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Ratbarf wrote:True, during the occupation of Paris it wasn't an uncommon day that a letter was received by the German occupiers commending them for solving what the populace thought was the "Jewish Problem." The myth that everybody in France was in the resistance is such a load of bull. Many people co-operated with the germans openly and quite a few even supported them.

Indeed. My grandparents/great-grandparents were actively involved in the Resistance movement. Highly decorated, too. But the corruption, and the misuse of the conceived 'vigilante' power was dreadful. It was often a front for communists to try and get their aims through the chaos. The trials for collaborating still go on today, believe it or not. In the immediate aftermath, girls who had whored themselves off to the Germans had their heads shaved, and feather's were attached with boiling tar to their scalps. Murders and retaliations were common -- girls were found with swastikas carved into their groins.



feth them.

Men who collaborated were often shot in the street. The pain inflicted by the Germans was so great that desperation forced these people to do such things.



Sorry, I'm on a MASSIVE tangent. This subject is one that is ingrained in my blood if nowhere else, and interests me, yet horrifies me greatly.

Peace.

sA

Going back to the original question.....

the article here seems to come down on the side that soap at least was made from humans, the lampshade.. hmmm....

Personally i lean more towards this

Human Skin Lampshade Myth?

However, it turns out that the stories of human skin lampshades are probably poorly grounded. There's no denying that the Nazis committed horrible atrocities and murdered millions during the Holocaust, but this horrific genocide was so bad that there's no need for exaggeration. Like the myth of human soap that was debunked 10-15 years ago, the story of human skin lampshades is based largely on rumors and can't be substantiated.

To get to the bottom of this, I interviewed Ken Kipperman, a leading authority on Nazi use of human remains and Polish-American son of Jewish parents who fled the Holocaust. He is the subject of a 2004 documentary, Shadows of Silence, about his obsessive search for lost human remains from the Holocaust and his compulsive quest to uncover the truth about the notorious "human skin" lampshade shown in an army newsreel days after the liberation of Buchenwald. It turns out, Kipperman tells me, that the famous lampshade from the newsreel footage was not made out of human skin, though it was believed to be at the time, and no human skin lampshades have ever been verified, though he says it's always possible that one or two were made in isolated incidents.

On the other hand, the Nazis did collect numerous pieces of human skin from concentration camp victims, and were particularly fixated on skin with tattoos, especially colorful tattoos with obscene images. Kipperman has found eight items of human skin in government archives in the Washington, D.C. area where they were filed away and forgotten about after being used as evidence in war crimes trials. Kipperman's conclusions comport with those of a June 2004 issue of the online de-bunking column The Straight Dope, which determined, "While the Nazis kept many grisly mementos of their victims, including tattooed skin, the lampshade claim may be a myth."

What about rumors that human skin was used to bind a copy of Mein Kampf or the photo albums of Ilse Koch, "the beast of Buchenwald" and other Nazis? Kipperman says he is unaware of any Nazi anthropodermic bindings and has personally examined many of the souvenir photo albums alleged to be bound in human skin but hasn't found any evidence of human skin bindings in his extensive research.

link to article


So..... I'd suggest that the lampshade is perhaps a myth or an exaggeration.

But..... especially amongst the higher ups there were a lot of distinctly odd goings on, especially as some of them got more involved/ fething crazy and into their various occult rubbish, so... maybe ?


EDIT : Be careful when googling this though, you'll wind up with some links to some very nasty sites. feth stormfront and all those who post there.

I read that experiments were done in making soap from human fat, recipes were found among the affects of certain camp personnel after the war. The Lampshades - would it really surprise you to learn that the same people who are murdering women and children are also keeping trophies? Here's a pretty good article:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2511/did-the-nazis-make-lampshades-out-of-human-skin

Now, I'm gonna run off a bit. I'd like to address the post listing The "Good Things" Hitler did, (if we can just get past the murder of ten million innocents and starting one of the worst wars in our planet's history)

The poster's points:

1) He unified the German people and helped them regain their sense of pride

Unified them in hatred, book burnings and mindless lockstep obedience. Today's German's are innocent of their grandparent's crimes, but I image "pride" is not the emotion most feel when they see a swastika or the crematoriums at death camps. I've had some fantastic discussions with Germans and Austrians my age about the Third Reich - none of them had anything nice to say about the Fuhrer. Twelve years of pride for generations of shame - for something they had nothing to do with. This Sins of the Fathers...

2) Stabilized the German economy and eliminated foreign debt

And then turned around and screwed the German worker over through the creation of the DAF, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront or German Workers Union, run by Dr. Robert Ley. You think our payroll taxes are bad? The workers were taxed out the ying yang to support the war effort, received little benefits in return. The Kraft Durch Freude (strength through joy) program was supposed to provide vacations and VW's for every German, but this never truly materialized. Enough happened for the propaganda reels, little more. Nazis lying. Go figure.

3) He instituted the standardized schedule
for the German train system and a standardized measurement for rail cars

This totally justifies establishing a police state, quashing personal freedoms, torturing people, the Gestapo. They did get the Jews to the ovens though - even when they were losing the war, they made sure that kept getting done in an orderly fasion. (Though when things looked totally lost Himmler did order the killings to stop and tried to make a separate peace with the Allies, in the hopes of installing himself as Hitler's successor. You can imagine this stuck in Hitler's craw a bit).

4) Created the modern autobahn system

Actually the idea for the Autobahn originated during the Weimar Republic, but OK. I'll give Hitler that much, he built a highway. See above answer.

5) Encouraged the development of the Volkswagen

See answer to number three. I don't see how advances in transportation justifies the deaths of millions of innocents.


6) Instituted the Kindergarten system

Nope. Kindergarten was developed by the great German thinker Freidrich Froebel. check Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Fröbel

7) Encouraged the development of jet aircraft, and rocket development.

As the last ditch attempt to win the war his "brilliance" had now lost. The Rockets were the V-2 and so on - Terror Weapons. They launched those missles at British Civilians.

End verdict: Hitler: Still a bad guy. Nobody's all bad, he wasn't a demon, or a monster. He was a human being. A very damaged human being, but just a man. However, his crimes against the human race are unforgivable, and should never be justified by being held up against improving infrastructure.

Before it gets closed: (gak, I didn't raise it. The Raven Queen compels me to help kill it!)

My Father-in-law said he saw a lamp once made out of nazi skin.
A soldier killed a nazi and cut the tats off of his chest and arms and cured them. Then the guy asked himself: What the feth am I going to do with cured nazi skin? Make a lamp covered in iron crosses and swastikas as a trophy.

and before it gets closed - that raise thread card rules. I've been officialy geekslapped (meaning I'm the geek)

I heard they made socks and stuff out of the hair they shaved off of prisoners.

Who is gonna lock this?

JEB_Stuart wrote:Who is gonna lock this?

Oh I think you know who...

Dunlop?

I didn't know that Nascar had Mods.

..Glen Beck ? Batman ? Zombies ?

they're in every other fething thread so...

wingedskull wrote:and before it gets closed - that raise thread card rules. I've been officialy geekslapped (meaning I'm the geek)

When is the Geek on Geek violence going to end?