting the way the Third Reich worked, Rosenberg thought. This didn’t make Kant clairvoyant, he said. Rather it was that “the dark side of German character was there a long, long time before Hitler came on the scene.”

“Radical evil—total destruction of opposing will, wiping it out, sending it up the smokestack—that was what the camps were,” said Rosenberg, who said he never felt sadder than the day he took his SHAEF jeep and drove to Bergen-Belsen, the camp in Saxony where he’d heard that several of his relatives had been sent by the Nazis.

“I drove through the camp, through that horrible death, people lying there staring into space, shouting on my U.S. Army bullhorn, screaming out to see if anyone knew the Rosenberg family from Göttingen. I found no one. Later I met one of my relatives, my cousin Henry, one of the few who survived—twenty-eight died—and he told me he heard me. He heard me shouting! But he could barely move. He couldn’t answer my call.”

Literature or Life took him by surprise, Rosenberg said. He vaguely remembered Jorge Semprún, the twenty-one-year-old partisan and philosophy student, and had no idea that Semprún, whom he had not seen or spoken to since those days in the Ettersberg woods, would remember him so vividly.

“When I first picked up the book and saw that chapter ‘Lieutenant Rosenfeld’ and began reading it, I thought, who could have dreamed this? Who could have imagined my life like this? But it wasn’t a dream. It happened. To me, and him.” That said, even though he thinks Literature or Life is “a masterpiece,” there are things in it that he did not recall happening quite the way Jorge Semprún did.

Semprún described the tone of his speech to the people from Weimar as “neutral” and that was good, Rosenberg said. “But I didn’t feel neutral. I was seething. Göttingen, where I grew up, was not all that different than Weimar. A shitty, right-wing town. Full of fascists. They tried to kill me in Göttingen, but it could have just as easily been Weimar. For all the lovely history and poetry, it was that kind of place. Those people from Weimar—I took them around, showed them the crematorium, the places where the medical experiments took place, where the Nazis ripped off the prisoners’ skin and made the lampshades… I might have sounded neutral, because that is the way a soldier is supposed to conduct himself. My father was a soldier. He fought for Germany in the First World War. Fought for these same people! The same people who fifteen years later would follow Hitler!

“To me, that is one of the great ironies of it, an irony I understood very well at Buchenwald. SHAEF was very smart to give me the job of tour guide that day. They couldn’t have gotten anyone better. Those people claimed to be innocent, but I knew they weren’t. I knew that because I knew them. They said they were crying because they didn’t know. But that was a lie. They were crying because they did know. They were hoping their tears would absolve them, as if someone would pat them on the head and say, don’t worry, it’s going to be all right. But they had the wrong guy for that. The trains ran to Buchenwald every day. People from Weimar worked at the Gustloff factory next to the camp. Guards lived in the town. So don’t say you didn’t know, because you did. You knew.”[18]

Eating taco chips, we sat at Rosenberg’s dining room table looking over some of his “souvenirs.” He had “stacks of stuff” from the war, which he kept in the “magic closet” where he once stored the remaining copy of The Buchenwald Report.

He had his “SHAEF pass,” which he referred to as “the ultimate Eisenhower get-out-of-jail ticket, a 007 James Bond license to kill that let us do basically whatever the hell we wanted.” Dated 18 February 1945, the pass said in bold capital letters, “THE BEARER OF THIS CARD WILL NOT BE INTERFERED WITH IN THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTY BY THE MILITARY POLICE OR ANY OTHER MILITARY ORGANIZATION BY COMMAND OF GENERAL EISENHOWER.”

He had his “intelligence officer’s identity card” with a picture of him as a young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a far-off gaze that made him seem more like a young Arthur Miller than a spy or a soldier. He had copies of old Nazi newspapers, photographs from the camps, and a translated letter dated November 29, 1941, sent from Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich to SS Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann of the Reich Race and Settlement Main Office inviting him to a meeting at Wannsee “in regard to organizational, practical, and material measures requisite for the total solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”

He had a prayer book given to him by a relative. “It was the prayer book of my favorite uncle,” Rosenberg said. “He kept a diary day to day, separated by years, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943. Then nothing. Nothing.”

It was quite a collection, but not all that it once was, Rosenberg said matter-of-factly. For years he had a piece of tattooed human skin that he had taken from the Buchenwald Table, just as Major Schmuhl, whom Rosenberg remembered as a “heavy-set sort of man,” had taken the lampshade.

“It was a tattoo of a woman, with a hat on her head. It came from a man’s chest because you could see the nipple alongside the girl’s head.”

Asked why he took the piece of skin, Rosenberg shook his head. “I have asked myself that same thing many times. In the beginning it seemed like no big deal. At the time there seemed to be many such objects at the camp. The pathology block was a veritable factory of human skin products. Ilse Koch was supposed to have had gloves of human skin, purses of human skin, a whole Paris collection. There was no reason not to believe any of these stories. You heard them over and over again. Everyone said pretty much the same thing… We had entered hell, so there was no surprise to see hellish things. To me the skin was just one more incredible item. It was years before I came to the conscious realization that that curled-up little piece of tanning had once been part of some poor soul’s hide.

“Then I couldn’t stand to have the thing near me anymore. I was having so many terrible dreams—I still do—and the tattoo had so many associations. The Nazis had perpetrated the worst crimes in the history of the world and here I had this little knickknack. God!

“I asked myself, why do I keep this awful thing? I was ashamed to have had it for so long. But I couldn’t quite part with it. It was some kind of pathology perhaps. I went to psychotherapy for years and still couldn’t figure it out. It was like it was part of me. I locked it up in a safe-deposit box at the bank, but it still haunted me. I sent it to a friend in Chicago. I told him to give it to Yad Vashem, do whatever you want. I never found out what finally happened with it and don’t want to know.”

Rosenberg sat there for a moment, looking out the window. It was midafternoon now and the winter sun was sinking behind the jagged peaks visible over the fence behind his apartment.

“What did you say that fellow called his movie? The one who thinks I brought the shrunken heads from Brazil? Buchenwald, Stupid Evil?”

“No. Dumb. Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil.”

“Dumb Dumb.” Rosenberg smiled wearily. “Well, that’s not a halfbad title, when you think about it. Evil is dumb. That is why it is evil. There are so many stupid people in the world willing to believe stupid things; put them all together and they can be very, very stupid. A stupid, dangerous crowd out for blood. To me, that’s what the Nazis were, one gigantic lynch mob.”

As for Denier Bud’s assertion that the PWD set up the Buchenwald Table, Rosenberg could only roll his eyes. The idea that Psychological Warfare did political propaganda was no great insight. “We were in the political propaganda business, for chrissakes,” Rosenberg said, with a cagey smile that seemed to indicate that once an intelligence man, always an intelligence man. Rosenberg supposed he could have “gone into the spy business.” The PWD was an easy, entry-level step to the OSS and the CIA beyond. One of the young men in his unit, called “Kampfgruppe Rosenberg,” was Michael Josselson, then an international buyer for Gimbels but soon to be the head of the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom that would fight the intellectual Cold War in Europe. Among Josselson’s many projects was Encounter magazine, which was edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol and published the work of such people as Arthur Koestler, James T. Farrell, Ignazio Silone, Bertrand Russell, and Sidney Hook. These career pathways were open, Rosenberg said, for the right sort of person.

But as for C. D. Jackson holding up a human pelvis that day at Buchenwald, Rosenberg said this was news to him. As far as he knew, there was no way the Buchenwald Table, with the lampshade sitting on it, was a PWD operation.

“The Table was set up by the prisoners themselves, the Communists. Those kapos! Who knows how many people they killed! They had their own agenda. Obviously the lampshade had propaganda value, but it wasn’t our propaganda.”

Rosenberg’s wife, Lourdes, was home now. A cheerful woman who looked to be at least twenty-five years younger than her husband, Lourdes met Rosenberg when he was teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso. They fell in love and married.

“That’s the worst thing about being so damn old,” Rosenberg said, “Lourdes having to take care of me all the time. She deserves better.”

Lourdes, who sets up school programs in both El Paso and across the border in teeming Ciudad Juárez, thought this was ridiculous. “You take care of yourself,” Lourdes said. “Besides, Albert has been very good for me. Once I was a poor Mexican girl. Now, thanks to Albert, I am a great European intellectual,” she joked.

Later Lourdes told me, “Albert suffers, you know. He likes to joke. He has a dark sense of humor. I think he does it to protect himself, because he has those dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up and he’d be banging against the wall or throwing the pillows around, in his sleep. Sometimes he’d throw me around in his sleep. He has so much he can’t talk about. So many people he knew were killed.”

For now, Lourdes looked at the picture of the lampshade with a sense of duty. “Is this like the one you saw at the camp, Albert?”

“Cuál?”

Lourdes shot Rosenberg a stern glance. “The one on the desk of the commandant.”

“Could be. It is very similar. It is not unattractive, I think. Maybe we could use an extra fixture.”

Lourdes had had enough of this and excused herself, giving Rosenberg a peck on the top of his bald head.

“She’ll probably ask the Virgin to forgive me now,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t know why she’s mad. She must have dozens of relics of the saints lying around. Catholics love their ossuaries, you know. Bones, bones, and more bones. I know she’d like to convert me but I’m holding out. I have never been very observant, but what else could I be with a life like mine but a Jew?”

Rosenberg sighed. Fate was so consigning. Not that there weren’t times when he had felt “totally free, out of the shadow of who I was.” When he first came to the United States, after being beaten in Göttingen, he lived for a time with relatives in Jackson Heights, Queens. He got a job working as a junior hotel detective at what was then called the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.

“I was a real junior G-man, fantasized myself as a kid gumshoe. Mostly I was supposed to chase out the prostitutes who hadn’t paid off the right people. But I didn’t care. Being there was such a perfect introduction to the kind of America I wanted America to be: fun and seedy, like a black-and-white Hollywood movie. Arnold Rothstein, the gangster, once lived at the hotel. Room 307. I was told to hold my breath when I passed the room because Rothstein was supposed to be the smartest man who ever lived. He fixed the World Series, they said. I didn’t even know what the World Series was, but after Göttingen I thought if a man named Rothstein could fix it, America had to be the greatest country in the world.”

Asked how he’d wound up in El Paso, Rosenberg said he’d been living in Dayton, Ohio, where he wasn’t fond of the weather. He and his son had a car and they started driving. “We went through everywhere, saw the country. This was the 1960s, a different time.” One day they reached El Paso and the temperature felt right. Rosenberg liked that it was on the edge of the country, as far as you could go. He got a job at the college, met Lourdes, and that was it, he said.

“A place to hide, I told myself,” Rosenberg related. “But eventually you realize there’s no escaping, no matter how far you go.” Only a few months after we first talked, Rosenberg was reading a New Yorker article about a recently discovered cache of photos taken at Auschwitz during the war. In one of the photos Rosenberg saw his cousin Aleeza, who would be murdered at the camp, standing on the selection ramp watched by the notorious SS man Emmerich Hoecker.

In El Paso it was the same. Every day, it seemed, the paper had another story about the murders right across the border in Juárez. The place was insane. In 1970 twenty thousand people lived there; now it was over two million with more pouring in every day. One of the most violent cities in the world, the murder rate was triple that of Detroit. The drug wars were so endemic that local officials had petitioned the United Nations to send peacekeepers. It was the feminicidios (femicides) that most upset Rosenberg. Dozens of women were being killed each year, their often mutilated bodies found behind the maquiladora factories that have sprung up since NAFTA, in garbage dumps, or simply dumped in the desert. Lourdes often went to Juárez and Rosenberg was worried about her, but it was more than that.

“So many of these murders aren’t simply murders,” Rosenberg said. “Women are killed and have their organs removed. They’re left hollowed-out corpses. Some women are killed when they’re eight months pregnant, ready to give birth. They’re left to die and the baby is taken away. They say it’s the drug cartels, or some cult that uses the body parts. The police can’t stop it, even if they wanted to. They’re part of it. Over and over the same thing happens. It frightens me, the lawlessness of it. It is so familiar. So horribly familiar. Evil, radical evil—everywhere you go, there it is.”

Sometimes he thought this was the true story of his life, Rosenberg said: trying to outrun evil, trying to stay one step ahead. Even though he’d lived to be ninety, he couldn’t say he’d succeeded. His legs were nearly useless to him much of the time. He was convinced this was due to having been stomped by Nazi thugs back in Göttingen.

“It might sound silly, that a ninety-year-old man would be dying from the effects of a beating that took place in 1937, but it is true, both physiologically and metaphorically. This pain has been inside me since that day.”

The sun had nearly sunk behind the mesa outside Rosenberg’s window, and he was tired. “So what are you going to do with this lampshade?” he asked me.

“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “What would you do?”

“I’d toss it in a Dumpster. But I’m not you.” Rosenberg smiled. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Right.”

I asked Rosenberg what it was like being in a place like El Paso, Texas, being the only one like him, the only person with memories like his.

“You mean to end up here, after all that?” Rosenberg looked out at the fading light on the reddish hillside. “Surreal, isn’t it?”

NINE

I first met Dani Dominici Babineaux, Dave Dominici’s sister, in front of her brother’s ramshackle house. A vivacious, good-natured woman a few years older than her brother, Dani was walking across heavily potholed Royal Street in high heels, wearing a pale blue dress, and carrying a huge armful of long-stemmed red roses, maybe five dozen altogether.

An events manager, Dani was organizing a convention dinner that night and was in a rush to get to the venue to oversee the arrangement of the tables. She wanted to make sure everything was “perfect, down to the last possible detail” because with visitors fitfully beginning to return to New Orleans in the wake of the storm, it was important that the conventioneers have a really good time and go home bearing the happy message that the Big Easy, the Birthplace of Jazz, home of Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras was “back up running and open for business.”

Dani tossed the roses into her van and turned back to her brother, who was standing in the doorway of his house wearing nothing but a pair of droopy gym shorts.

“Is it possible for you not to screw me up one damn time?” Dani screamed at Dave, and drove away.

To characterize Dani’s relationship with her younger brother as “difficult” would be something of an understatement, says Dani’s husband, Alvin Babineaux. “I’d call it more like tortured. Dave’s the torturer and Dani is the torturee.” Alvin is an outgoing, friendly guy in his fifties who was born in the border town of McAllen, Texas. A professional musician, Alvin has been employed at Pat O’Brien’s, the always mobbed tourist joint in the French Quarter, for the past forty years.

“I play the tray,” Alvin says. He stands on a small stage between two piano players (Alvin’s mother was a Pat O’Brien’s piano player) and provides the one-man rhythm section to the Billy Joel/Elton John songs by beating on the bottom side of a metal bar tray with his fingertips, on which he wears a variety of thimbles, each producing a different sound. Often attired in wild, sequined costumes worn to celebrate ultra-drinking days like Saint Paddy’s or Mardi Gras, gyrating his body like a genial belly dancer and mugging rubbery features until the cows come home, Alvin is what is usually called “an institution” in the French Quarter. Indeed, since the death of Eddie Gabriel, the original New Orleans tray player, Alvin is probably the only living practitioner of the form. A few years ago Dani helped him patent his tray and thimble setup. “It ain’t Buddy Rich but it pays the rent,” Alvin says of his gig.

Alvin and Dani have been totally devoted lovebirds for several years now, but Dave remains a sore point in their relationship. “I like Dave, but he’s done nothing except give us a pain in the butt,” says Alvin of his brother-in-law. “One time I went over to that mess of a house of his and he’s got, like, thirty-five bicycles in the kitchen. Now, why is someone going to have thirty-five bicycles in their kitchen? Next time I go over there all the bicycles are gone down to the last one. I don’t have to ask where the money goes. All I know is every time there’s a water bill coming due, who pays? Me and Dani. Every time a light bill comes due, who pays? Me and Dani.”

Dani says, “I love my brother. I want to make that clear: I love my brother. But it isn’t easy. It has never been easy.”

Dani told a story about the day she and Alvin were married. “This is the biggest day of my life. The day I always dreamed about. Before the ceremony David says, ‘Hey, Dani, your car is dirty. You can’t go on over there like that. It’s your wedding day. You have to come in like a princess. Let me go get it washed for you. Make it nice. It’ll only take a minute.’

“Made me feel good, you know. Because I thought David realized what all this meant to me and he was trying to be a good brother, for once. I should have known.

“So now it is time to go. They’re calling from the church, and David still hasn’t come back. I was in a panic. I wound up having to almost hitch a ride to my own wedding. It was very embarrassing. Then, just as the service is about to begin, David comes roaring up in the car at, like, a hundred miles an hour. The car wasn’t washed. It was dirtier than it was before. I didn’t even want to know where he claimed to have been.”

Dani says that even though she would never do it, there have been times she thought about never talking to her brother again. “But that would break my mother’s heart.”

This is true, says Patsy Dominici, a marvelously brassy woman in the New Orleans style who has “been through the trials” of being Dave Dominici’s mother for more than fifty years. Sitting in her “temporary house” near the Kenner border while she waits for her Road Home settlement to rebuild her St. Bernard Parish home that was “washed away whole,” she says, “I know what the other kids think, that I pay more attention to David than I do to the rest of them. I love all my children, but David, he needs more. He was the most difficult of my deliveries. I had to go back to the hospital three times before he came out, they had to induce labor, then he got stuck in the birth canal. That boy just didn’t want to be born.

“David took it hardest when my husband, Mr. Dominici, died. He was sixteen, and no one could get him to leave the coffin. People say I’m blind when it comes to the boy, because I’ve given him so much money, tried to get him out of so many jams. But when it comes down to it, maybe that’s just the way mothers are: blind. God made them that way. David is my cross to bear. He’s like I was: a free spirit.”

Dani says that the cemetery thefts were “the worst. Dave was on the front page of the paper every day, and people were looking at me like, ‘Isn’t that your brother?’” She has attempted to take Dave’s questionable life choices in stride. She did, however, sound upset when she called me on the phone shortly before the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

“They’ve got David locked up over there at the OPP,” Dani said, using the local shorthand for the Orleans Parish Prison, New Orleans’s infamously overcrowded and violence-ridden city jail. In New Orleans just about every arrestee, from murderers to parking ticket delinquents, sooner or later winds up in the OPP. Years ago Johnny Cash made a record about the place, “Orleans Parish Prison,” easily his worst prison song, which kind of fits.

Dominici had been in and out of various lockups since his teens. The difference this time was, Dani explained, “they got him on the tenth floor, in the psych ward. They’re going to give him a Lunacy Hearing.”

It was another of those New Orleans things, not simply the way Dani pronounced the word loo-na-cee in her sweet Chalmette accent, but also the fact that this was the official name for a state-sanctioned practice, the way a term like psychological review might be employed in other places.

“David doesn’t need a Lunacy Hearing,” Dani went on. “He might be a lot of things. He might not take his medicine like he is supposed to. But he’s not crazy. He doesn’t belong with those maniacs they have up there. My mother is sick out of her mind worrying about this—”

Then, without warning, Dani interrupted herself. “Do you know something about a lamp?”

“Lamp? You mean the lampshade?”

“Yeah, lampshade. David keeps talking about some crazy lampshade. He said you knew about it, that’s why I’m calling you. Look, I don’t know what David told them over at the courthouse, but would you mind writing a letter to the judge telling him you’re a reporter from New York and you know about this lampshade, because they think David just dreamed the whole thing up. That’s why they’re giving him the Lunacy Hearing, because of that lampshade.”

Over the next few weeks the story would become clearer. Actually I knew a good portion of it already. Apparently, around the time that he scavenged the lampshade, Dominici had also “found” many other objects to his liking. “Believe me,” Dominici told me one evening, “if you have a discerning eye, you can find some very fashionable things.” Sometimes, Dominici said, if he wasn’t crazy about what he was wearing at the moment and he ran across some garments that were generally clean and his size, he’d change clothes right then and there. “I’d leave my stuff there, in trade.

“One night I found this nice pair of Wrangler jeans, folded and broken in, and I’m driving back to Piety Street in my little old Amigo pickup. It didn’t have any headlights or windshield. But it’s New Orleans after the storm, so who the fuck cares about a couple of headlights? The National Guard didn’t give a shit. But the N-O-fucking-P-D, they’re all concerned. Running without headlights is just the kind of crime they figure they can handle. So they stop me because of the lights. They want to see my license but of course I don’t have my license. I gave them some other shit with my name on it for ID. I see them looking at it with flashlights. Then I hear them laughing. They’re saying, ‘Look who we got here, Mr. David Dominici. Step out of the car, Mr. David Dominici!’

“Those guys were always pulling me over. The same cop stopped me seventeen times. Since the cemetery bandit thing I’m like Brad Pitt to them. So they’re giving me the star treatment, in between a little knee in the stomach. One of them pats me down, then he reaches into the pocket. ‘Look what Mr. Dominici has, fellas,’ he yells.

“The cop has this little white pellet in his hands, the size of half a raisin. They’re saying it is crack cocaine. I told them it wasn’t mine, that I don’t use crack. They’re saying, ‘Oh, yeah, then how did it wind up in your pocket?’ Well, I couldn’t tell them that I just boosted the pants, could I? Is that some kind of fucked-up luck or what?”

Telling the story got Dominici riled up about it again. “I paid my debt to society. All I want to do is live my life as a normal citizen, get my credit straight, fix up my house. And they’re harassing me, popping me for this stupid shit. Look at the way they filled out the arrest report.”

Dominici handed me the report, pointing to a series of little boxes in the middle of the page where the arresting officer is asked to indicate various characteristics describing the suspect. In the category labeled “Race,” the box indicating “black” was checked. Under “Teeth,” someone had ticked the “gold” box.

“They think I’m a black guy with gold teeth!” Dominici thundered. “What kind of crap is that? It’s bullshit!”

I had to agree. At best, this was some very sloppy paperwork on the part of the NOPD. “Dave,” I said, “you’re a white guy with hardly any teeth. They can’t get away with that. You’re going to beat this case.”

“You think so?” Dominici answered. “That’s great.”

The New Orleans courts being as they are, it took several months before Dominici’s case appeared on the calendar. During this period a number of things had happened. Dominici and Gaynielle Dupree broke up and got back together at least two times. Plus he received a check from the State of Louisiana Road Home program, giving him a tidy settlement for the damage Katrina had done to his house.

“I didn’t want that Check For Zero,” Dominici said of the payment, referring to the dread “Check For Zero” that many homeowners had received from the state. The Check For Zero came in a windowed envelope, with the “Pay to the order of” part visible, leading many desperate residents to think that finally their relief money had arrived and they might begin to rebuild their lives. Yet upon opening the envelope, the embattled homeowner would find a State of Louisiana check for $000,000.

“I thought it was one of those,” Dominici recounted. “But then I saw that little number one in there and I was proud to be an American.” One of the best things about it, Dave said, was that the check came on his birthday. “How great was that? Gaynielle got me a card that played the theme song from Law & Order.”

Perhaps it was this long break since the original arrest that made Dominici forget that his court date was coming up soon. It was this oversight that, he told me, caused him to get high with some friends even though there was a near certainty that his appearance would include a drug test. Caught off guard, Dominici became enraged by the whole process and, in the company of a number of court officers, declared that there was nothing Orleans Parish, or any other law enforcement agency, could do to him.

“You can’t do anything to me,” the wide-eyed Dominici reportedly declared. “You can’t do anything to me because I’m the one who found the Nazi lampshade. I’m the one who found the Nazi lampshade and the New York Times is coming down here to make a movie of my life. So screw you.” Apparently Dominici made this assertion a number of times.

It was then, Dani Dominici Babineaux said, that the authorities began thinking of giving her brother a Lunacy Hearing.

A few weeks later I visited Dave Dominici at the OPP and asked him if he really made those statements concerning the lampshade in the presence of Orleans Parish officials. Sitting on the other side of a two-inch-thick piece of Plexiglas and talking into an old-style black telephone receiver, Dominici gave a sheepish look and said, “Perhaps.”

Dominici takes pride as someone who “jails well.” In Angola, he recalls, “they had me pulling out these huge eight-foot-around tree stumps with a tiny little shovel. You had a partner with you, digging all day long. When you finally get the stump out, you have to fill in the giant twelve-foot-deep holes. Ten hours a day, pulling stumps. That’s Angola. You could tell the place used to be a slave plantation, you can just smell it.”

The OPP was another kind of clink. Before the storm, there had been as many as sixty-five hundred prisoners (90 percent of them African-American) locked up in the place, which made it the ninth- largest jail in the country. It was a massive operation, a multistructure complex with an annual budget of $75 million, employing twelve hundred people including the kitchen workers who served eighteen thousand meals a day. With the city paying the sheriff’s office $22.39 per day per prisoner, jailing people in New Orleans was a lucrative business.

Katrina put a serious crimp in the OPP operation. With several of the complexes severely damaged, many prisoners were transferred to other facilities around the state. By the time Dave Dominici got to the OPP psych ward, the place felt all but deserted, with most of the inmates consolidated within the decrepit House of Detention (the sign outside says, simply, House of D) with its skeleton crew of guards and a lone metal detector.

Being cooped up on the tenth floor was giving Dave Dominici the creeps. The problem was more than just the usual mumblers, starers, and guys who’d rip out your lungs if they got half a chance. Every prison had those people. Even the suicide rate, one of the highest in the country, didn’t faze Dominici. Nor did the fact that many OPP prisoners had been in the facility for months without seeing a lawyer or even knowing the precise charges against them.

What was driving Dominici around the bend was the ghosts. It sounded pathetic, Dominici said, the illustrious cemetery bandit being freaked out by ghosts. But these weren’t the tourist poltergeists that Quarter barkers hustled on “haunted New Orleans” tours. They weren’t the dead-and-buried ones, fifty years stone-cold in a Lake Lawn mausoleum. These ghosts were fresh and desperate, searching and hungry, screeching in pain.

Dominici knew “bits and pieces” of how bad it had been in the OPP during Katrina, but it wasn’t until he got locked up that he heard “the whole bad thing.” It was a nightmare to be sure: with everyone in the city running for their lives, many of the prisoners were left in their cells, without food or drinking water. First thing, the power went out, followed by the emergency generators, so you had thousands of men, the usual hair-raising array of OPP offenders, many of them still handcuffed, sealed into the fetid pitch dark by jailers who’d deserted their posts. And all the while the floodwaters were rising, to as much as eight and nine feet on the lower floors. There were awful, awful stories, tales of prisoners who tried to swim through the waters to safety, only to get ripped to shreds by the submerged razor coil wire.

The city fathers, from Ray Nagin on down, were denying the whole thing. Sheriff Marlin Gusman, Nagin’s close associate, who had never run a prison before taking over the OPP, told the press that stories about what had happened at the OPP were the fantasies of “crackheads, cowards, criminals… and disgruntled former employees.” But no one believed that, certainly not Dave Dominici. He was from New Orleans, he was a convicted felon, and as such he was of the opinion that nothing any local official ever said in a time of stress could possibly be true, especially when it came to what happened in the jails. People had died at the OPP, Dominici had heard. They had died horribly, either drowned or stomped, or by heart attack, which didn’t make it any less a murder. Since he’d been checked into the psych ward, that’s all he’d heard about, the madness of those days, the way the fleeing deputies had sprayed the wards with machine gun fire to push the prisoners back into their cells.

“They say guys are buried in the walls,” Dominici said, recounting stories about panicked inmates who had supposedly tried to break through the walls to escape the stench-filled water and had gotten trapped. Dominici didn’t believe these wilder tales, but as he said, “they prey on your mind.”

Dominici pushed his head against the Plexiglas, let it rest there for half a minute or so before speaking again.

There were a lot of things he’d done in his life that could have been better, he finally said, confessionally. He could have been a better brother to Dani, to his other sister, Dawn, and to Ralph Jr. He could have been a better son to his mom; Patsy was “a saint.” He despaired over the times he’d made her bail him out, the time he wrecked his car on the railroad tracks, all the embarrassment he put her through. He could have been a better son to his father, too, or at least to his memory, even if his Pops had been a hard sort, the kind who’d give you a slap if you talked when Lawrence Welk was on the television.

It was the same with Gaynielle. She was his “soul mate,” they were made for each other, but there were times when he treated her poorly, when they didn’t allow themselves to express the love they felt for each other. Then there were his children. One of his daughters lived with Patsy. She was doing fine, too, had a good job, was going to college, going to make something of herself, yet when you mentioned her father, she narrowed her eyes and said, with equal parts disdain and regret, “Oh, my father. Let’s not talk about my father.”

That was his fault, Dominici said. No one else’s. He had been given great gifts throughout his life and had squandered every one.

And for what? Being a dope fiend. How could being a dope fiend be worth losing the love and trust of so many good people? So many times in who knew how many court-ordered treatment program meetings, Dominici had said he’d tried to “open his heart to Jesus Christ.” But even if he’d been an altar boy, the Jesus thing had never worked for him and it never would, at least not with the kind of Christ the priests tried to shove down your throat.

“It’s like I told you, from the beginning Albert Einstein made more sense to me than Holy Communion. Good luck with that in St. Bernard Parish! The fact is I’m not like the rest of these people. I got ideas. I told you about the Thermo-Squat, right?” Yes, Dominici had told me about the Thermo-Squat, his idea for a remote-controlled heating system for toilet seats. He’d told me more than once, but there was a special urgency to the sales pitch this time, as if a prewarmed toilet seat was the singular innovation upon which the continued spin of the planet depended.

“I’m not a bad person. I never did anything that hurt anybody. Not really. That’s why they shouldn’t have done to me what they did.”

We were close to the nub of it all now, the specter of the future that had increasingly come to haunt Dominici since being locked up with the ghosts of the OPP. It was part of his sentence in the cemetery bandit case, he claimed. He was barred from every cemetery in Orleans, Jefferson, or St. Bernard Parish.

“Dead or alive! I can’t set foot in a cemetery dead or alive. I can’t be buried in my home ground.”

This was the first I’d heard of it. If true, the sentence was breathtaking, both unmistakably appropriate and shockingly cruel, a punishment beyond day-to-day jurisprudence, almost tribal in nature.

It was the kind of retribution one might expect to find in a far-off place like the venerable Varanasi, the Indian city most loved by the world-destroying Shiva. Devout Hindus came to die in Varanasi, to have their bodies burned on massive woodpiles, the ashes flung into Mother Ganges. Piles of the dead, wrapped in gauze, were everywhere. Varanasi was municipality as death cult, but wasn’t that also true of New Orleans, another decaying former colonial metropolis set on the banks of a primal waterway. Dave Dominici had broken one of New Orleans’s inviolate taboos, had carelessly trampled, as dope fiends tend to do, upon sacred rules. So what other choice did the court have but to deny him the final splendor of earthly presence down here, the moment when the fellas yell, “Cut him loose!” and the band begins to play?

“That supposed to be fair?” Dominici wailed. “They don’t do that to murderers. They don’t do that to rapers. They’d only do it to someone like me. Someone from the other side of the tracks. A despised person like me.”

Dominici again rested his brow on the Plexiglas, as if the full weight of fate was upon him. Then, as if ejected from a crashing fighter plane, he jumped from his chair, straight up into the rank jail air.

“They don’t have the right! Throw me in here all you want, but no court has say over eternity. I’m from New Orleans. New Orleans is my home. I should be buried in New Orleans!”

A moment passed before Dominici said, “You know what’s going to happen to me? I’m going to be like that lampshade! Just like that fucking lampshade! All these years, since Hitler, and there’s no rest. From hand to hand. Wandering… The wandering Jew! No place to lay its head. That’s going to be me.”

TEN

It was a typical late summer afternoon at the intersection of Tulane and Broad, east of the OPP. Rain was beginning to fall, but vertically, always a relief during hurricane season. Since Katrina, the tempests had stayed away. Ernesto petered out over the Atlantic, Dean hit Mexico, but nothing big, nothing “named,” made it into the upper Gulf. The bit of moisture beating down today would quickly drain, leaving only soggy shoes and perhaps a couple more customers for the fungicide guys who put up the 888-MOLD signs on telephone poles in Treme and St. Roch, not that any of these treatments could be considered surefire. The problem was deeper than that.

In the middle of the last century, Tulane Avenue had been a decent sort of commercial thoroughfare, no Canal Street but a place to buy a couch and eat a reasonable bowl of gumbo at a restaurant with or without a tablecloth. The Katrina tide had been ten feet high here, and now, with the Times-Picayune running stories saying more than one-third of the residential structures in the city were uninhabited or “fatally blighted,” the avenue was half wasteland, with few cars and even fewer pedestrians. Many of the buildings were still boarded up, marked with fading “TFW” (Took Flood Water) National Guard marks. A spray-painted “U Steal, We Get Real” sign, barely visible, covered a piece of plywood nailed to the front of a former store that, in the idiosyncratic black southern tradition, had once doubled as an outlet for both tuxedo rentals and po’ boy sandwiches. The plywood was about all that was upright about the place; the remainder of the building had caved in behind it.

The only commercial establishments that could be said to be flourishing were bail bondsmen. There was the Free Me BailBond, the Abra-Ca-Da-Bra BailBond, the 1, 2, 3 Rollout Bailbond, and half a dozen more. This owed, of course, to the real business of Tulane and Broad, the meting out of justice at the massive Criminal Courts building that has dominated the intersection since it was built by Jim Crow labor in 1929.

Jurisprudence has often been a catch-as-catch-can thing at Tulane and Broad, no more so than since the end of the thirty-year reign of District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., father of the singer. Connick’s successor, Eddie Jordan, the first African American to be elected Orleans Parish DA, was on the verge of resignation. Known as “the Hat” thanks to his affectation of wearing an expensive derby, Jordan had just lost a $3.7 million civil action filed by several former DA office employees who claimed he’d systematically fired them for no other reason than that they were white. Of the fifty-six white employees fired, all but one was replaced with a worker of color, the suit charged. Claiming he was only trying to do “what was best for the city,” the Hat denied that his actions were motivated by race.

Whatever the merits of the suit, there could be no arguing the dismal performance of the DA’s office. In 2003 and 2004, with New Orleans in contention as the most crime-ridden city in the country, fewer than 12 percent of all homicide and attempted homicide cases resulted in conviction. Since Katrina, with the courts and police department in disarray, that number had decreased even further. In 2006 Jordan’s office, operating under Louisiana’s much-lambasted “701” law, which required the release of prisoners not indicted within sixty days of their arrest, managed to bring only 7 percent of all felony cases to trial.

These numbers were a disaster, nothing that should ever happen in a major city. But then again, could anyone really claim that New Orleans was a major city? Barely three hundred thousand residents lived in the town, half the 1950 population. It wasn’t even the biggest city in Louisiana anymore; Baton Rouge, that former governmental backwater of frat houses and Taco Bells, had more people. As of 2007, New Orleans was listed as the fifty-ninth-highest population center in the country, right behind Aurora, Colorado, wherever that was. The mystery was how so many of the remaining inhabitants still found such large numbers of other people to shoot and kill.

The chronicling of the nearly daily deaths became an obsessional pastime for the city’s bloggers. In the weeks before I visited Dave Dominici at the OPP, one Internet site, the New Orleans Murder Blog, provided the following content: On August 12, “A man and a woman were shot to death Saturday morning in the Village de l’Est neighborhood of eastern New Orleans, police reported.” On August 14, “Two people were shot fatally and a third wounded at North Villere and St. Philip streets, near Armstrong Park in the Treme neighborhood, New Orleans, police said.” On August 15, “A man shot multiple times in the 7700 block of Chef Menteur Highway, Garry Flot, an information officer for New Orleans police, said.” On August 16, “A New Orleans woman was critically injured Wednesday night when a man entered a Mid-City bar and slashed her throat, police said.”

A few days later the Murder Blog carried the following account of an apparent murder in the Seventh Ward: “The deceased was a 25-year-old light-complexioned African-American with a gold tooth had the following tattoos ‘Ms. Coco,’ on the left thigh; a drawing of a naked woman on the left inner forearm; ‘Big Mike,’ on the outer left upper arm; ‘Fatt’ or ‘Fatty,’ on the left arm; ‘Darryl,’ on the left wrist; ‘Belinda,’ on the left hand; a butterfly on the back of the left shoulder; ‘B,’ in the middle of the back; and ‘Queen,’ on one buttock, and ‘B@#$HV,’ or ‘B@#$HY,’ on the other buttock. He wore a long blond wig, makeup, a short blue skirt, three tanktops and gold shoes.”

Mayor Ray Nagin’s commentary on the steady drumbeat of doom proved less than helpful. In response to the shooting death of two brothers who themselves had been implicated in fourteen murders, the mayor said the killings were “not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there.”

“I wouldn’t say that the whole city is trying to kill itself, but sometimes it sure does seem that way,” the Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard told me. Dressed in his customary white lab coat, a patrician shock of silver hair rakishly combed atop a highball-red face, Minyard is about as close to a Walker Percy character as you can find in the Crescent City these days.

Once a highly paid uptown gynecologist, Minyard, seeking “something with more meaning to it,” first became coroner in 1974. He has been reelected eight times, always using the same campaign poster, a shot of a fortyish version of himself dressed in a white linen suit blowing his beloved cornet on a Mississippi River levee. It is this image, along with unimpeachable homeboy credentials like residence papers from Charity Hospital and a penchant for volunteering remarks like “As a medical man I thought the efficacy of Viagra might wear out when nearing eighty, but I’m happy to report this is not the case” that have made Minyard a favorite of New Orleans local color writers.

One of Minyard’s NPR interviews, given shortly after Katrina, stands out. Speaking from St. Gabriel, Louisiana, where the feds had belatedly set up a massive high-tech morgue, Minyard was asked if he could foresee an end to all the suffering.

“I don’t think so,” Minyard said in his loping, smooth-syllabled drawl. “You see, these are my people, every one of them. I get emotional about it. I get emotional about the people, I get emotional about the city, I get emotional about the music. You know, I play trumpet. I have a band. A couple of weeks ago—I hadn’t practiced or played because of the hurricane—I took out my trumpet in the quiet place of my trailer, and I played ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?’. And I started crying. The devastation not only of the place but of the people and our lives—none of us will ever be the same.”

It was an overworked trope by then, singing and playing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”, which was written by Eddie DeLange and Louis Alter in 1946 for a Hollywood musical called New Orleans that featured Billie Holiday playing a domestic. Louis Armstrong’s version was classic, true, but hearing the tune every time an out-of-town newsman appeared in a windswept yellow slicker could drive you crazy. Minyard’s a cappella version, however, just the first two lines, “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans / I miss it each night and day,” sung by the doctor of the dead from inside a government-issue trailer parked in a postmodern morgue, returned to the sublime.

“Great song,” Minyard said to finish the interview.

I’d come over to talk to Minyard about the lampshade, which, after all, had been found within his jurisdiction. Sitting at his makeshift desk in the lobby of the funeral home on Martin Luther King Boulevard—his old office at Tulane and Broad had been flooded in the storm, trapping him for three days—Minyard looked through the pictures of the lampshade I had stored on my computer.

“You say it was the guy from the cemetery case that had it?” Minyard inquired. A Louis Prima fan, Minyard remembered the mausoleum looting well. Dave Dominici’s involvement with something like the lampshade was “a heck of a coincidence,” the coroner said.

I asked him how he might have handled the lampshade case. “You mean, if I was responsible for finding out what it was?” he replied, thinking a moment. “That would be tough because, from our point of view, you’d have to prove that a crime had been committed. If it is really sixty years old, from the war, then what can you do here in New Orleans? I don’t think it would be illegal just to have it.”

Minyard called in Alvaro Hunt, his chief forensic pathologist. Hunt, a sweet-faced man who has worked with Minyard on and off for thirty-five years, stared at the lampshade photos awhile. “It looks like it’s been tanned. Definitely tanned,” Hunt said. He thought he saw a particular skin pattern but it was impossible to say anything definitive from looking at a photo.

“He’s got some DNA on the thing,” Minyard said, handing Hunt the printout of the Bode lab findings. Hunt looked the report over before saying, “They could only get the mitochondrial, huh? That makes sense; the sample had to be very degraded. This sort of work is way beyond us right now.”

This was because more than two years after the storm, Orleans Parish still didn’t have an operational crime lab. Much of the work was being sent to LSU in Baton Rouge. Minyard took another look at the lampshade picture. Like Shiya Ribowsky, who’d seen so many shattered parts of former humanity after 9/11, the coroner of New Orleans, the Murder Capital, shook his head.

“Incredible what people will do,” he said. “What can you say? It is one of those unthinkable sort of things.”

Minyard leaned back in his chair. “I’ve thought about it, what it might have been like to have done this work at a concentration camp, at a place like Auschwitz, when you’re looking at so many bodies. Taken one by one I don’t think determining the cause of death would be that difficult. You’d have asphyxiation, choking, circulatory collapse, pulmonary edema, gunshot wounds, blows to the head. You could put the reports together in a nice, neat pile. But ‘the why’—the why of it—that would be another thing altogether. Forensics are never going to answer that, why people would do something like that to other people.”

Minyard took another look at the photo of the lampshade. “That’s a sad thing you have there,” he said.

Asked if he saw any reason why, out of all places, a lampshade identified with Nazi concentration camps would turn up in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, Minyard said that if you didn’t count the obvious answers, “like it was brought back by some vet,” this was a troubling mystery. Katrina had turned everything upside down, “shaken things loose.” There had been many times since the storm, Minyard said, when he had felt truly lost, that the world he grew up in was “off its compass.”

“There’s a warehouse downtown where we have as many as one hundred bodies of people killed in the storm. We’re just storing them there. Some of the corpses are unidentified, but we know who a lot of them are. But when we notified someone and said, ‘We’ve got your uncle Fred here,’ they said, ‘Why don’t you just keep him?’” The unclaimed bodies kept turning up. “We’ve found thirty-five bodies since we stopped looking for bodies, so what can I assume?”

It bothered Minyard, “this kind of disregard,” the namelessness of it all. “You know, the records from our potter’s field were washed away in the storm. It is almost like dying twice and still nobody knows you. The murders are just more of it. We had two shootings here yesterday. We might have two today. Two more tomorrow. The police can’t stop it. They can put a dent in it, but they can’t stop it. Maybe no one can stop it, not the politicians, not the pastors. I’d like to think God can, but he hasn’t seen fit to do that. Not yet.”

If a human skin lampshade was going to turn up somewhere, perhaps New Orleans after the storm was as likely a place as any, Minyard said. “We’re no different than anyplace else when you come down to it. We’re the product of history and human nature. Prisoners of it, you might say. And, as you know, we have a tragic history here in New Orleans.”

By the time I got to Lee Circle I was dripping wet. Robert E. Lee was there, or rather a bronze twelve-foot-tall likeness of the Confederate general, built in 1884. Perched atop a sixty-foot stone column, Lee stood ramrod straight in the downpour, arms crossed, left foot forward, water pouring off the brim of his hat.

It has never been easy to get used to these monuments found throughout the American South celebrating those who fought and died to preserve the “peculiar institution” of slavery. In New Orleans, onetime home to the nation’s largest slave market, an ornate tribute to Confederate president Jefferson Davis sits at the intersection of Canal Street and the Jefferson Davis Parkway. Over by City Park, on a horse, is General P. G. T. Beauregard (from St. Bernard Parish), who ordered the first shots on Fort Sumter that started the war.

But Lee Circle is the focal point. The St. Charles Avenue cable car circumnavigates the circle at the beginning and end of its run past the genteel mansions of the uptown rich and powerful. Almost all the old-line Mardi Gras parades, from Comus on, have passed by here, where bleachers are set up to accommodate the cheering crowds. The fact that New Orleans fell without much resistance to a Union naval assault in April 1863 and that the Virginian Lee never set foot in the city during his time as commander of the Confederate forces does little to tarnish the general’s status as the first son of what is often called the Cult of the Lost Cause.

Standing there looking at the statue, I wondered what present-day New Orleans would look like to the man who said that slavery was “a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.”

In keeping with the southern bromide that a man of honor should never turn his back on a Yankee, Lee faces northeast, which, during Katrina would have afforded him an excellent vista of the flooded Central Business District. A glance to the left and he could have seen the Superdome. A turn to the right would have given him a view of the nearby Crescent City Connection, the bridge across the Mississippi River to the Westbank Jefferson Parish communities of Gretna and Terrytown. Following World War II, the Westbank became an early “white flight” refuge for those who could no longer tolerate living in New Orleans with its rapidly increasing black population. Half a century later, in one of the most distressing of Katrina incidents, hundreds of stranded, desperate New Orleans residents attempted to cross the bridge in the days after the hurricane only to be turned back by cops under the command of the general’s namesake (albeit the Chinese version), Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee. To show they meant business, the police fired a volley over the heads of the crowd, vowing to shoot whoever set foot on their side of the river.

One hundred and forty years after his surrender at Appomattox, what would the general in chief of the Confederacy think of that? This was a question I began asking around town. The responses were remarkably consistent. Several people quoted a bumper sticker seen on pickup trucks lined up at the frozen-daiquiri-to-go spots, at least the ones catering to whites: when it came to black people and their continued presence in the city, We Should Have Picked Our Own Cotton.

Elaborating on this theme was Dr. Raynard Sanders, a former public school principal who now spends his time steadfastly trying to save what’s left of the system in the city. “Robert E. Lee, oh, Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee would have watched what happened after Katrina and thought, well, things never change, do they? He would have seen another example of how the North will always desert the South when it is in need, and in that he’d be right, of course. As for what was happening to people trying to cross the bridge, Lee wouldn’t have cared about that, and not because he was so hard-hearted or hated black people. However, if those people were running away from a plantation, that would have been a different story altogether because then they would have had a business function. They’d be property, a means of production, worth something. What were those people on the bridge worth? Who did they belong to, what was their economic value in the society? No, they’d be invisible to Robert E. Lee.”

These conjectures about Lee’s opinions were interesting, but I found myself wanting more from the commander who ordered Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, a military blunder that did much to seal the South’s fate. I wanted to know if Lee, the legendary gentleman, felt any regret or pain over the decisions he’d made, the side he’d chosen. I wanted to know if standing there at the center of his circle for 120 years, he had sometimes felt like shrieking, “Enough!” so loud that even the soused loungers inside the Circle Bar could hear. Or would he shout, like Marlon Brando’s Kurtz raging, “Kill them! Kill them all.”

It would be fascinating to hear the general’s views, because when it came to the issue of race, he’d seen the Beast in action, right there at Lee Circle.

New Orleans has had its share of race riots.[19] In 1866 a group of former Confederates attacked a meeting of Radical Republicans who were protesting the state legislature’s refusal to allow freed blacks to vote. Thirty-eight people were killed. In 1874, at the so-called Battle of Liberty Place, thirty-five hundred armed members of the “White League” seeking to overthrow the “carpetbagger” government and the rule of “the insolent and barbarous African” faced off against a like number of mostly black local militia troops under the command of “turncoat” ex—Confederate general James Longstreet. The White Leaguers overran the poorly equipped blacks, driving the forever disgraced Longstreet into the river. Dozens more were killed.

Race relations in New Orleans and the country at large entered a new stage in 1892 when Homer Plessy, a twenty-nine-year-old light-skinned Creole man from the Treme district challenged the recently passed Louisiana “separate car” law by boarding the “whites only” section of an East Louisiana Railroad train at the Press and Royal Street station in the Bywater. Plessy challenged his arrest, leading to the 1896 “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling that legalized the Jim Crow codes throughout the South.[20]

Racial discrimination had also acquired a new vocabulary, as evidenced by a story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat of July 17, 1900, in which Dr. Gustav Keitz, a German-born Canal Street physician with a passion for eugenics, wrote that the number of Negroes could be reduced through “asexualization, a measure which should be practiced at the earliest possible period of life.” Less than a month later, this relatively modest proposal was eclipsed by an editorial written by Henry J. Hearsey, a former Confederate major and editor/publisher of the New Orleans Daily States, the official journal of city government and leading afternoon paper in Louisiana. More than forty years before the Nazis used the phrase at the Wannsee Conference, Hearsey wrote of “The Negro Problem and Its Final Solution,” declaring that if blacks should continue to “by word or deed listen to the screeds of agitators in the North,” the South would have no choice but to engage in a full-scale race war. Hearsey regretted that “whites would suffer some casualties in the conflict,” but there would be a major consolation: “The Negro Problem in Louisiana at least will be solved—and that by extermination.”

Hearsey’s editorial was responding to the just concluded “Robert Charles Riots.” The incident had begun on the evening of July 23, 1900, as Robert Charles, a thirty-five-year-old black railway worker, sat on the stoop of a house in the 2800 block of Dryades Street, then in the middle of New Orleans’s Jewish neighborhood. Approached by a trio of New Orleans police officers, Charles was told to run along. Son of illiterate Mississippi sharecroppers and a self-educated follower of the fledgling International Migration Society, one of the first groups to advocate that former slaves repatriate themselves to Africa, Charles declined, telling the cops he was waiting for his girlfriend, Virginia Banks, and her roommate Ernestine Goldstein. The fact that Charles was something of a dandy, decked out in clothing purchased from Hyman Levy’s clothing store on Poydras Street (Levy would later describe Charles, with whom he had a friendly relationship, as “a stylish negro, above the average darkey in intelligence”), probably didn’t help matters. At some point in the conversation, one of the cops knocked Charles’s snazzy brimmed hat from his head. Told to leave the hat on the ground, Charles refused, and committed what the police report described as “an aggressive act.” A struggle ensued, the police discharging their weapons in Charles’s direction. In possession of a small handgun, Charles returned fire, wounding one of the policemen. Shot in the leg, Charles was cornered several hours later in a house on Fourth Street, a few blocks away. This time Charles shot a police captain through the heart and, shouting “I will give you all some!”, sent another bullet through a second policeman’s head and fled.

Thus commenced the largest manhunt in New Orleans history. The fully mobilized 315-man NOPD was quickly joined by a rapidly swelling army of vigilantes. The black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett described the development in a pamphlet entitled Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, The Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics. “Wednesday New Orleans was in the hands of the mob… ,” Wells-Barnett writes. “Unable to vent its vindictiveness and bloodthirsty vengeance upon Charles, the mob turned its attention to other colored men who happened to get in the path of its fury… The reign of absolute lawlessness began about 8 o’clock Wednesday night. The mob gathered at the Lee statue…”

Wells quotes at length from the account that was published in the New Orleans Times-Democrat the next morning. The Lee Circle gathering of about seven hundred was addressed by a man introducing himself as the mayor of nearby Kenner, who said, “‘I have killed a Negro before and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours, I am willing to kill again. The only way that you can teach these Niggers a lesson and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of them… String up a few of them, and the others will trouble you no more.’”

Two days later, his hideout at 1208 South Saratoga Street revealed by a paid police informer, Charles was besieged by a crowd wildly estimated at anywhere between one and twenty thousand. Fighting alone, using homemade bullets made from a lead pipe melted down over a charcoal stove, Charles held off the mob, the NOPD, and the Gatling gun—wielding state militia for several hours, shooting twenty-one of his attackers. He was routed only when the house was set on fire, whereupon he was shot, burned, and beaten beyond recognition, then dumped into a potter’s field grave.

Thirty-eight years later, Jelly Roll Morton, one of the earliest New Orleans jazz geniuses, the brilliant Storyville piano player and noted braggart (he claimed to have invented jazz single-handedly in 1902, when he would have been twelve years old), recorded a number of interviews with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. One of these sessions included a segment entitled The Story of the 1900 New Orleans Riot and the Song of Robert Charles. As Charles was well on his way to being completely forgotten by this time, no one was checking Morton’s veracity, which was spotty.

Playing chords at the piano as he speaks, a weary-sounding Jelly Roll (his career in tatters, he would be dead within three years), begins the Charles story with a burst of bluster. Claiming to have “been there when it all happened and been there when it all stopped,” Morton says that “Robert Charles must’ve been a marksman… because every time he would raise his rifle, when a policeman was in sight, there’d be a policeman dead. It was never learned how many policemens [sic] were killed. Some said thirty-two, some said eighteen, and so forth and so on.” (The actual number was seven.) After reporting that “anyplace a white man seen a colored man, there was a fight, or a colored man seen a white man, there was a fight” and laying in a little tourist hoodoo about Charles possibly still walking the streets at night, Morton seems to tire of the topic. Fending off the eager Lomax, Morton says he can’t recall any of the “bad man” songs inspired by Charles’s act save a lyric about how “the police wouldn’t let him get his hat” and soon drifts into talking about some obscure blues singers.

This is too bad because Jelly Roll does allude, briefly, to “this one killing that arose Robert Charles to fury, a killing that haunted Robert Charles and started the great New Orleans Riot.” As mentioned in the accounts of both Ida B. Wells-Barnett and William Ivy Hair, whose Carnival of Fury is the accepted basic source on the Charles Riots, the “killing” was very likely the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia. Charles was apparently obsessed by the incident.

In one of the grisliest post-Reconstruction episodes, Hose, a farmworker, was accused of murdering his employer, Alfred Cranford, raping Cranford’s wife, and maiming their child. Hose’s protests that he’d killed Cranford with an ax in self-defense after the boss drew a gun during a dispute over wages (Hose denied the other charges) fell on deaf ears. He was tried two weeks after the killing and sentenced to death. His execution brought out a crowd of two thousand (two trains full of gawkers came from Atlanta), people craning their necks to get a better view as Hose was systematically tortured, his ears, fingers, and genitals severed from his body, the skin sliced away from his face and torso. Then, doused in kerosene, he was burned alive before being hung from a tree.

The local paper, the Newnan Herald and Advertiser, devoted the entire front page to the event. “The expected has happened,” the account began somberly. “Sam Holt [sic], the black fiend… has been caught and made to pay the penalty for his crime… Overtaken by the wrath of an outraged community, burned at the stake, his very ashes scattered to the winds, there is nothing to remind us that such a monster in human form ever had existence save the bitter recollection of his infamous career while on earth.”

As horrific as Hose’s death was, what most affected Robert Charles, according to Hair’s book, was that many viewers had approached the ravaged corpse to cut off pieces of his skin to take home as souvenirs. Later Hose’s heart, knuckles, and facial skin were displayed in local store windows and offered for sale.

Seven decades after Robert Charles made his last stand at 1208 South Saratoga Street (now a bottle-strewn vacant lot in the Central City murder zone west of the I-10), another black man took on a fully deployed New Orleans police department. In an eerie reprise of the Charles incident, Mark Essex, an AWOL Navy man, entered the Downtown Howard Johnson on January 7, 1973, and began firing. Running past a frightened black hotel maid with a .44 carbine, Essex reportedly said, “Don’t worry, honey, I’m only killing whites today, no black people.” By the next morning, Essex, whom Stokely Carmichael praised for “carrying our struggle to the next quantitative level, the level of science,” had shot twenty-two people, killing nine, including six policemen. When he was finally stopped on the hotel roof in a hail of NOPD fire, Essex’s body had been hit over two hundred times. His right leg and tongue were severed from his body and found on the other side of the roof, several yards away. Like 1208 South Saratoga Street, the Howard Johnson, now a Holiday Inn with a jaunty painting of a clarinet on the side, is only a few blocks from Lee Circle.

Standing beside the general’s monument, I wondered if there was ever to be an end to this. One of the things people said about Katrina was that it pulled the covers off the question of race in America. Maybe for out-of-towners it did. But few in the Crescent City needed Kanye West to tell them that George Bush didn’t care about black people. That had been apparent once again only days before, on the second anniversary of the day Katrina made landfall. There was supposed to be a march from the spot in the Lower Ninth Ward where the Industrial Canal levee broke, down St. Claude Avenue, over to the Morial Convention Center, where thousands of storm victims had been stranded for days without food, water, or power. Skip Henderson and I decided to go over to the Lower Ninth to check things out. “They’ll get twenty people, if they’re lucky,” Skip said, as we made our way over the St. Claude bridge.

Much to our surprise, the trash-bound streets on the other side of the canal were packed with cops. Helicopters hovered above. There’d never been so many cops in the Lower Ninth in the history of the city.

“What’s going on?” inquired Skip.

“Bush!” replied one overweight white cop from behind the visor of his riot helmet. “Bush is in there,” the cop said, pointing to the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology at the corner of North Robertson and Caffin Avenue.

The president was in there talking about everything his administration was doing to aid New Orleans’s recovery. As White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters, the MLK speech was Bush’s “fifteenth visit” to the region since he’d first viewed the devastation from the window of the low-flying Air Force One. Inside the charter school, just about the only building in the entire neighborhood that was back up and running, the president greeted the children in his best Pet Goat style, before making a speech in which he reminded restive locals that U.S. citizens had already “paid out one hundred fourteen billion dollars in tax money—their money—to help folks down here” and that instead of complaining, people should look at the storm as “a great opportunity to really jump-start the reform efforts in New Orleans.” He finished up by saying how happy he was to once again be “in this part of the world,” as if giving a nod to Henry Stanley and other great profiteer explorers who had the temerity to venture to remote corners of the planet.

The unannounced speech was closed to the general public. Still, a cluster of neighborhood people, perhaps fifteen in all, had gathered in a sudden downpour at the corner of Poland Avenue to make their feelings known to a heedless man in a speeding bulletproof limousine.

Moments later, preceded by a long line of NOPD cruisers running full lights and sirens, the president’s car appeared on the rise of the heavily rusted Claiborne Avenue Bridge. However, to the consternation of the group, who had taken refuge from the rain under the porch of an abandoned home, they never got to see Bush. They’d picked the wrong side of the street. All that could be seen was a fleeting, anticlimactic glimpse of a smiling, waving Laura Bush. She was there for a moment, then gone, tailed by a phalanx of NOPD motorcyclists.

That’s when he came into view: an enormous reddish brown man, three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, Beach ball—like shaven head mounted recklessly atop a much bigger but equally round protruding belly gave him the aspect of a dark snowman or a fat, stern Buddha. Attired in nothing but flip-flops and a pair of soaked-through maroon shorts clumped about his genitals, the guy, who looked to be in his mid-thirties, was standing on the opposite side of Claiborne, fleshy arms raised above his head, both middle fingers extending upward in a double fuck-you. If Bush had been looking out the window, waving like Laura, there was no way he could have missed him.

“Okay. Show’s over,” said the NOPD officers as they got in their cruisers and drove off. People began trudging down Claiborne, but the man in the maroon shorts did not move. Rain pelting off his brown skin, he held his stance, middle fingers raised. The way he stood there, his giant stomach hanging over his shorts, accusing fingers pointed to the roiling sky on the anniversary of the disaster, he was like an angry prophet confronting God.

I was convinced there was a link between the terror of Buchenwald, where the story of the lampshade began, and this sad, beaten-down New Orleans, where the most recent incarnation of the icon had turned up. But I couldn’t quite put it together. There was something missing, some piece that could not be supplied by a professor or scientist. So it was a good thing to run into Mac Rebennack, aka Dr. John the Night Tripper, author of the unbeatable acid voodoo record Gris-Gris and always my favorite New Orleans musician, at least among the white guys.

Just the night before, I’d seen the Doctor playing at Lincoln Center along with Wynton Marsalis, another, albeit far more kempt, New Orleans refugee. Now, the next morning, we were booked on the same flight from LaGuardia to Armstrong Airport. The plane was delayed, and since at the previous night’s gig the Doctor had played “Witchy Red,” a composition about a “conjure woman” who carried “a mojo satchel made of human skin,” this seemed as good a time as any to provide Rebennack with a short version of the lampshade saga.

“That’s a weird story,” said the Doctor, who was attired in a blue silk jacket with an NOPD patch and gold-buckled blue suede shoes. “But there are a lot of weird stories in New Orleans, especially since the storm. Things are off the hook, out of whack. You see all kinds of birds hanging with birds that they never hung with before. They got these giant watermelons growing out in St. Bernard Parish. Botanists from LSU are studying them with stethoscopes. The whole balance of nature is backwards. Every time I fly into the city, I look out the window to see what’s there and what’s not.”

The Doctor was enraged over what had happened during the storm and since. He’d cut a number of songs protesting the wetlands destruction and appeared at benefit concerts to aid the displaced. “All my life I heard people saying they was just trying to live through the Long dynasty,” he said. “Now I’m just hoping my coonass gets through the Bush dynasty.”

I asked the Doctor if, in his long interface with the hyped-up New Orleans voodoo tradition and its attendant sub-rosa spiritual arts, he’d ever heard of anyone who dabbled with human skin, someone who might have knowledge of something like the lampshade.

“Not off the top of my head,” he replied. “But I’ve been out of town.” As far as he knew, outside of Sallie Ann Glassman, the Bywater Jewish voodoo priestess, all the decent practitioners had left town after the storm. But he said he’d think about it. In case anything came to him, I gave him my number, thinking that would be the end of it.

A few weeks later the phone rang sometime after midnight. “This is Mac,” the Doctor said. “Can’t get that lampshade off my mind. It’s haunting me. I got some Jewish on various sides of family, you know. There’s everything else, but there’s Jewish, too. I got this uncle who parachuted behind Nazi lines during D-day, and another uncle who was fighting in the Spanish Civil War against the fascist fuckers. When World War Two started up, he tried to enlist on the German side. My father couldn’t hack that. They had to put that uncle of mine away, on account of his imbalance. War is like that, I suppose. It puts you over the line.

“But whatever it is, I don’t think I can leave this lampshade shit alone. I remembered a guy who messed with that sort of human skin thing. He hung around the Saturn Bar on St. Claude. Can’t recall his name right now, but it’ll come to me. When it does, I’ll call you back.”

Over the next few months I received a scattered series of late-night calls from Rebennack. Sometimes he’d be barely intelligible. Other nights he’d rage eloquently about conditions down in New Orleans.

“I have been radicalized,” the Doctor declared. “You know in New Orleans there’s all kinds of evil. There’s the fake evil, for the tourists. Hoodoo, voodoo, bullshit-doo. That’s the kind of evil that’s fun, the kind when you step out a bit. I’ve done that. I got a whole Ph.D. in the breaking of totally reasonable rules. The silly evil is the stuff you go with to make a little money and to take your mind off the real evil, which is out there in the streets at the end of a rusty knife. The bullet in the head. The body in the river with the arms and legs pulled off. That’s why you make up the fake evil, to keep you from thinking about the real evil. But I can deal with that. What I cannot deal with is the institutional evil. Slavery was an institutional evil. What happened down here with Katrina is like that, the way the wetlands were eaten away, the way the city’s run, the way the private armies moved in, what you had with Bush. A whole way of life being swept away. That’s the institutional evil. Nazi evil. That’s what you got to fight. What you was put on this earth to fight! What you got to go down fighting to fight, if need be.”

Then one night Rebennack called and said the name of the man by the Saturn Bar who messed with human skin had come back to him.

“It’s Cheeky,” he croaked. “Cheeky Felix. Felix. F-E-L-I-X. Like the cat. But it could be Felice. Creole guy. He used to mess with human skin. Made masks of human skin. Slip them right over your head, give yourself a whole new face. He’s probably a bit older than me. So he might be alive. He might not. But that’s his name.”

I put the word out, but no one knew a Cheeky Felix. Trips to the tumbledown Saturn Bar were equally fruitless. Back in the day the Saturn was run by one of the old-time characters, O’Neil Broyard. The first time I had gone by there, the place seemed open, never a sure thing, but the door could not be budged. It turned out that O’Neil was inside, asleep, his head propped up against the front door like a pillow. But now O’Neil was dead, and the Saturn Bar had moved in the video poker machine, so there was no help there.

News that no one seemed to remember Cheeky Felix bugged Dr. John. “Before the storm, you would have found someone,” he said. “Definitely.” The interruption of the chain of oral history was one more tragedy. “No one can remember nothing. It’s like the storm blew the memories right out of their head.”

I got a lead from Andy Antippas, who owns Barrister’s Gallery on St. Claude Avenue only a few blocks from Skip Henderson’s house. Antippas, a sinewy chain-smoker from the Bronx and one-time English literature professor, has one of the best collections of African art in the country. He also runs a gallery where he favors what he calls “the transgressive and biological.” In his front yard he had an eight-foot statue of the Bahamut, an Arabian-influenced manifestation of the devil, constructed wholly from a pile of bones Antippas purchased from a Freemason temple that had fallen on hard times. It was this sort of “unusual” taste, Antippas allowed, that almost got him locked up in the Dave Dominici cemetery case.

“The cemetery robbers came by here offering these stolen statues,” Antippas said in his fast-paced way as he sat in his living room surrounded by large Yoruban sculptures. “It wasn’t Dominici but some of the other guys working with him. They had this marble angel, a really nice piece, and were very, very apologetic because they must have broken one of the wings off when they threw it in the van. They still had the wing, which they set down very carefully beside the angel. They were going on and on about they’d lower the price on account of the damage. It wasn’t even worth it to try and explain that an angel with a broken wing was far more exciting than a regular angel. So I just told them I wasn’t interested. I just didn’t want to get mixed up with that.

“What got me in trouble was when the cops came over. They were looking at every dealer in town. They come banging on the door and right off they see the African stuff. They’re asking me where I got it. The statues were freaking them out. Then they go into the next room, where I had this piece I was working on, The Helmet. I got the idea from a story about a Knight Templar who had gone off to Jerusalem to fight in the Second Crusade. The knight was a great fighter. The pope had personally bedecked his helmet with relics of the saints. But the knight ran afoul of the Muslim defenders and had his head chopped off by Saladin himself. It occurred to me that if a lot of the collections of Western museums are essentially trophy art taken from conquered peoples, then what might it be like if the tables were turned and the Muslims decided to exhibit this dead Knight Templar’s head, with his relic helmet still on, in the main museum of Baghdad or Constantinople. It gave me the idea for the piece.

“I wanted to make it realistic, so I called up some of these people I know who deal with the aftermath of autopsies. This one guy from Cincinnati sent a bunch of eyes with the retinas removed. I incorporated them into the piece. But now the cops are there and they’re going nuts.

“‘These are eyeballs!’ they’re yelling. ‘You got human eyeballs! It is illegal to have eyeballs.’ They thought they’d found, like, the castle of Dr. Frankenstein or something. I’m screaming back at them, ‘They only used to be eyeballs! Now they’re trash. Organic trash! Organic trash from Cincinnati! With the retinas removed.’

“‘The retinas removed?’ one of the cops screams. ‘Who removed them? You?’

“It got out of control from there. I had cut up these lamb skin Forex condoms to simulate skin. Now they’re fixated on that, saying I skinned people to make the piece. I told them, ‘These are condoms, man, condoms!’ They’re not listening to a thing I’m saying. They’re fixated on the condoms. ‘What’s this?’ they’re shouting.

“‘That’s symbolic of the Virgin,’ I said, which was the truth because what is the central idea of Christianity anyway? Belief in the Virgin birth was the reason these Crusaders are in Jerusalem to begin with.

“‘What?’ the cops are screaming. And all of a sudden I’m handcuffed to the wall in my own house. The cops are ripping the place apart, going, ‘Look at this, look at this.’ It was like everything I owned was conspiring against me.”

It eventually got worked out, Antippas said, slouching in his chair as if exhausted by the memory of the events.

I asked Antippas if he knew of any African tribe brought to America during the slave trade that might have used human skin in their rituals. Antippas said the only group that came to mind were the Ekoi, a warlike culture from Nigeria known for painting large, flowery murals and making giant masks, often from human skin. Antippas had none of the original masks but did have some pictures, which were simultaneously hauntingly beautiful and creepy.

Around that time I became aware of the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy project, a database created by Rutgers University professor Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on captives who may have passed through New Orleans slave auction houses from 1719 to 1820. Most of the information came from the logs of the French slavers, who were easily the match of the Nazis when it came to record keeping. On a whim I entered “Orleans” into the search engine as “Plantation Location” and “Ekoi” for group of African origin.

Only two names came up. One was Felix.

The Felix in question was listed in the database as a black female who first disembarked from the slave ships at age twenty-two in 1792. Her master (recorded as deceased) was named Landry, owner of the plantation Chapitoulas. Her “selling value” was set down as $430. At the bottom of the sheet was noted “woman is pregnant.”

Was this really the record of the Ekoi ancestor of Cheeky Felix, who Dr. John said hung around the Saturn Bar and knew about making things out of human skin? If it was, who would that make the pregnant woman? Cheeky Felix’s ten-times-great-great-grandmother?

I called Dr. John to tell him the news. He was touring somewhere in Colorado, bitching about the altitude. “Cheeky Felix from 1792, that’s far out.” Then he said, if I wanted to keep looking I should talk to Cyril Neville. “Cyril knows things.”

Coincidentally the Neville Brothers, one of New Orleans’s greatest family acts, were due to play at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park band shell, a block and a half from my house, a couple of days later, so talking to Cyril Neville seemed the thing to do. Dr. John said he’d give Neville a heads-up.

“Look,” the Doctor said. “I’m helping you because there’s no time in the world that anyone should be made into a lampshade. I don’t care who it is. No one. You need to get to the bottom of it. So go do it.”

Cyril Neville, then fifty-eight years old and the youngest of the four Neville brothers, didn’t exactly know why Dr. John insisted I talk to him. He said he didn’t know what was happening in New Orleans. He’d left the city after the storm, moved to Austin, Texas, and had no plans to return.

“What for?” Cyril demanded to know. “There’s nothing there. All that tradition and history, and the truth is a musician can’t make a living there. Now you can’t even live there, period. Maybe some fish can, not me.”

Cyril’s brother, the nonpareil Aaron Neville, a large, faintly scary-looking tattooed man with maybe the sweetest voice in the world, sat on the other side of the room eating a sandwich. “We’re scattered to the four winds,” he said.

I gave Cyril the short version of the lampshade story and he was interested but again insisted he had little to add. “Well,” he finally allowed, “there was the Gown Man. If our mother wanted to keep us home, she’d tell us about the Gown Man. He was this big white guy in a hospital gown, and he’d snatch you off the street, put you under his arm, and take you over to the dissection room at Tulane University medical school. They’d pull off your skin and you’d get chopped up by medical students, practicing their autopsies.”

“They had the Needle Man, too. Supposed to shove a six-inch needle in your eye, suck out your brain out right from the socket,” Aaron Neville chimed in.

Showtime was approaching and Cyril looked about ready to say good-bye when he said, “There is this one thing. Don’t know if it helps you or not, but when we were kids our parents used to send us to this Boy Scout camp by the Lake. We’d play ball and that, but on Wednesdays we went to the movies because that’s the day they set aside for black people to go to the movies.

“They always showed these horror movies, like Attack of the Crab Monsters. Creature from the Black Lagoon. The usual shit, trying to scare us, but the movies were so corny, we’d just laugh. Then there was this one time the movie came on and you could tell from the first second this wasn’t going to be the same old thing. The film was all messed-up-looking, with these scratches in it. At first you didn’t see anything. It looked overexposed. Then you saw these people coming out of what looked like a giant hole. These skinny, skinny people, their eyes sunk deep inside their head. They were wearing what looked like striped pajamas. They showed these dead bodies, stacked up. And right away, I was scared. We were all scared. Because we knew this wasn’t something fake. It was real. Remember that, Aaron?”

He nodded.

“Then they had these other people, marching by. And I think I saw that thing you’re talking about—a lampshade they said was made of human skin. That was really scary.”

“You’re talking about footage from Buchenwald. The Buchenwald concentration camp,” I said.

“Some concentration camp, that was for sure,” Cyril answered. “Long as I live I’ll never forget those pictures. Gives me the chills thinking about it even now. Because there’s two things about seeing that movie that have always stayed with me.

“First of all, I couldn’t believe white people would do that to other white people. But even more than that was the question about why they picked that particular Wednesday to show that particular movie to us—the kind of message they were trying to send.”

ELEVEN

Herr Wolfgang Röll put on his white cotton gloves, turned the key in the gray metal door, and opened the cabinet. The main museum at Buchenwald was several hundred yards away, down the hill from the Appellplatz. But these objects, kept in the temperature-controlled cabinet inside the former SS barracks that now served as the administration offices of the Buchenwald Memorial, were “separate.” They were “not for public view,” Herr Röll told me as he carefully placed the items on the table between us. There was a cardboard box of tapered vials from the Serum Institute, part of the Department of Epidemic Typhus and Virus Research run by Waffen-SS doctors in camp blocks 46 and 50. In one research experiment, twenty-one of the thirty-nine prisoners tested died, which added up to, as dutifully noted in the final report, 55.5 percent of “the control group.” There were also some human body parts floating in formaldehyde, a shrunken head, and a lampshade.

The lampshade was small, probably a third the size of the object found in New Orleans, and it was crudely made, the diminutive panels stitched together with thick rawhide on a metal frame. It was grayish in color, with darker blemishes in a scattershot pattern. It was thick and bumpy to the touch. It felt inert, without animation.

“This is a fake,” I told Herr Röll.

Röll smiled. “Yes,” he said.

“It is plastic or some laminated paper.”

“Yes. Quite fake.” Röll smiled again, a knowing but somehow inscrutable smile. “But it wasn’t always fake. Once it was real. Or at least that’s what was said. In the GDR times, much was said about lampshades and everything else.”[21]

A few nights earlier, in Berlin, I’d been out to dinner with some friends who had grown up in the German Democratic Republic, aka GDR, or East Germany. They told me about the lampshade in Herr Röll’s cabinet.

“It was something they always showed you when you went on school field trips,” recalled Anetta Kahane, who was born in East Berlin in the early 1950s into an illustrious German Jewish family. Her father, Max Kahane, fought in the Spanish Civil War on the loyalist side, which was considered the gold standard of heroism in the stridently antifascist cosmology of the GDR state. Max later became head of the official GDR news service. Anetta’s mother, Doris, a well-known state-sponsored painter, was the niece of Victor Klemperer, author of the famous diaries detailing his day-to-day life in Berlin and Dresden during the Third Reich. Doris Kahane is buried in Berlin, in the same cemetery as Bertolt Brecht, in a grave alongside Herbert Marcuse. “It is the family joke,” Anetta said. “They sit there playing cards, all those old Commies.

“We were the elite, we lived in Pankow, which is where all the Party members lived, the big shots,” said Anetta, who at fifty-six still sports a wild mane of orange red hair. She is the head of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, a group that keeps track of right-wing violence in the former East Germany (Amadeu Antonio was a young Angolan immigrant murdered by neo-Nazis in 1990). “Being one of the elites you felt a special kind of pressure. Even when I was little I felt it. The Wall had just gone up, not to keep people in, but, as we were told, to keep the fascists from the West out. All the Nazis were over there, in control of the government, doing the bidding of their new American masters. The Wall was put in place to protect us, to enable the growth of the antifascist Nazi frei East German state.

“I wanted to be a good Communist girl. A perfect model of East German youth, especially at Buchenwald. In the GDR, Buchenwald was a sacred place, where the heroes of antifascist resistance rose up against the SS. My idol was Olga Benário, who was a great spy and fighter against the fascists from her teenage years. She traveled to Brazil to try to spread workers’ revolution and smoked cigarettes in a most romantic way. She was betrayed to the Gestapo and gassed in 1942, defiant to the end. To me the heroes at Buchenwald were like Olga. They seemed so impossibly brave and good. This was how I wanted to be, ten years old and totally fearless.

“Instead, when they took us to Buchenwald the very first time and I saw the lampshade, I got so upset. We were supposed to think that even though the fascists were willing to stoop to such a level that they would make lampshades out of people, this did not deter the heroes in the antifascist struggle. They battled on to victory. We were expected to follow in their footsteps. Our resolve to oppose the West was supposed to be stiffened by seeing such a miserable thing as the lampshade. Except I couldn’t stop crying.

“It was awful because I was supposed to be setting an example. We were in the vanguard. And here I was crying because I saw a stupid lampshade. The teacher had to lead me away. It was so embarrassing. I felt as if I’d let everyone down, my classmates, my family, the state, the entire glorious future of the German workers’ Utopia. My weakness had betrayed everything.

“Of course, there was this extra added factor, something I didn’t really consider at the time: being Jewish. I mean, I knew I was Jewish, but as a member of the elite, a good little Communist girl, it wasn’t something that was considered a factor. My mother and father rarely talked about it. Good commies didn’t. Why would they? In the GDR there was really no such thing as being Jewish. Judaism was a religion, not a cultural or ethnic designation, and there being no religion in the GDR meant there were no Jews. When we learned about the camps, Jews were not mentioned. Persecution of Poles, yes, Hungarians, yes. Not Jews. It was a shadow existence. Besides, there were so few Jews left in Berlin. They were all dead.

“But that day they showed us the lampshade—the fake lampshade—I think I remembered who I was, a Jew in Germany. Because none of the other children were crying, not the way I was.”

To make sense of the lampshade inside Herr Röll’s cabinet, my friends in Berlin told me, it was essential to understand Buchenwald’s pivotal position in the “foundation myth” of the late GDR, how in the East German version of events, the camp was not freed by Patton’s army but rather “self-liberated” by the prisoners themselves under the command of the red kapos, the Communist leadership of the inmate underground. It was these men, people like Ernst Busse, the “camp senior number two” in charge of the infirmary; Robert Siewert, head of the construction detachment; and Hans Eiden from the prison clothing department, guided by the inspiration of the murdered Ernst Thälmann, leader of Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), who drove the fleeing SS from the camp on April 11, 1945, at precisely 3:15 in the afternoon, the time memorialized to this day by the stopped clock on the camp gatehouse. The Americans may have been around but played no part in the liberation.

More than fifty thousand people died at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945, but in the GDR the camp was not a symbol of inhuman behavior, but rather a scene of triumphant struggle, a crucible of fire from which emerged a wholly new Germany. The Hitler years were spoken of as a catastrophe that had engulfed the unblemished People like a plague of unknown origin. That any individual of the steadfastly antifascist multitudes living in the East might have taken part in Third Reich activities was considered an impossibility.

“This was the kind of thinking that we grew up with in the GDR,” said Harry Stein, a lank-haired, sober, fiftyish man who has been the official historian at the camp since the early 1980s. “But we have learned, very much the hard way, that the truth is a good deal more complicated than that.

“The GDR was not what could be called a real country in the traditional sense,” Stein explained in his office down the hall from Herr Röll’s cabinet. “It was a product of political negotiation, a construction. We were different than the other East Bloc states under Soviet control. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the others were existing countries, with a distinct culture and history of their own before the war. This was the bedrock of the country over which Communism was placed.

“But what was the foundation of the GDR? Of course we had the German culture. The great German culture. But look where it had led us—to National Socialism. This was an unacceptable past, painful and self-incriminating. Something else had to be worked out.” What needed to be done, Stein said, was to make another Germany, a phoenixlike place that might rise from the ashes as a wholly new thing. But a nation cannot come from nothing. So “the myth of the heroic red kapos was invented, right here at Buchenwald,” Stein said.

While never less than polite, Stein ran through his thoughts on the lampshade with a dutiful brusqueness. It was his conclusion that lampshades of human skin were indeed made at Buchenwald, although in far fewer number than often talked about. Proof was far from conclusive, Stein said, but he believed that Ilse Koch had given her husband, Karl, such a lampshade, constructed in the pathology block, for his birthday in 1939.

“This was something of a fad among the SS wives,” Stein said. “They were very intrigued with the research Dr. Wagner was doing on the tattooed men.” As for Ilse Koch actively selecting individuals to be skinned, however, Stein was dubious. “What must be understood was that Buchenwald was run like a kingdom under the Koch family. Karl was the king and his wife was the queen. People like to please the queen. The queen doesn’t necessarily have to be an active participant. But it seems, according to the witnesses, as if Ilse Koch did give a human skin lampshade to Karl Koch and everyone applauded because it was such a wonderful gift.” As a caveat, Stein added that Karl Koch’s reputation for cruelty and corruption was widespread, “so wherever Koch went, stories like the lampshade came up.”

This did not mean that the lampshade was an insignificant item, Stein said. “As a symbol it had great power, and as you are telling me, it still does.” The Allied forces were certainly well aware of its value. There were reports of an American soldier who had “gone through the entire camp” looking for lampshades to ship back to the States, but no record was kept of what he found and what might have happened to the objects. Stein wondered if perhaps the shade found in New Orleans could be one of those.

In any event, Stein admitted with apologies that he found it difficult to focus on items like the lampshade. He was in the midst of compiling a complete list of all those who had met their death at Buchenwald. In the past several months he’d assembled as much information as possible on over forty thousand people. There were several thousand to go.

“I am so up to my neck in death, if you came and put that lampshade from New Orleans on my desk, it would hardly register.”

This was a response I’d heard several times before. In New York, one survivor said, “I have a head full of terror and what do you show me? A lampshade. I have more miserable memories in my pinkie finger than a hundred lampshades.”

Yet when it came to discussing the lampshade in Herr Röll’s cabinet and the circumstances surrounding it, Harry Stein sighed distressed. As “a GDR boy,” he’d taken those field trips to Buchenwald, been shown the lampshade and the shrunken heads, and never once had it occurred to him that they were not real.

“Perhaps a historian, even a young historian, should be more skeptical,” Stein said. He then explained how his faith in the GDR version of the Buchenwald story began to unravel.

“When I first came here during the 1980s, I was a firm believer in the official version. I revered the red kapos and came to know several of them personally. To me they were the old lions. Wonderful, wonderful men. I respected them tremendously.”

Yet as he began to research the camp history, especially with the fall of the Wall, the inconsistencies became too pronounced to ignore. Stories of how several of the red kapos had been accused of collaborating with the SS to maintain their positions of power inside the camp structure, charges long suppressed by GDR authorities, began to surface. In writing his guide to the permanent historical exhibition, certainly the most complete, and corrective, update of Eugen Kogon’s The Theory and Practice of Hell, Stein was dismayed to find that founding “heroes” like Ernst Busse, Walter Bartel, Harry Kuhn, and others had exercised their kapo powers over their fellow prisoners in ruthless and corrupt ways, often convicting “real or alleged traitors” in kangaroo courts or, in Busse’s case, wielding “power over life and death” in the inmates’ infirmary.

“I found these revelations difficult to accept at first,” Stein said. “But that is a historian’s job, isn’t it? To shatter illusions, even if they are your own.”

So it was with the lampshade Stein and so many other GDR children had been shown as evidence of Nazi brutality. Shortly after the Wall came down, the shade was sent to Frankfurt for testing. It didn’t take long for the scientists to determine that it was fake. “Another false symbol,” Stein said, sourly.

Nothing, however, affected him as much during this period as “the confrontation with the bones.”

In 1989, one of the camp workmen came to see him. “He said, ‘If you care so much about the dead, why don’t you do something about those bodies in the woods beyond the storage house?’ This was news to me. I never heard of any bodies out in the woods, so we went out there to look. That’s when we found the bones.”

In a small booklet entitled Buchenwald: A Tour of the Memorial Site that he wrote with his wife, archivist Sabine Stein, is a description of what came to be called Special Camp No. 2, one of several internment facilities maintained by Soviet forces in Germany during the aftermath of the war. It was “hardly four weeks after the last survivors” left the camp that Buchenwald once again “became a place of isolation and death for another four and a half years.”

Noting that the “anti-Nazi policy” of the Soviets was “put in practice in a Stalinist way and distorted the process of denazification,” the Steins write that even though many interned in the special camp had “worked on low and intermediate levels of the NSDAP… a larger number of the persons came to the camp because they had been denounced, taken for somebody else or arrested in an arbitrary way.” Of the estimated 28,000 people who would suffer “from overcrowding, vermin, and cold in the barracks” at Special Camp No. 2 from 1945 to 1950, 7,113 would die there, their bodies tossed into mass graves without notification to their families.

“During the GDR it was a tremendous taboo to talk about such things, so the existence of these graves was unknown. There were rumors, but I didn’t believe them. I never imagined the Soviets would do a thing like that.”

Then the historian who dealt with so much death on a daily basis rubbed his brow. He was choked up, close to tears.

“I remember the day I went out there, to where the bodies were. The ground was soft from all the leaves that had fallen from the trees and rotted away. You didn’t have to dig very deep to find what was left. That is when it truly struck me, as I stood in the forest confronting the bones… I was a historian, writing essays, attempting to be authoritative, complete. And right here, no more than a few hundred meters from my office, was this, all this new horrible history. A completely other chapter of cruelty. It was death on top of death, layers of fear and terror.

“I realized I would have to go back to the beginning again. To check everything again. To check and recheck…”

It was past six o’clock and already dark and cold, a German dark and cold, when I look the number 6 bus down the Blood Road away from Buchenwald. I didn’t feel like going back into the hotel, shutting myself away in that little room quite yet, so I walked down Schopenhauerstrasse, past the Bahnhof, to the Internet café near Ernst-Thalmannstrasse. There were a couple of emails waiting for me from Skip Henderson: more photos of houses on top of cars, pleas for more bottles of Manhattan Special espresso soda, and a rant about how the fools in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, still refused to allow the unveiling of the tombstone of Tommy Johnson, avatar of the highways 49 and 61 crossroads, even though Bonnie Raitt, a bona fide white person, had paid for it. Amended to that was further news of the Bus and Skip’s unending quest to find jobs for America’s Least Wanted.

“Sometimes you just have to shake your head,” Skip wrote. “The other day I got the Bus parked out by the mission near St. Charles and this kid, like 17 or something, comes in with ‘fuck bitches’ tattooed on his face. The ‘fuck’ is under one eyebrow and ‘bitches’ under the other. I took one look at him and said, ‘now why you want to make my life harder like that?’ The kid kind of hung his head. I guess he had some second thoughts about the ink. He said that sometimes he’d walk into a store about to ask for a job and wouldn’t even get to open his mouth before they said, ‘no.’ Nothing else. Just no.

“I told him not to worry because I was going to get him a job. I would get him a damn job if it was the last thing I did. ‘This is our city’ I told him, ‘we got to work together on this thing.’ The kid looked at me like I was one more crazy white man, so I tried to break it down for him. I told him to look at himself, with the ‘fuck bitches’ and the white T-shirt, and the Yankee cap on his head. Didn’t that look like someone who needed to have a little money in his pocket? He nodded, sure, everyone needs a little money in their pocket. So I asked him question two: didn’t he look like someone who if he couldn’t get that money by working a nice, safe job would instead be out in the street trying to get that money some other way? He didn’t get that part of it, so I asked him, ‘who would you rather meet in a dark alley, me, or you?’ The kid said, if I put it that way, he could see my point. He didn’t want to rob and steal, he was trying to be a good citizen and build a better New Orleans. So I sent him out on some jobs in the back of the house of some restaurants, where the public doesn’t see you. I got him signed up for cooking school. I told him to forget about the ‘fuck bitches,’ to wear sunglasses.”

That Skip, I thought, he was a great New Orleanian, a great American, always trying to raise the level of hope among the hopeless. His second email, however, was not so uplifting.

Dated a day later it began, “Mark. What the hell are you doing with that lampshade? You have got to get rid of it. Now! It is driving me insane.” Skip detailed another dream he’d had. He’d woken up after the storm to find himself on top of the A-frame roof of a house. “It was just me on top of the roof,” Skip wrote. “I knew the water was coming up. But it wasn’t water. It was lampshades! A sea of lampshades bobbing up and down like shark fins. Circling, closing in! So save me, brother. Save me!”

This email pissed me off. Skip lays the lampshade on me and now I’m supposed to exorcise his guilty dreams? But I knew what he meant. The tide was rising, inside my mind.

Leaving the Internet place, walking around Weimar, I thought Harry Stein was right. When it came to Buchenwald, it was best not to make assumptions. Just because seven thousand bodies were found dumped into a mass grave didn’t mean there weren’t more, maybe thousands more, a hundred feet away. The hand of malevolence was on the place, it could never be redeemed, if that’s what the GDR history makers were trying to do. The truth would never be found here. In the early 1950s, when the Soviets handed the place over to the GDR, the idea was to make Buchenwald into “a place of solemn memory.” To that end, the first thing they did was knock down most of the camp, save the crematorium, the SS barracks, and the pathology blocks. Several years later, many of the old barracks were reconstructed to serve as a set for the state-produced film Naked Among Wolves (Nackt unter Wölfen), the story of how heroic red kapos banded together to hide and protect a young boy smuggled into the camp by his father. Naked Among Wolves was originally written as a novel by former Buchenwald inmate Bruno Apitz. The movie version, mandatory viewing for all citizens, was presented as fact. The use of the rebuilt camp, it was said, added to the story’s “authenticity.”

Weimar itself has been renovated. Left to decay under the GDR, a cash influx of over $700 million had since transformed the town into a classical fantasyland, and it was while strolling from Puschkinstrasse back toward Lisztstrasse behind the Bauhaus Museum that I ran into the Nazis. I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned. “World Heritage Site” or not, Weimar was a “brown” (as in “Nazi”) town. Always had been, maybe always will be. Neo-Nazis lived in the old East German housing blocks and out in the suburbs, places like Apolda and Magdala. Garages where Trabants, the old East German—made, underpowered, smoke-belching sedans, once sat are often filled with the music of bands like Kommando Freisler, who sing children’s folksongs with lyrics about how “in Belsen” we hang them by the neck, and how Judenhaut is only good for Lampenschirme, fidiralala, fidiralala, fidiralala. There have been hundreds of documented violent incidents involving neo-Nazis and other far-right groups in Thuringia since reunification.

This was what happens, people in Berlin said, when twelve years of National Socialism is immediately followed by forty years of neo-Stalinist clampdown with Stasi microphones under every pillow, when phony socialist Utopia abruptly gives way to grim post-industrial, capitalist reality. In the West they had six decades of post-Nazi Vergangenheitsbewältigung, another of those ingenious German word-phrases meaning roughly “working one’s way through the past.” In the East there was no such process. Here there was only the stolid cult of the New Man and polluted rivers. The past was off-limits, left to fester like a piece of cheese ripening under glass for forty-five years. When the lid came off the Pandoran nastiness, it was best to stand back.

Not that the Nazis—there were four of them, tramping up Lisztstrasse right toward me—were immediately identifiable as such.

Only a few blocks from here, on January 15, 1933, days before becoming chancellor, Hitler addressed ten thousand cheering people in the Marktplatz in front of the Hotel Elephant. Those were the Nazis I knew, chinstrap-straight Aryans in the thrall of their master’s voice. Also recognizable would have been those twenty-two skinheads and their fraus who, on July 24, 1994, according to an Associated Press account, attacked the Buchenwald camp “shouting ‘Sieg Heil,’ giving the stiff-armed Hitler salute, and threatening to burn ‘with their own hands’ a woman who works at the camp.”

But as for the young men in front of me, it was hard to tell. Sometimes present-day Nazis announce themselves with brand loyalty to their preferred gegen, or fighting apparel. Favorites are Thor Steinar and Lonsdale—the latter a familiar soccer club T-shirt logo that, with a jacket worn over it, can be arranged so only the letters N, S, and D show, for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche. On Lisztstrasse, however, these self-signifiers were nowhere in sight. Under the streetlights the Nazis presented as merely generic-looking punks, black hoodies pulled down over the brims of baseball hats, low-slung jeans, Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers. At this distance it was nearly impossible to distinguish them from the “antifa,” or “antifascist” left-wing youth, who also wear black hoodies, low-slung jeans, and Converse.

“This is because there is the antifa and the anti-antifa, two sides of a coin,” I would later be told by a man who chose to call himself Hans, which he said was “a perfect German name, straight from the earth, dripping with blood, soil, and beer.”

Raised in “a big, soft-with-money Nazi family” in West Germany, as a teenager Hans found himself more at home with the disgruntled youth in the shabby outlying neo-Stalinist housing projects in East Berlin “Ossie” suburbs like Marzahn and Lichtenberg.

“It started with the music,” Hans said. “Real good hard-core fuck-the-world music. I wanted to know how they felt, to be at the bottom of the barrel, unloved and wondering why. I saw how it worked with these people. Their parents filled their heads with the commie bullshit. At school was the reunification bullshit. The TV had the American buy-this, buy-that bullshit. But over there, in the corner, was Grandpa. He was an old man now, sick. No one paid much attention to him. But he once was a Wehrmacht soldier, a defender of the Reich. Smart in his uniform on the bloody front. And when he talked about those days, it was not bullshit. It was about another time, when there was something to believe in, when the world was there for the taking.

“I felt, this makes sense,” said Hans, who joined up with a variety of hard-right groups. “I stayed with them for years but could not continue. Maybe I wasn’t desperate enough, maybe it became clear that the right wing politicians were as corrupt as anyone else. Maybe I met some of those people I was supposed to hate, even Jews, and I found they weren’t all the same like I’d thought. I even liked some of them. But mostly it was the violence. I didn’t want to walk into a room blind drunk and be helpless to stop my finger from pulling a trigger as I shouted, ‘Heil Hitler.’”

Now entering his thirties, long frizzed mullet grown onto his formerly shaved skull, Hans said it was the “stupidity of the state” that gave the right-wing anti-antifa no choice but to dress in the exact same way as the left-wing antifa.

“The Hakenkreuz and everything else are banned,” Hans explained. “If you are seen with a swastika, you are put in jail. So it is best to go out dressed plainly.” At first many of the right-wing youth resented this curtailment of their so-called self-expression, but they soon realized this “plain dress” annoyed the left-wing youth.

“When we heard the antifa were in their bars and squats, angry that we were supposed to be copying them, that was great. Anything that made them mad, the stupid arrogant fuckers. If the antifa made a decal saying, ‘Good Night, White Pride,’ with cartoons in the middle, the anti-antifa made the same thing with ‘Good Night, Left Side’ and Mario from Donkey Kong in the middle.”

It made sense, Hans said, because when it came to the most militant members of the antifa and the anti-antifa, there wasn’t all that much difference between the two. “They all hate capitalism, say they will do anything to save the planet from big business and pollution, and want Israel blown off the map. They might have completely different reasons, but this is what they want. But what they really want to do is fight. Punch each other in the head.”

There was one sure way to tell the difference between the antifa and anti-antifa, Hans said, pulling up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. “You look at the skin. Then you know.”

He was covered with tats, had at least twenty, he said. On his arms was some of the typical Nazi stuff, a Celtic cross along with other runic geometry, and a bunch of gothic-lettered tributes to black metal bands including “an old one” honoring Absurd, whose leader, Hendrik Möbus, was jailed following a pilgrimage to West Virginia, where he was photographed exchanging Hitler salutes with late white nationalist William Pierce, author of the apocalyptic Nazi novel The Turner Diaries. On his back, Hans said, he had a six-inch-wide swastika and the head of Geronimo, owing to his longtime infatuation with Native Americans, whom he regarded as more legitimate pagan souls than the greasy-bearded Wotanists revered by most neo-Nazis. Running his hand over the black sun imprinted on his forearm, Hans said it was a problem, what to do with these things once you stopped believing in them.

Talk of tattoos got us onto the lampshade. Hans said lampshades were something of a coming thing in the German right-wing underground. He still had contacts around the black metal music scene, where “you hear people go on about lampshades, getting their hands on one. Buying one or even making them.” Not that Hans believed this was anything more than “big talk.” Personally he’d never seen a lampshade, even a fake, and that was okay since the whole idea gave him “the creeps.”

“Maybe that’s what we’re all doing,” Hans allowed with a shrug, pulling down his sleeves. “Preparing ourselves to be made into lampshades.”

As for the Nazis in Weimar, I need not have worried about them, Hans said. “They wouldn’t have known you in a thousand years.”

This was true. After all, my nose is big, a definite honker, but it isn’t that big; it doesn’t quite hook like the Shylock beaks in Goebbels’s Expressionist propaganda posters. Nor was I hunched over like an insect under a soiled prayer shawl. I held no visible puppet strings by which I controlled the reins of international capital. In 1937 the race scientists at nearby Jena University might have applied their phrenological calipers to my cranium, so as to suss out my dirty secret. In bathrooms, storm troopers bearing bright gooseneck lamps would have homed in on my foreskinlessness, pointing with black-gloved fingers at the undeniable proof. But this being now I could pass. The approaching neo-Nazis might know chapter and verse of every Elder of Zion conspiracy, but it was all abstraction, stuff pulled off the Internet from right-wing sites in America. Seinfeld was on the TV, but how many real Jews had these would-be Übermenschen really seen, in the flesh? There were never very many Jews in Thuringia to begin with, and the original Nazis had managed to reduce that number from an estimated 4,500 to 450. In the GDR, if Jews appeared in the history books at all, it was as “victims,” a “victim” being the lowest of concentration camp inmates, below “resistance fighters” and passive “mere survivors.” It was a pejorative thing, to be called “a victim.” Neo-Nazis often addressed their targets as “you victim” before stomping them.

Years ago a good friend of mine was on his deathbed. A grand, knock-around Heeb of the beatnik variety, once Muhammad Ali’s press agent, friend of Norman Mailer and Bugsy Siegel, he would die within the hour. He asked me to place my ear close to his mouth because, after a life of raconteur patter, he couldn’t talk above a whisper. He said he had two last things to say. The first was to ask me if I’d brought a joint because if he was going to die, he might as well go out higher than a kite. The second was a regret.

“I regret I never killed a Nazi,” my friend said.

I knew what he meant, of course. When we were kids, it was another schoolyard Holocaust topic along with the lampshades: if you saw the baby in the carriage and you knew it would grow up to be Hitler, would you strangle it or not? It was a strange image, nine-year-olds from Queens with their hands around the neck of a baby, but we all swore our unwavering willingness to do it. But these Nazis? These latter-day street punk malcontents on Lisztstrasse? These anti-antifas? Would it have been worth it to strangle them in their cribs?

We passed each other without so much as a nod, ships in the night. They didn’t know me, I didn’t know them. They were probably too busy dreaming of pummeling Indian merchants and throwing a rock through the window of a kebab shop to care about this big-nose Jew. It was another one of those universalist/particularist problems. If Nazis weren’t trying to kill you and turn you into a lampshade, this had to be progress, right?

TWELVE

I was in Mannheim, fifty miles south of Frankfurt, talking to Daniel Strauss, whose father, Heinz, or “Pappo,” was a Buchenwald prisoner from the summer of 1944 until the end of the war. “He was there, and before that in Auschwitz, when he was a teenager,” Daniel said of his father, now in his eighties and quite frail. “But he never talked about it. Except at night, when we heard him screaming from the nightmares.

“As a child, it scared me when he yelled,” recalled Daniel, a balding, friendly man in his fifties. A scholar and activist, the younger Strauss runs the Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma Baden-Württemberg, an organization dedicated to preserving the culture and history of the Sinti and Roma, people commonly, and pejoratively, known as Gypsies.

“‘What, Pappo?’ I’d ask him. ‘What do you see?’ But he would never tell me. He said it was better if I didn’t know.”

Author of such articles as “Between Romanticisation and Racism, 600 Years of Sinti and Roma in Germany,” Daniel, a Sinti, says no group besides the Jews were as systematically terrorized during the Third Reich as the so-called Gypsies. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws expressly forbid Sinti and Roma people from marrying or having sexual relations with Germans. In 1936 the Nazis instituted a campaign that sought to make Berlin “Gypsy-free” for the Olympic Games. In 1938, with the opening of the Reich Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace, concentration camp internment escalated, with many imprisoned in the so-called Zigeunerlager (“Gypsy camp”) at Auschwitz, where they became favorite subjects for Josef Mengele’s race-based experiments. It is estimated that somewhere between 250,000 and half a million Sinti and Roma died in the camps. In the Romany language the period is called Porrajmos, or “the Great Devouring.”

According to Daniel, Pappo’s transfer to Buchenwald from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 almost certainly saved his life. Only days after his departure, the remaining prisoners at the Zigeunerlager, nearly three thousand people, were gassed in a single night. But it wasn’t until 1995, when Daniel went with his father to observe the fiftieth anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation, that Pappo decided to talk about his experiences during the war.

“I’ll tell you once and don’t ask me again,” Pappo said. Seizing what he knew to be a singular personal moment, Daniel decided to make a video recording of Pappo telling his story. Beginning with a long segment of the old man playing the piano, his camp tattoo visible throughout, Daniel’s video is a touching treatise on the nature of cultural survival. If you’re in Mannheim someday, perhaps you might be lucky enough to see it.

Eventually Pappo told Daniel about his nightmares. “There were a lot of them,” Daniel said. “People being shot in the back of the neck, hung, so many terrible things happened there.” But one image appeared more than others.

“It was a woman. The Kommandant’s wife… Frau Koch,” Daniel said. She regularly invaded Pappo’s dreams, more often than not coming out of nowhere on her horse, riding crop in hand. The lampshade also haunted Pappo. “Ilse Koch and her lampshades.”

This was curious, since it seemed unlikely that Pappo had ever seen Ilse Koch, on horseback or not. If he arrived at Buchenwald in April 1944, that was three years after Karl Koch’s transfer to Lublin and a year after Konrad Morgen’s investigation at the camp, during which time Ilse Koch continued to live in the so-called Villa Koch but was rarely seen in public by the prisoners. Her horseback riding days were long over.

Yet one hesitated to assign these dreams wholly to Pappo’s imagination. At the Buchenwald reunion a number of other prisoners, some Sinti and some not, spoke of similar nightmares. “Ilse Koch and the lampshade, several of them mentioned this,” Daniel said. Albert Rosenberg, who had been at the camp only after its demise, had said a similar thing in far-off El Paso, Texas. Ilse Koch was in his nightmares, too. “A beast of a woman,” he called her.

When I asked Daniel if I might talk to Pappo, he was not encouraging. The elder Strauss had been in the hospital. He was very weak. Daniel feared it might be too stressful for him to talk about the camp days. Moreover, as far as Pappo was concerned, the Nazis had never gone away. Until quite recently, following the family tradition, he had continued to go around Germany operating his swing carousel, a staple attraction at Sinti traveling carnivals. The carousel appears, quite poignantly, in the final scenes of Daniel’s video. Pappo sits with Daniel’s young son in a seat of the swing, going round and round, an inviolate symmetry of cultural endurance. But there were always problems from the neo-Nazis, mostly skinheads, who would attack the Sinti carnivals. On a number of occasions Pappo had been beaten up and his carousel vandalized. Eventually, Daniel said, he and the rest of Pappo’s kids convinced him to give up traveling because it was too dangerous.

Still, Daniel said he’d ask his father if he minded talking about Buchenwald and the lampshade. If such a thing really existed, it would be “important” to talk about. “It is something you don’t ever want to show anyone but you want everyone to see,” Daniel said. Sometime later, however, I heard that Pappo, after several nights of bad dreams, had passed away.

“He died with that woman in his head,” Daniel said.

Perhaps Diane Saltzman from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum had been half right after all. The lampshade might not be a myth, as she claimed, but it certainly was mythic. It had a life of its own quite apart from any conventional notion of physical reality. This went double for its spiritual creator, its most-cited progenitor, Ilse Koch. Routinely included in Internet polls as one of the ten most evil women ever, along with Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian serial killer; Irma Grese, the vicious Nazi prison guard at Ravensbrück; and Isabella I of Spain, enabler of both Columbus and the inquisitor Torquemada, die Kommandeuse had entered what the French social philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, a colleague of Henri Bergson’s and Émil Durkheim’s, who died of dysentery at Buchenwald in March 1945, called “the collective memory,” which “need not be exact” but nonetheless “carries a prestige reality does not possess.”

Jorge Semprún, another Buchenwald prisoner who almost certainly never laid eyes on Ilse Koch, calls up her image in his novel The Long Voyage, published in 1963, more than thirty years before Literature or Life. Following long descriptions of the brutal train ride to Buchenwald, Gerard, Semprún’s narrator, finds himself in a small-town café ten years after liberation with Sigrid, a young, “beautiful” German woman with “short hair and green eyes.”

Gerard has questions, things he needs to know from Sigrid. Just who is she, what were her parents doing ten and twenty years ago? Perhaps she is the daughter of “Dr. Haas,” a “Gestapo character.” She puts out her cigarette and asks, “Why are you treating me like this?” Her father was not “Dr. Haas,” he was not in the Waffen-SS, not any Totenkopf. Gerard keeps on, saying well, of course Sigrid’s father could not have been a Nazi “because there were never any Nazis.”

She shrugs this off, says he’s drunk, inquires why he is “sad.” It is the dim openness of the question, the alluring naiveté of her green-eyed face, that makes Gerard wonder: could it possibly be that Sigrid truly doesn’t know about the hangings on Sunday afternoons in the Ettersberg woods, “beside the electrified barbed wire, the village beneath its quiet smoke, the winding road and the green, fertile Thuringian plain”?

Then they are in each other’s arms, entwined in what Gerard calls “the burning tension… between the weight of this past and the refusal to remember this past.” Her face is “smooth,” “polished,” and “eternally fresh,” as if “washed by centuries of slow, Nordic rains.” Her body is “perfectly suited for the appetite of juvenile perfection which vibrates within each of us.” It is a face and body, Semprún writes, that has been “reproduced tens, perhaps thousands of times in the women’s magazines” as if only “to make us forget the body and face of Ilse Koch, that straight, stocky body planted solidly on her straight, sturdy legs, that harsh, sharp, incontestably German face.”

Years after liberation, Gerard is still held captive by the image of Ilse Koch, with her “iron gray eyes” fixed on the naked torso of her human prey, her gaze “already cutting out that white, sickly skin along the dotted lines of the tattoo which had caught her attention… picturing those bluish lines, flowers or sailing ships, or snakes… on parchment-like skin.” It is the picture of Ilse Koch, “reclining on a couch” surrounded by adoring Waffen-SS officers, all of them bathed in the post-human light of her lampshades, that must be banished, Gerard says, if he will ever fully return to the living.

It is not unlike the drama Semprún will write about thirty years later in Literature or Life, the story of how Albert Rosenberg, a.k.a. “Rosenfeld,” saved him from limbo. The hope here is that Sigrid (and who knows how many Sigrids before and after) with the softness of her unmarked skin will somehow rescue Gerard/Semprún from das radikal Böse of Ilse Koch’s echoing laughter as she surveys her lampshade collection, “gathered like shells at the seashore on a weekend,” restoring the narrator to a world where love and untainted sex are possible.

Many people of the post—World War II generations got their first look at Ilse Koch, or at least her facsimile, in one of the now vanished movie theaters on New York’s Forty-second Street and in similar “grind houses” throughout the United States. Few films outsleazed Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Shot on the set of the cheery prisoner-of-war camp television comedy Hogan’s Heroes and starring the spectacularly endowed 37D-22-35 Dyanne Thorne, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS takes a number of liberties with the Ilse Koch story.[22]

Far too immoderate a presence to be a mere Kommandant’s spouse, Thorne’s Ilsa functions as a Nazi Dr. Moreau, serving as both the Kommandoführerin and head doctor of Medical Camp No. 9. With this expanded portfolio, Ilsa eschews such ho-hum Third Reich medical practices as mass sterilization in favor of pet projects like a series of experiments bent on proving that women can tolerate more pain than men. While the apparent goal of breeding a race of Ilsa-like dominatrix Amazons to serve in the front ranks of the Reich’s push for world domination remains unfulfilled, the tests do allow for a few extended, sapphically oriented S&M scenes. By night, Ilsa, an allpurpose Hexe when it comes to the unholy mixing of sex and death, orders male prisoners to her swastika-bedecked boudoir. Those who do not satisfy her are killed or merely castrated, depending on how close they bring her to orgasm.

Since Chaplin first pranced with his globe in The Great Dictator, mockery of Nazi leaders has been a staple of American popular culture. Why simply have a sleepy village attacked by zombies when you can dress the undead in SS uniforms and make them Nazi zombies? Few Reich figures, however, have provided as much cartoon mileage as Ilse Koch. Although offering few of the “fascinating fascist” contradictions inherent in a dashing character like Leni Riefenstahl, the plump Dresden secretary still supplies much fertile study territory to those seeking to explore the male fantasies that suffuse both the rise and fall of the Reich. Scholars like Alexandra Przyrembel, in her aptly titled essay “Transfixed by an Image: Ilse Koch, the ‘Kommandeuse of Buchenwald,’” say Koch got a raw deal because she was one of the few recognizable females in the Nazi Party. The point appears irrefutable. Is it any surprise that in 1951, with so many high-ranking Nazis already restored to positions of economic and political power, Ilse Koch was again sentenced to life imprisonment in a German court where she was described as a “diabolical female,” a “red-headed cocotte,” and a “robot of cruelty”? When the defendant broke down in her cell, sobbing, “I am guilty! I am a sinner!” Time magazine tastefully described the scene by saying “the fat-faced Bitch of Buchenwald… no longer the doll-eyed ruminant, collapsed in a hysterical heap.” Who, after all, could be a better scapegoat than Ilse Koch? Shortly after her conviction, Neues Deutschland, the Party-approved East Zone newspaper, wished good riddance to the “symbol of that period of the deepest disgrace and humiliation of all decent Germans.” But the transfixing image of Ilse Koch, like the lampshade, did not disappear. The cartoon was too compellingly drawn to fade away.

Reached at her Las Vegas home, Dyanne Thorne, now in her seventies and “busier than ever,” says she knew “very little” of Ilse Koch when she agreed to take the Ilsa part. “I knew she was something of a despicable psychopath, a totally terrible person. I knew something about the lampshades. We read about that in the newspapers when we were little. That scared me, the idea I was going to be her.

“But I didn’t choose Ilsa, she chose me,” said Thorne, whose credits include Sin in the Suburbs, Blood Sabbath, The Swinging Barmaids, and Hellhole. “I studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. We all wanted to play Shakespeare, to be Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire. But Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS was what I was offered. That is the way the business works. Say what you want, but it was a starring role and I wasn’t going to turn my nose up at that. I’ve taken some flak over the character. A few people stopped talking to me. There were stares in the supermarket. But I never saw Ilsa the way others did. I always thought of her as a female James Bond, an exotic woman of action. It is the responsibility of the actor to see a character from different sides, to be aware of the saving grace in them.”

Remembering afternoons inside the sticky-floored Selwyn Theatre on Forty-second Street when I sat between snorers and outpatients watching Ilsa dribble through a golden shower scene with a snivelingly kinky SS general, I wondered what Dyanne Thorne, who seemed like a very nice person, found to be Ilsa’s saving grace.

Thorne laughed. “Well, she is a very strong-minded individual. A strong woman character. That’s what you get when you take out the politics, isn’t it? A woman who’s in charge. Someone who scares the hell out of the men. Don’t look at her the wrong way or she’ll pull your skin off—that’s power. That’s Medea. Catherine the Great. I never imagined that Ilsa was something anyone would want to emulate. She isn’t what you might call a role model. That’s one reason I insisted Ilsa die at the end. She has to get what is coming to her.

“Still, Ilsa has been good to me. I get so many fan letters! I can’t even answer them all. Fans send me such lovely artwork, pictures of me as Ilsa. What imaginations they have! I’m always flying to one film convention or another. We just got back from the Cleveland Cinema Wasteland convention. Everyone was so nice to us. They treat me like a homecoming queen. Maybe that is Ilsa’s saving grace: I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or what, but she makes people happy. Strange as it sounds, Ilsa is a beloved character.”

Since her last film appearance in 1987, playing James Belushi’s deeply cleavaged transsexual father in Real Men, Thorne has earned a Ph.D. in comparative religion, become an ordained nondenominational minister, and along with her husband, musician Howard Maurer, currently runs A Scenic Wedding, a Las Vegas—based wedding planning business. Billing themselves as “an alternative to chapels,” the Maurers stage what are called “fantasy weddings.”

“We’ve done them in canyons, on the shores of Lake Mead, with hot-air balloons. What I tell our clients is the only limit is your imagination,” said Thorne, describing a recent wedding she and her husband presided over in a nearby forest, on horseback. To listen to her talk about it, the wedding, with unicorn-like trappings, had a distinctly Renaissance faire feeling to it.

“On horseback, like Ilsa,” I threw in.

“We do a lot of weddings on horseback, deep in the forest; it is very popular. Everyone has a ball,” Thorne said, pointing out that, as an accomplished horsewoman, she handled all the riding and stunts in the Ilsa movie herself.

Hearing this, it was difficult not to recall “the fantasy wedding” of the real Ilse Koch, to Karl Koch at midnight in the woods behind Sachsenhausen, with the steel helmet, the rings bearing runic symbols, the bread and salt, the white-gloved SS men.

“When you marry people, do they know you were Ilsa?”

“A lot of them do,” Dyanne Thorne answered. “It’s a kick, I suppose, getting married by Ilsa… but no one has ever asked me to dress up as Ilsa to marry them.”

“Would you? If they did ask?”

Dyanne Thorne thought a moment. “Well, we’re in business to give people the wedding they want. If Ilsa is their dream wedding, I guess I’d have to think about it.”

I had an address for Uwe Köhler, Ilse Koch’s son, in Bavaria, east of Regensburg.

Born in Landsberg Prison in October 1947 following his mother’s conviction, Köhler was Ilse Koch’s fourth child. Her first three children—a son, Artwin, and two daughters, Gisela and Gudrun—were born at Buchenwald, each successive year from 1938 to 1940. It is assumed that Karl Koch was the father of these children—a cradle embossed with back-to-back Ks, donated by a local family, is in Wolfgang Röll’s special collection at Buchenwald—however there were many rumors concerning Karl Koch’s purported homosexuality, and Ilse almost certainly had a number of lovers. Prominent among these alleged paramours were the deputy camp commander, Hermann Florstedt, and the camp doctor, Waldemar Hoven.

The brutal, gawk-necked Florstedt was Karl Koch’s chief lieutenant/henchman at both Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald before replacing his disgraced boss as head of Majdanek, where he would preside over a murderous regime that set the stage for the horrific “Operation Harvest Festival,” a mass killing spree that peaked on November 3, 1943, when eighteen thousand Jews were reported to have been shot. Hoven was another sort of Nazi. Darkly handsome in a tragically Teutonic, Gregory Peck mode, the ascot-wearing Hoven traveled in the United States, where he sought a career as a Hollywood romantic actor. Failing this, he returned to Germany, joined the SS, and despite scant medical training became a camp physician. He was later convicted at Nuremberg for dispensing lethal injections to prisoners. Koch and Florstedt were shot by the Nazis as a result of the Konrad Morgen investigation; Hoven was hanged by the Allies. This makes Ilse Koch quite possibly the only woman ever to have sex with men put to death by opposite sides in a world war.

Nonetheless, in the story of Ilse Koch, the conception and birth of Uwe Köhler remains a singular event.

Prosecutors at the Dachau war crimes trial were dumbfounded when the forty-one-year-old former Kommandeuse announced in open court that she was pregnant. This seemed impossible, even for the supposedly insatiable Bitch of Buchenwald. As the only woman among the thirty-one defendants at Dachau, she had been locked up in an isolated, heavily guarded cell. The disclosure set off a tabloid firestorm. The court officers believed the father might be Josef Kirschbaum, one of the military interrogators, a Jew. Could Ilse Koch be so man-hungry that she would welcome the company of a Volk-defiling Hebrew? Joshua M. Greene in his book about the trial, Justice at Dachau, writes that Koch’s mystery lover was likely a prison kitchen worker who “dug a hole to her barracks,” tunneling his way into the arms of the Kommandeuse.

The paternity question was never settled. Koch refused to talk about it. It was as if the birth were a magic thing, the uncoiling of the malign spirit that, in keeping with the vows sworn by Ilse and Karl during their midnight wedding, dwelled in the womb of SS women.

This was some onerous existential baggage with which to begin life’s journey, I thought as I drove south through Bavaria to the town where I’d been told Uwe Köhler lived. Taken from his mother almost immediately after his birth, raised in a succession of foster homes, Köhler (Ilse Koch’s maiden name) was unaware of his parentage until shortly after his nineteenth birthday, when he saw a newspaper article headlined, “No Pardon for Ilse Koch.” Recognizing the name from his birth certificate, Köhler did some checking and in 1966 made contact with Ilse, then entering her sixteenth year of incarceration.

It was with “a creepy feeling” that he first approached the looming old Aichach prison one dank morning shortly before Christmas, Köhler told New York Times reporter David Binder in 1970. He wasn’t sure what kind of reception he would get from this person who supposedly turned men into lampshades and also happened to be his mother. As it turned out, Köhler told Binder, it was “a joyous reunion” and he began to visit Koch every month, which was all the law allowed. Insisting on her blamelessness, Koch sent her son several poems she’d written in jail. One poem, entitled “Innocence,” goes: “Still they keep me bound / counter to all justice / when guilt cannot be found…” One day, she writes, her fate will be “reversed,” with honor paid to those who were “cursed,” Hell’s torments at an end, right “installed again.”

“I always avoided talking with her about the war,” Köhler told the Times. “She said she was the victim of libels, lies and perjury but I didn’t discuss it with her further because it was painful for her… I can’t really imagine what it was like. I am not even convinced she is guiltless. I feel she just slithered into the concentration camp world like any others without being able to do anything about it.” Köhler continued to see his mother until one day in September 1967, when he arrived at the prison for his monthly visit to find that she had hanged herself in her cell the day before.

When he spoke with the Times, Köhler was twenty-three years old, “making a good living in the insurance business,” and attempting to rehabilitate his mother’s name, the prospects of which he called “practically hopeless.” After that, Köhler disappeared from public view.

Given this past, perhaps turning up on Köhler’s doorstep unannounced was a cruel thing to do. My only excuse was that I’d tried to call the number provided without success and my letter had gone unanswered. It is a reporter’s sickness, this barging in. The truth was I didn’t have any list of probing questions for Uwe Köhler. I had no right to put him on the spot. If his mother had turned men into lampshades, it was certainly no fault of his. Still, I felt a need to see him, to speak with him, if for only a moment. So much about the lampshade was fleeting, impossible to pin down. But here there was a connection, a direct line, in the blood. To stand next to Uwe Köhler might be as close as I’d ever get to Ilse Koch and whatever happened in the Buchenwald pathology lab.

I knocked. No one answered. I was thinking of leaving a note when a youngish, dark-haired man called to me from the road. He lived in the house, he said, and didn’t recognize Uwe Köhler’s name. Perhaps someone named Köhler had lived there many years ago, or resided in another house in the town. It was difficult to tell if the man was telling the truth or not. I couldn’t imagine that I was the first lampshade hunter to arrive in town looking for Uwe Köhler. Either way, it was stupid to stand out here in the rain, the man said. He managed the tavern across the road, and I should come in and have a beer.

The bar was rustic in a cozy, deeply unsettling Bavarian way. It was a lucky thing I’d come by, said the man, now standing beside his cheerful blond wife, with whom he ran the tavern. A good friend of theirs was stopping in and he was bringing his accordion; this was a real treat, they said, especially since, as they were sure I would notice, he looked “exactly like our Austrian cousin, you know, Hitler.”

A few minutes later, Mishi, a large, white-faced man wearing a denim mechanic’s jumpsuit, came through the door carrying a mother-of-pearl-inlaid accordion. I had to admit, despite his huge size and lack of mustache, he did look a little like Hitler.

We drank and chatted, aided by the bartender, acting as translator. Mishi was very put out by the ingress of immigrants into Bavaria. It wasn’t that he minded so much that “Munich is full of Arabs,” Mishi said. What bothered him was “these people do not know to act in a proper German way.” Mishi felt entitled to say this, being an immigrant himself. His family came to Bavaria from Kosovo in 1890, so he was not a native German and had never forgotten that fact. To become a “real German” was a long process. It wasn’t as easy as making out a tax return. It was a matter of blood and soul, he said, picking up his accordion.

Settling in a chair, Mishi flashed a smile and shouted, “Since four forty-five we are shooting back.” This apparently was his customary opener, the way another musician might say, “Hit it,” or count off, “1, 2, 3, 4.” Later it was explained to me that this was what Hitler said the morning the Reich attacked Poland to begin World War II: after a specious report of Polish gunfire, the Führer went on the radio to inform the Volk that as of 4:45 a.m., the German army was returning fire.

With that intro, Mishi launched into “Rivers of Babylon,” a spiritual adapted from Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, there we wept when we remembered Zion.” Mishi sang it beautifully, too, his pure tenor lifting over the squeezebox licks. Perhaps it was the odd confluence of tune and setting—the sad song of homesick Jews sung in a Bavarian bar by a man who was happy to look like Hitler—but by the time he got to the part about “so let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our heart be acceptable in thy sight,” I was a bit choked up. When he finished, I clapped and told him how much I enjoyed his performance, especially since “Rivers of Babylon” had been one of my favorite songs ever since I first heard it in the Jamaican film The Harder They Come. Adapted from the biblical original by the Rastafarian band the Melodians, the song celebrates an otherworldly kind of logic, Rastas being under the impression they are a tribe of Africans stranded in a tropical Babylon where they do not belong. The idea of former slaves, forcibly exiled from their home, inventing such a seemingly outlandish yet sanity-saving cosmology has always touched me.

“Who?” Mishi asked.

“The Melodians. From Jamaica.”

Mishi shook his head. “This is not from Jamaica. It is from Boney M.”

Boney M. I had forgotten about Boney M., the disco band put together by German entrepreneur Frank Farian, who later was the mastermind behind the black duo Milli Vanilli, the only group ever to have their Grammy Award revoked for not really singing on their records. Like Milli Vanilli, Boney M. had a visual crossover racial appeal, but their voices were electronically altered to mask any undue evidence of ethnicity. In 1978 they had had what is called a “Eurodance hit” with a cheesy version of “Rivers of Babylon” that played in every hotel bar from Scottsdale, Arizona, to Mogadishu.

Mishi was done playing. On my way out he wished me luck finding “your friend Uwe.”

Authenticity was a hell of a thing, I thought, driving across the Hitlerscape near Berchtesgaden. Were things ever as they were supposed to be?

Sixty-five years ago, as a member of the 133rd Engineers Corps attached to George Patton’s Third Army, my father came through here. His unit built numerous bridges in advance of the front lines, and by the time they came to Berchtesgaden, it was June 1945. The war was over. My father had a picture taken of himself sitting on Hitler’s balcony with the Alps behind him and sent it to my mother. My parents are both long dead, but the picture is my all-time favorite: a two-inch-square Brownie print with crinkle-cut edges showing Dad, in his uniform, puffing on his pipe, the same pipe I often saw him smoke after dinner in Flushing, Queens. It is a sunny day; the light glints off his wedding ring. You can’t miss it. On the back of the photo, my father wrote, in his familiar angular handwriting, “On Hitler’s balcony, me too, the ring is shiny, huh?”

I may have never taken the time to notice it while growing up, but my parents had a brilliant, thrilling romance. They were married only days before my father shipped out in 1944 to return to the Old Country from whence his own mother had fled the Cossacks and a whole galaxy of anti-Semites. Now he returned to help vanquish the greatest of Jew-killers. My parents’ fate, and my own, was tied up with beating the Germans, crushing them to rubble. To sit on Hitler’s balcony, smacking the ashes of his civil servant’s pipe onto the grounds where the Führer once took tea with Eva Braun, that was the payoff, a most perfect spike of the football. I look at the reflection from my father’s ring and know that, even before I was born, at least some of its glow was intended for me, his way of sharing that moment of love and triumph with the unborn son who soon would be cracking up his Plymouth station wagon on the West Side Highway.

For my night in Obersalzberg, I checked in close to the Eagle’s Nest at the Hochlenzer hotel. It was an older place, perched on the side of a hill, at forty-five euros probably the cheapest around. I could see why. While perfectly well maintained, the hotel had an eerie timelessness about it, as if nothing had changed since 1938, the year the watercolor landscapes hanging above my bed were painted. In the lobby, one photo stood out among many. Its frame bolted to the wall with heavy screws (other prints had been stolen), the picture, labeled “A. Hitler an Hochlenzer,” showed a smiling Führer looking jaunty in a double-breasted suit and fedora as he shook hands with a number of people on the patio of the hotel.

One person in the photo, a man in a corduroy jacket and lederhosen, looked familiar. He was blond and tall like the man standing beside me in the dining room of the Hochlenzer right now. “This hotel has been in the family for many, many years,” the man said, slapping down a plate of cold cuts before me, unhappy that my late arrival had required him to reopen the kitchen.

As I ate the lonely slices of Jagdwurst in the empty knotty-pine dining room, the light suspended above the table caught my eye. The lampshade, perhaps a foot high and sixteen inches across and made of a thick brown paper, was of little interest. The trim, however, the pink and gold embroidery stitching, rang a bell. It wasn’t identical to the pattern on the New Orleans lampshade, but it was close. Very close. Not that this was a great surprise. If the accoutrements of a human skin lampshade couldn’t be found here, in these mountains, where would they be? I was in the zone.

I had one more address. It was for David Duke, Louisiana’s most famous fascist. If you happen to be in possession of a lampshade possibly made in a German concentration camp that turned up in a flooded building in New Orleans after the storm of the century and you want to find someone who best personifies the psychic connection between those two points, David Duke is your man.

Over the past several years, outside of occasional sightings in the deli department of the Mandeville Winn-Dixie, Duke had all but disappeared from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. Now I was told he was residing, deliberately under the radar, a mere hour’s drive from the Eagle’s Nest. This was a switch, a Nazi hiding in plain sight amid the dampfnudeln bakeries and T-shirt shops of an Alpine tourist town rather than down a Buenos Aires back alley or deep within the Brazilian jungle.

Back to the days of Napoleon, who sold half a continent to finance a doomed attempt to conquer the world, the snake oil—drenched world of Louisiana political theater has had its outsized players, megalomaniacs of every stripe. There was Henry C. Warmoth, a Reconstruction Republican who was elected governor in 1868 at age twenty-six by a grand total of two votes and then proceeded to run the state debt from $6 million to nearly $100 million in a few short years. More recent times have included segregationist kingpins like Judge Leander Perez Sr., unchallenged ruler of the Plaquemines and St. Bernard swamplands, who in 1960 unleashed a call to action against the integration of New Orleans schools: “Don’t wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese. Don’t wait until the burr heads are forced into your schools. Do something about it now.” Then, of course, there was the Long trinity: Russell Billiu Long, who served thirty-nine years in the U.S. Senate, and his uncle Earl Kemp Long, the three-time governor and self-proclaimed “last of the red-hot poppas,” who was quoted by his occasional Boswell, A. J. Liebling, as saying he wasn’t against nobody “for reasons of race, creed, or any ism he might believe in except nuttism, skingameism or communism.” And sitting at the top of it all, Earl’s brother, the Kingfish—Huey Pierce Long, who, it is often conjectured, dreamed of overthrowing Franklin Roosevelt’s U.S. government and making himself a latter-day Napoleon of a self-styled share-the-wealth, Libertarian, downhome National Socialist state, albeit with much better food, music, and manners.

David Duke, loner son of a largely absent Shell Oil executive father and an alcoholic mother, entered this ripe tapestry as a full-blown race fascist in 1967 when, at age seventeen, having carried a copy of Mein Kampf to classes at John F. Kennedy High School in New Orleans’s Lakeview section, he first appeared in public wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. By his early twenties, Duke, the self-anointed Grand Wizard of his own Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (the KKKK), was hosting LSU campus birthday parties for Adolf Hitler while wearing a knockoff Hugo Boss SS uniform.

Duke soon smoothed these rough edges and positioned himself as a kinder, gentler, Ayn Rand—reading racialist for the post—civil rights era. Rather than one more troglodyte blocking the school door like George Wallace, here was a soft-spoken young man tricked out as a network anchor type (rumors of early-career plastic surgery earned Duke the nickname “the nose job Nazi”), a dreamboat of a National Socialist to appeal to doublewide-dwelling Frauenschaft. After a bizarre interlude during which he wrote a sex manual for women, Finders-Keepers, under the pen name Dorothy Vanderbilt, Duke ran for public office in the late 1980s, with surprising success. In 1989, campaigning as a Republican in a Metairie district adjacent to New Orleans, he was elected to the Louisiana state legislature. A year later, in a U.S. Senate primary, Duke received a shocking 44 percent of the vote, just missing a runoff with the stalwart seventeen-year incumbent, J. Bennett Johnston.

This set up one of the most phantasmagorical elections in state history, the 1991 gubernatorial “race from Hell” pitting Duke, who had astonishingly vanquished the sitting governor, Buddy Roemer, in the primary, against the coolest cucumber of all Louisiana pols, the wily, unashamedly graft-ridden three-time chief executive Edwin Edwards. Edwards’s presence in the race was something of a surprise. By the late eighties, after he was implicated in a far-reaching series of scandals involving such disparate individuals as Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans mob boss often mentioned as a possible plotter in the John Kennedy assassination, and Tongsun Park, a South Korean rice magnate accused of bribing a wide range of U.S. officials, Edwards’s political career appeared finished. According to the Shreveport Journal, the only way the former governor could get elected again would be “to run against Adolf Hitler.” In David Duke, he had the next best thing.

Matched with a canny cracker-barrelist like Edwards, Duke, never your Triumph of the Will spellbinder, came off like a cue card—reading ideologue, more Volk than folk. The election was basically over when the famous slogan “Vote for the Crook—It’s Important” began to appear on bumpers throughout the state. Zingers from Edwards, a noted philanderer—stuff like “The only thing David Duke and I have in common is we’re both wizards under the sheets”—only ran up the score. Edwards, unsurprisingly, went on to preside over an administration racked with impropriety and would eventually be jailed for racketeering. Still, Duke received 671,000 votes, including 55 percent of whites, leading the undeterred candidate to declare, “I carried my constituency.”

Duke’s electoral career peaked with the Edwards defeat. By the 1996 Senate primary he was under 12 percent and sinking fast. His regular-Christian-guy pose was blown with the 1998 publication of his seven-hundred-page autobiography, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding, in which Duke contends, among many other things, that more than 25 percent of all African Americans have “an IQ of under 75” and that the Jewish-controlled media is covering up the existence of the “Aryan gene.” Under investigation for fraud and tax evasion, he pled guilty in December 2002 to embezzling several hundred thousand dollars in donations from supporters and gambling it away in Gulf Coast casinos. He was sentenced to fifteen months in the federal lockup in Big Spring, Texas, a minimum-security prison that didn’t even have an Aryan Brotherhood, which was probably just as well from Duke’s point of view. After his release in 2005, having alienated most of his better-heeled followers, Duke relocated to eastern Europe, where, he said, he felt “more in tune with the demographic.”

The address I had for Duke turned out to be a small apartment house a few blocks from the picturesque but largely deserted (the ski season was winding down) main drag. The eight buzzers all had German names next to them and random bell pushing produced no result. Nearby an older man was playing Frisbee with a blond-haired boy about nine. “Are you looking for the American?” the old man asked. “He is there.” With that the old man unlocked the building’s door, walked up the wooden staircase, and knocked on a door.

A moment later there was Duke, coming down the staircase in a lime-green satin bathrobe, tan puffy bedroom slippers, and a bathing cap on his head. The skin on his face was red and curling; it seemed as if I’d caught him in the middle of a chemical peel.

“David Duke,” I said.

“No,” he said. “My name is Ernest Duke.” Ernest is Duke’s middle name and he sometimes signed articles as “Ernest Duke.” It was not clear if Duke preferred to be addressed as Ernest or whether he was pretending to be a wholly other person.

After a pause, Duke abandoned this tack and asked me who I was and how I’d found him. I said I was a reporter, I’d been given his address by some people in Vienna, and since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d drop in. I was writing a story on Katrina and its aftermath, and since he’d once been a hair’s breadth from occupying the Louisiana statehouse, I thought it might be interesting to hear what he had to say about the storm, from the leadership point of view. All of which was completely true, more or less.

I handed him my New York magazine card, which Duke looked over. “New York, huh?” he said. Then, he focused on my name in what appeared to be three distinct, escalating takes: Jew… Jew… JEW.

“Who gave you my address?” Duke asked again, sharper than before.

“I don’t have an ax to grind. I just want to hear views,” I offered.

“Okay,” Duke said, putting my card in the pocket of his bathrobe. “I’ll talk to you. Go down to the café at the corner. Wait there. Let me get dressed. Be a few minutes.”

The café was closed for the season, so I sat down at a metal picnic table outside and surveyed the scenery, which was copious, with mountain peaks in three directions. Small packs of bicyclists rode the sloping curve in the road, tapered spandex butts in the air. Austria. For years I couldn’t think of the place without recalling the line attributed to Arnold Schwarzenegger during his bodybuilding days: “The Germans are nothing without an Austrian to lead them.”

It was taking Duke a while to come down. I figured he was on the Internet trying to find out who I really was. The wait gave me a chance to mull over the time I’d attended a seminar for middle and high school teachers back in New Orleans on how to present Holocaust and civil rights curricula to students from backgrounds not in tune with the current thinking on these topics. The seminar leader, the estimable Plater Robinson, had invited some members of the small New Orleans Holocaust survivor community, including Anne Levy, then in her seventies but still in the Garden District antique business and very spry. Separated from her family as a young girl, and having grown up as a street urchin in the Warsaw Ghetto, Levy was very upset when David Duke began running for office. “It was like they’d come after me again,” she said when we talked.

Levy described coming face-to-face with Duke. It was during Duke’s term in the legislature; Levy was in Baton Rouge to see an exhibit about the Holocaust. “I was looking at some photos,” she recalled. “Then I see, right beside me, David Duke. The way he was standing there, his hands clasped behind his back, it was exactly the way I remembered the Germans standing in the Ghetto, when they made us line up and looked us over. Sometimes they’d pull people out of line. You never saw them again.

“‘What are you doing here?’ I yelled at Duke. He didn’t respond. It was like I wasn’t there at all. I said it again, ‘What are you doing here? Why do you want to look at pictures of something you say never happened?’

“Finally he looks at me and says, ‘I didn’t say it never happened. I said it was exaggerated.’ I guess I was yelling at him, because some cameramen started coming over. Duke started walking away, faster and faster. He didn’t want to have his picture taken with me. But I wouldn’t let him go. I started running after him. The closer I got, the faster he went. Here I am, this five-foot-tall Jewish grandma and David Duke is running away from me. They got shots of it; it was in all the papers.”

Duke was walking toward the café now. He’d changed into tight-fitting blue jeans neatly cuffed to show off a high-end pair of hiking boots. A partly zipped buckskin jacket covered a striped Ralph Lauren shirt. His blond hair, haphazardly dyed, sat on top of his head like a half-fallen soufflé. Now nearly sixty, Duke, his teeth whiter than buffed Chiclets, seemed intent on presenting the aspect of a man twenty years younger.

Duke said he didn’t know how much time he had. Even though his position in “the cause” had shifted over the years to “more of an elder statesman, an adviser, a historian and philosopher, rather than the young Turk I used to be,” he was still very busy. He wrote columns for his website, DavidDuke.com, and did a radio show three times a week with Don Black, who runs the “white rights” Stormfront site. There was also the matter of putting the finishing touches on his new book, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question, which he’d begun as part of the Ph.D. he got in history from the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management in the Ukraine.

Beyond that, there was a chance of a great sunset and Duke wanted to photograph it. “I’ve always been an amateur shutterbug,” he said, but since moving to the Alps he’d become “inspired as never before.” He was currently displaying his pictures, many of them Obersalzberg landscapes, at DavidDuke.com, where framed 20 × 28—inch prints were available for sale, each one personally autographed in “a special gold ink.”

Duke took a deep gulp of Alpine air, which he said was “the world’s finest.” There was simply something about “being around the mountains” that brought out the best in him. “Up here you feel free… You wouldn’t have anything like Katrina up here, that’s for sure.”

Katrina was a “cataclysm of race and neglect,” Duke said. “I watched those images and was heartsick to see what has happened to our country. It was like Uganda in New Orleans. As if a lovely city had been thrown back to the Stone Age. It was a massive failure of government on every level, but it was also an even more massive failure of people. Face it, black people were out of control in those streets. I have a lot of good friends on the NOPD. The stories they’ve told me you won’t believe. The public will never know the half of it because it is suppressed. The scene in the Convention Center and the Superdome was way, way worse than anyone knows. There were dozens of rapes. People were just defecating right there in their seats. Right where they sat!

“You ask me what I would have done if I was governor during the storm? What could you do, short of letting the police and military have their way with the criminals, but is that what you really want, all those people shot down in the streets? You can’t give people like Nagin and Bush a free pass, but New Orleans was so far gone before Katrina that the disaster was inevitable. It might be a dead city now but it has been dying for years. Look at the basic structures, look at the schools. Everyone says the public schools in New Orleans are bad for black kids, but they’re hell for white kids. I went to a good segregated public school in New Orleans. I got a good education. Now a white kid would be lucky to make it through a day.

“People talk about a post-racial society. You might as well call it a post-human society, because race is the natural order of things. It dictates behavior. Tell me, do you think if you had twenty thousand Anglo-Saxons in the Superdome, you would have had people acting like that? Twenty thousand Germans, twenty thousand Danish or Swedish people? You think any of that would have happened?”

There was every chance the entire American enterprise was going to go the way of New Orleans, Duke said. The white Europeans who had founded the country, built it into a great nation, were getting the short end of the stick.

He related the situation to his own criminal conviction. “They had nothing on me. The whole thing was going to be dropped. But then I made an appearance on Al-Jazeera talking about how the Iraq War was about nothing but Zionist domination of American foreign policy. It wasn’t a war about oil. It was a war about what Israel wants. A war dictated by Israel. Dictated by Israel to the American president. That’s what I said to an audience of ten million. I guess some Zionist in the State Department must have heard it and asked around, ‘What do we have on Duke?’ Then, the next thing I know, I’m arrested, facing something like twenty years in jail with the threat of an all-black jury hanging over my head. So I took the plea. I didn’t want to, but I did. That’s what happens to people who speak out against the real power structure.”

Duke had been talking for going on two hours. He’d missed his date to photograph the sunset, but no matter. The sun would go down tomorrow, too. He had a lot more to say, an anxious, even desperate need to explain himself to this Jew who dutifully wrote down most everything he said in a skinny reporter’s notebook. It was “good to talk to a Jewish man who likes to listen,” Duke said.

Which was true. There was a strange comfort in hearing Duke spin out these moth-eaten theories, these conjectures about how my people (not me, of course, but my people) were the true power behind Bush and every other asshole currently wrecking the world. After encountering the anti-antifa in Weimar, those inscrutable black-clad figures harboring who knew what newer and more opaque kind of “Ossie” fascism in their hearts, here, at least, was the Nazi I knew.

I wouldn’t say I felt sorry for him, but Duke did have a seriously hangdog aspect. It seemed a sad Dick Shawn act, shacking up in this college party resort in such close proximity to the Berchtesgaden mother lode. Was he so friendless in his secret Aryan Valhalla that he didn’t even mind opening up to a big-nosed Jew?

Duke became expansive. Did I know, for instance, that white people had settled the New World before the so-called Native Americans?

“It is called the ‘Solutrean hypothesis,’” Duke explained: “A professor at the Smithsonian Institute came up with it based on the arrowheads they’ve found. There is also a lot of genetic evidence, an overlapping between the DNA of European groups and skeletons found in America. All these years we’ve had to listen to how horrible the white race is. How much terrible stuff we’ve done. They say the white man wiped out the Indians. Well, here’s proof that it was actually the other way around.”

I asked him if he ever misses Louisiana.

“Well, I go back there a lot. I have no restraining order against me preventing it. And I do love it. I loved growing up there,” Duke said. “When we were kids, we’d string hooks with worms, dig for hearts of palm. We’d go out on little boats for days at a time. Swim with the gators. We all swam with the gators. Then you’d wake up early to see the sun rise over the water. I guess you can say I’m torn because as much as I love the bayou, I love the mountains, too. When I’m here I feel more religious than I ever have in the church. There’s so much strength in the landscape. But when it comes down to it, I’ll always be a Louisiana boy at heart.”

We’d bonded now, Duke and me. He gave me his personal number and told me to call whenever I “get a hankering.” There was only one thing left to discuss, the lampshade.

“Can’t talk about that,” Duke replied, his mood suddenly cold. “Nothing about the Holocaust.”

In the mongrelized USA, Duke could say whatever he wanted, but here in the cradle of National Socialist romance and idealism, there was no First Amendment. No license to say the first moronic thing that came into your head. It had only been a couple of years since the Austrian government had sentenced David Irving to three years in jail for maintaining there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. If you were going to “talk politics,” as Duke called it, you’d better watch your mouth.

A flock of geese flew overhead. Duke looked up. “You can see eagles here, owl eagles,” he said, noting he’d like to do more photography of Alpine bird life. Then, leaning over, Duke lowered his voice. “Those lampshades are a myth. Everybody knows that.”