...somewhat unfortunate. The human soap. The human skin lampshades. Repeating these anecdotes unintentionally benefits Holocaust deniers who latch on to their questionable authenticity and use it as an argumentative wedge to try to persuade others into doubting the greater, more well-documented aspects of Nazi atrocities.
Do I believe anyone on DU would fall for that line of reasoning? Well, I hope not. But the world is a big place and these really are the tools used to break down memory.
Did I say this guy could
write!? This guy can
write! Read this
excerpt from his book and tell me you don't think the same after reading it, too. Wow. Reminds me of Lansdale at his very, very best. It also becomes clear that he's telling a
story and when one reads his fabulous writing I'm afraid there is little doubt it is just that: A story.
Is someone really in possession of a lab-tested human-skin lamp? Possibly. Does this mean it was a Nazi-made human-skin lamp, much less one made out of a murdered Jew? Doubtful. And here, again, like the very hawker of the item in the story comes an absurd assertion: That not only were Nazis, regardless of any official policy, responsible for producing such items
but they did so with such frequency that these items are anything more frequent than one-offs.
There is also the reality that grisly artifacts recently-produced from the corpses of humans are not unknown to turn up now and again and that this sort of...
token making...is and was not a passtime unique to a few even-more-disturbed-than-usual Nazis.
Anyway, whomever might be reading this might wish to consider reading Cecil Adam's
The Straight Dope piece on the subject, entitled
Did the Nazis make lampshades out of human skin? This is not Cecil's best work but even his bad days are still better than most.
PB