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

1

The story of selling one’s soul to the devil for temporal reward has long been among the most reliable narratives in world culture, but for Goethe and his German readers it was essentially a local story, with its roots quite close to the Ettersberg forest. An early mention of “Faust” turns up in a letter sent from one Trithemius, abbot of Würzberg and noted occultist, to Johann Virdun, an astrologer in Heidelberg. Dated August 20, 1507, the letter warns against a “Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior,” who has been passing himself off as the “prince of necromancers.” Six years later, in 1513, there is a mention of a “Georgius Faustus,” who is now described as “cheiromancer,” or palm reader, supposedly operating in Erfurt, fifteen miles from Weimar. This was followed, in 1587, by the first of the “Faust books,” under the all-inclusive title History of Dr. Johann Faust, the notorious Magician and Necromancer, how he sold himself for a stipulated Time to the Devil, What strange Things he saw, performed and practised during this Time, until at last he received his well-merited Reward. A popular hit, it was widely read in Weimar, as was the later Christopher Marlowe adaption of the legend. Goethe’s version signified something of a homecoming for the Faust story.

2

Buchenwald doctor Erich Wagner, whose thesis on tattooing was supposedly read by Ilse Koch (the thesis itself appears on the Buchenwald Table, at the base of the lampshade), was brought to the United States as a prisoner of war. Escaping custody, Wagner returned to Europe, where he practiced medicine under an assumed name until he was recaptured. He committed suicide in prison in March 1959. Wagner’s work in the identification of “criminal types” seems to lean heavily on the ideas of Cesare Lombroso, the nineteenth-century Italian psychiatrist and surgeon who is generally considered to be the father of modern criminology. Born into a well-to-do Sephardic family in Verona, Lombroso believed that “born criminals” could be recognized through eugenic-based characteristics of “biological determinism” such as handle-shaped ears, hawklike noses, and insensitivity to pain. It was Lombroso’s belief that individuals displaying these signs of “atavistic stigmata” were more likely to have tattoos. Studies of the connection between tattooing and criminal activity of groups like the yakuza, Russian crime societies, and Latin American gangs are now standard police work. While gang tats can be quite elaborate, the old-style jailhouse tattoo remains an entire genre of self-branding. Most prison tats are quite primitive, owing to the meager resources at hand, with colors restricted to blue or black. Most are still done “freehand,” by a needle dipped in ink, but homemade tat machines, usually powered by a small motor and a 9-volt battery, are also common. For a wide array of what’s available to the long-term jailbird, check http://www.eviltattoo.com/pr.

3

Clarksdale, known as “The Golden Buckle of the Cotton Belt,” was the key commercial center of the Mississippi Delta, the most fertile (along with the Nile Valley) cotton growing area in the world. The concentration of cotton plantations and the later sharecropping system in the Delta did much to create the dynamic that produced African-American blues music. For an excellent overview of the social and economic conditions of the Delta at the time, see Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (Vintage, 1992). Muddy Waters’s sharecropper shack once stood on the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale until it was purchased and hauled away by the House of Blues on a flatbed truck. Many sign-waving local music fans chased after the truck screaming, “Don’t take Muddy’s house away.”

4

The monument Skip Henderson helped erect at Mount Zion Church was never intended to mark Johnson’s actual burial spot. The other “gravesites” are at the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Greenwood, Mississippi, and near the Payne Chapel Memorial Baptist Church in Quito, Mississippi. Robinsonville, a small town near the Tennessee border where Johnson lived for some years, is now home to several legalized gambling casinos with lounges mostly featuring second-string country artists, an irony the soul-selling Johnson might have appreciated.

5

NASA’s version of the Ed White spacewalk incident includes no mention of any feelings of intoxication on the astronaut’s part. It does, however, quote the astronaut as saying his extravehicular activity (EVA), which lasted twenty-three minutes, was “the most comfortable part of the mission,” and that having it end was the “saddest moment of my life.”

6

The most interesting work on New Orleans’s ever-changing geography has been done by Richard Campanella. A New Orleans resident, his books include Bienville’s Dilemma, Time and Place in New Orleans, and Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm.

7

But the bon temps does not rouler for long in the Crescent City. Only two months after Skip Henderson received the sacrament of Ash Wednesday, he was back on the Bus, in emergency mode. On Tuesday, April 20, 2010, the 121st anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles off the Louisiana coast. Eleven people were killed and the resulting spill, the biggest in American history, threatens to wipe out the fishing industry on the Gulf Coast and befoul millions of acres of wetlands. Even as the Treme TV show reprised the nightmare life following Katrina on HBO, the fabled, wounded city suffered another blow. Again, the old, bad feeling of neglect from both the private and public sectors was ambient. One thing that was sure, the price of a po’ boy made with real, unfrozen shrimp was going to go through the roof. From Skip Henderson’s point of view, it meant more weeks of getting up at four thirty in the morning to drive the Bus down to Port Sulphur in Plaquemines Parish. The Plaquemines unemployment office was wrecked in the storm and never rebuilt, so Skip was enlisted to help out. “I am the Plaquemines Parish unemployment office,” he wailed. What was worse was the return of the national media to the Louisiana coast. Skip called me the other day from Port Sulphur to complain about the way things were going, when a loud noise came across the line. Screaming over the din, Skip said, “They’re landing a goddamn helicopter, right next to the Bus. There’s no end to this.”

8

For DNA report from Bode lab, see Appendix.

9

Accounts of Dave Dominici’s career as the New Orleans cemetery bandit can be found in many Times-Picayune articles, from his arrest in February 1998 until the trial in March 2000. Short of Dominici’s own accounts, probably the most interesting and idiosyncratic rendering of the story is in Lost Souls in the Cities of the Dead (1st Books Library, 2001), “a fictional police mystery novel” self-published by New Orleans Police Department detectives Lawrence Green and Frederick Morton, the arresting officers in the case. As Morton, who is now an NOPD captain in charge of the evidence and property room, told me, the book was started by his late partner, who saw it as “a chance to get a lot of things off his chest about the job and his relationship with his father.” When Green abandoned the project, Morton took over and wrote the second half, which contains the cemetery bust. “I really jazzed it up,” said Morton, an outgoing individual who promotes mixed martial arts cards on the side and maintains an abiding interest in New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination. According to Morton, the cops “kind of felt sorry for Dominici,” who is called “D’Angelo” in Lost Souls in the Cities of the Dead. “He really got the short end of the stick in all that with the art dealers,” Morton said. “But what can you expect? Dominici is a total potatohead.”

10

Ideas expressed here owe a debt to Professor Lawrence Douglas’s article “The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremberg.” Douglas’s discussion of the psychological motivation of the Nuremberg prosecutors is quite cogent. The article also includes the remarkable photo of Thomas Dodd holding a shrunken head in his hand, “like Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick.”

11

According to Israeli author Tom Segev, who was completing a book about Wiesenthal when I spoke to him in Jerusalem, the famous Nazi hunter later changed his mind on the soap issue. “He came to the conclusion it wasn’t so,” Segev said.

12

Buechner’s books Adolf Hitler and the Secrets of the Holy Lance (Thunderbird Press, 1988) and Hitler’s Ashes—Seeds of a New Reich (Thunderbird Press, 1989) were written with the pseudonymous “Captain Wilhelm Bernhart.” Buechner, a much-respected medical professor in New Orleans and a regular at many uptown society gatherings, claims “Bernhart,” whom he presents as “a former U-boat captain,” was privy to much of what went on between Hitler and Himmler regarding the Spear of Destiny. In Buechner’s account, the spear was recovered from beneath the South Pole ice in 1979 and now is back in Europe, in the possession of a mysterious organization called the Knights of the Holy Lance. Buechner has also advanced the theory that the ashes of Hitler and Eva Braun were similarly buried and retrieved from Antarctica.

Buechner’s work on the Dachau Massacre, which he claims to have witnessed, is far less fanciful. As recounted in his book Dachau: The Hour of the Avenger (Thunderbird Press, 1986), 520 German prisoners of war were murdered by American forces under the command of 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment. Bushyhead, Buechner reports, was a “full-blooded Cherokee Indian” whose ancestors had been brutalized during the infamous “Trail of Tears,” a race-based death march in which thousands of Native Americans were forced from their homeland to reservations in Oklahoma. In murdering these Germans, Bushyhead was motivated, Buechner conjectures, by a kinship with the Jewish people who, like the Cherokee, had been “harassed and driven from country to country for thousands of years.” This idea is echoed in the recent Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds, in which Brad Pitt plays a Native American leading a platoon of Jews to take vengeance on the Nazis.

13

In his memoir, The Course of My Life, British prime minister Edward Heath writes of how as a young man he saw “tattooed human skins on lampshades” among the exhibits at Nuremberg, which is somewhat puzzling since no tattooed lampshades were introduced in evidence at the war crimes trials.

14

Some of the items on the Buchenwald Table were tested to determine their validity, others were not. Three “tattooed skin hides” were sent to the Army Section of Pathology in New York. A report dated May 25, 1945, signed by Major Reuben Cares, describes “Piece A” as measuring “13X13 cm., is transparent and shows a woman’s head in the center and a sailor with an anchor near the margin.” “Piece B,” a similar size, “is a tattoo of several anchors resting on an indefinite black mass. To the right of this mass is a man’s head.” “Piece C” is “truncated,” with the upper portion showing “two nipples” sixteen centimeters apart. A “black dragon, with fire coming from the mouth, measures 28 cm.” To the left of the dragon “is a man in a coat of mail, with a sword being apparently stuck in the dragon.” According to the report, “all three specimens are tattooed human skin.”

15

For the curious, Denier Bud’s work can be found in many web locales. Since these addresses tend to change from time to time, the entry of “holocaust denial videos” or “denier videos” into Google is a fairly reliable pathway. Presently Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil can be found at http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/buchenwald. For Nazi Shrunken Heads, see http://www.holocaustdenialvideos.com/nazishrunkenheads.

16

David Cole was widely attacked by militant Jewish groups following his appearance on the Phil Donahue Show. In an article entitled “David Cole: Monstrous Traitor,” the extremist Jewish Defense League, referring to Cole as a “low-life beast worse… than the Julius Streichers and Joseph Goebbels” and an “evil monster” who “does not deserve to live on this earth,” offered “a monetary reward” to anyone supplying his correct address. In 1998, supposedly in response to JDL pressure, Cole recanted his “revisionist” position and has rarely been heard from since. It is “intimidation” like this, according to Denier Bud, that has sapped much of the energy from the “revisionist” movement. But there are unmistakable signs that the “movement,” at least in its “scholarly” application, has been fading away since the Deborah Lipstadt—David Irving lawsuit case. In a January 9, 2009, article, Mark Weber, the longtime head of the Institute for Historical Review, publicly asked, “How Relevant Is Holocaust Revisionism?” Weber wrote: “Over the past ten years, sales of IHR books, discs, flyers and other items about Holocaust history have steadily declined, along with inquiries about Holocaust history and requests for interviews on this subject.” This was countered by a more than equal rise in sales of items dealing with “Jewish-Zionist power, the role of Jews in society, and so forth.” It was Weber’s conclusion that “In the real world struggle against Jewish-Zionist power, Holocaust revisionism has proved to be as much a hindrance as a help.” Asked if this signaled the end of formal Holocaust denial, Denier Bud said, “Well, maybe I’m going to be the last man standing.”

17

The Desire Projects, 262 low-rise structures on outlying terrain on the way to New Orleans East, were built in 1949 as part of a major urban renewal effort. Known as “the dirty D,” the area was crime-ridden even before the famous streetcar (which never reached the projects) stopped running in the middle 1950s. When the projects were torn down in 2003, the area was slated for a major housing upgrade, a plan that was derailed by Katrina. Some new housing has been built, but anyone exiting the I-10 at Louisa Street cannot fail to be struck by the abject desolation of the area. The fact that many of the unpaved streets have names like Abundance, Benefit, and Humanity only adds to the end-of-the-world squalor. The lamentable state of the old Desire area has often been mentioned as a cautionary note by activists who protested the demolition of New Orleans’s other projects after Katrina.

18

On January 27, 2003, Jorge Semprún addressed the German Bundestag as the keynote speaker of a Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism, and once again called up his memories of Albert G. Rosenberg. Retired from his post as the Spanish minister of culture, Semprún recalled his days at Buchenwald, saying that even if it was his “good fortune to meet many individuals of exceptional humanity, intellectual acumen, possessed both of anger and moral courage,” it was Rosenberg that he remembered most. He spoke of their talks about philosophy, their drive across “the landscape of Goethe, on the Ettersberg,” and recollected the quiet authority Rosenberg displayed while speaking to the Germans from Weimar, telling them not to say they were innocent when they were not. Semprún explained he’d changed Rosenberg’s name to Rosenfeld in his book Literature or Life because he did not know if the American was dead or alive, and to avoid the possibility that Rosenberg would feel “disturbed or injured” by his depiction. Mentioning that Rosenberg himself had lost twenty-eight family members in the Holocaust, Semprún said he knew the story of the American soldier was far from over. Perhaps someday, the then seventy-nine-year-old Semprún said, he would write about Albert Rosenberg again. When I saw Rosenberg in El Paso in 2008, five years after Semprún’s Bundestag speech, I asked him if he’d ever heard from the writer. No, Rosenberg said. But that was fine.

19

New Orleans’s ethnic riots did not all involve members of the black community. The anti-Italian riots of 1891, during which eleven immigrants were murdered, rank as the largest mass lynching in American history. The incident was set off by the assassination of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy, who had arrested a number of reputed Mafia racketeers. Hennessy’s reported dying words, allegedly whispered to an NOPD captain, “Dagoes did it,” set off a chain of events that culminated in a mob storming the Orleans Parish Prison and dragging out all Italian prisoners. The lynchings were defended by New Orleans mayor Joseph Shakespeare, who said, “The Italians had taken the law into their own hands and we had no choice but to do the same.”

20

On February 11, 2009, 117 years after Homer Plessy’s arrest at the corner of Press and Royal Street, 113 years after the watershed Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, the City of New Orleans finally got around to putting up a plaque on the site. A heartwarming story it was, too, at least as depicted in the Times-Picayune, which told of how Keith Plessy, a fifty-two-year-old New Orleans bellhop and great-grandson of Homer Plessy’s first cousin, collaborated with Phoebe Ferguson, great-great-granddaughter of John Howard Ferguson, the judge who ruled to uphold the city’s “separate car” laws, to make sure the city finally commemorated the historic spot. Some people, Skip Henderson among them, were less than impressed. Skip had been trying to get the vacant lot where the railway station once stood turned into a “Civil Rights Park” for years with no success. “Looks kind of like a historical marker you drive by on the interstate,” Skip said of the two-foot-square brown and yellow plaque. But still, it was better than nothing.

21

For a discussion of anti-Semitism in the German Democratic Republic and issues of right-wing activity in the current Germany, see the work of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, http://www.amadeu-antonio-stiftung.de/start.

22

Long before her surrogates lit up the screens of American grind houses, the sexual legacy of Ilse Koch was a sub-rosa sensation in Israel. For a whole generation of horny Israeli teenage boys, vivid comic books depicting female SS officers abusing camp prisoners were just about the only pornography available. The books, called “stalags,” followed similar plotlines to the Ilse film: sadistic, busty camp guards decked out in full bondage gear tortured prisoners until the underlings rose up to kill the vicious women, usually raping them along the way. Since Ilse Koch was the worldwide model for the evil Nazi sexual predator, it would be fair to say her image was at least the initial inspiration for these cheesy but undeniably compelling books. The fact that the Holocaust was rarely discussed in Israel prior to the Eichmann trial no doubt added to the subconscious appeal of the works. A film documenting the phenomena, Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel, played at the 2007 Jerusalem Film Festival, engendering much controversy.

23

In the middle 1990s, Professor Karl Skorecki and his collaborators established the existence of the “Cohen Modal Haplotype,” a DNA configuration thought to be distinctive to descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses, the first Kohen Gadol (high priest) of the twelve tribes of Israel. Since then many Jews, in both America and Israel, have undergone DNA testing to see if their particular arrangement of Y chromosomes qualifies them as Kohanim, or members of the priestly class. “Not everyone is Kohanim, but lots of people wish they were,” said Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman when I talked to him in a café not far from his house in the Old City of Jerusalem. Author of a number of books on the topic, including DNA and Tradition: The Genetic Link to the Ancient Hebrews, Rabbi Kleiman, a Kohen himself (and a big Dr. John the Night Tripper fan), sees the discovery of the priestly gene as a powerful linkage between modern Jews and those of biblical times. “Jews have spent so much time and effort debating who is a Jew and who isn’t. Now science is helping us, making some of the decisions for us. We’re living in the golden age of Jewish population genetics,” Rabbi Kleiman said. “I think that fifty years ago, if you had asked a Jew, especially a Jew in Israel, if it was possible to trace their origin straight back to Aaron, they would have looked at you like you were nuts. Now we can. Perhaps that explains a lot of recent history, because when suddenly things you think will always be hidden are suddenly revealed, that changes a lot.”

24

Probably the best source for information about the New Orleans Jewish community is Catherine Kahn, coauthor of The Jewish Community of New Orleans, former president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, and longtime archivist at Touro Infirmary. An exceedingly charming lady who has been known to greet a visitor with a hardy “Shalom, y’all,” Cathy Kahn is Albert Rosenberg’s cousin. When I was in El Paso visiting Rosenberg, he said, “Well, if you want to know anything about Jews in New Orleans, call my cousin Cathy. She has it all down.” Offering to make an introduction, Rosenberg dialed his cousin’s number. She wasn’t home, so he left a message. “Hello, Cathy, this is Albert, calling from El Paso… Look, I’m talking to this nice young man who is doing some research on a parcel found in your neck of the woods. It is a lampshade made of human skin. Help him if you can, would you please? Ciao.” Hanging up, Rosenberg, a sardonic glint in his eye, said, “That ought to get her attention.” The next time I was in New Orleans, I looked up Cathy and we had a nice chat. She asked me what I was writing about; I told her about the lampshade. “Oh, so that’s what Albert was talking about,” Cathy exclaimed. “I knew it was something strange.”

25

Shortly before dropping the lampshade off at Buchenwald, I stopped in to visit Gert Schramm at his home in Eberswalde, thirty miles northeast of Berlin. Now in his early eighties, Schramm, son of a German woman and an African American, was the only black prisoner at Buchenwald. His father, Jack Brankson, an engineer from San Francisco, met his mother in Erfurt, where they fell in love and were married. When the Nazis came to power, Brankson was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where presumably he was murdered. Young Gert was incarcerated in the children’s barracks at Buchenwald. He managed to survive, was embraced by the East German regime, and made a good living running a cab company. Schramm was present in the camp on April 16, 1945, when the Buchenwald Table was shown to the people from Weimar. “Yes. I remember it well,” Schramm said, pointing out that the white background seen in the Buchenwald Table photo was probably a sheet held up by prisoners so the photographer could get a better shot. He recalled the shrunken heads most vividly and “had no doubt whatsoever” that the Nazis skinned prisoners at the camp and made them into lampshades. In regard to the Liberators controversy, Schramm, who had an Obama sticker on his car, said he did see a number of black soldiers at the camp in the first days after liberation. “This was incredible to me. Outside of my father, who had already been missing for so long, I’d never seen a black person until the Americans came. I knew these people looked like me but I never thought of myself as black. I was a German and this was how I looked. This is what I saw in the mirror, myself, that was all. So I was amazed to see the black soldiers, but they were not all black. The story that blacks liberated the camp is not true.” Schramm said being black in Germany has not been a problem for him. “I often think that this was a very good thing, because from what I have read and what people have told me, my life would have been much harder in America.” Retired now, Schramm is writing his life story and makes a point of giving speeches to schoolchildren warning about the rising neo-Nazi movement. He still sits on the prisoners’ advisory board at Buchenwald but as a son of the GDR retains reservations about the “Wessie,” or western, influence at the former camp.