Horrors of holocaust revisited: Nazi photo album made of human skin discovered in Polish market

The collector spotted it at an antique market in Poland

In yet another token to remember the horrors of the holocaust, a collector found a photo album made from the skin of a Nazi extermination camp prisoner in Poland.

The collector spotted it at an antique market in Poland, and noticed that the album cover had a "tattoo, human hair and a bad smell." He then bought it from the antique market and handed it over to the staff at Auschwitz Memorial Museum.

The museum authorities reported that the album cover made of human skin was "without doubt proof of a crime against humanity," the Metro newspaper stated in a report.


'The album contained over 100 photos and postcards, consisting mainly of views and panoramas,' a report by Daily mail stated.

Analysts are claiming that the album was made using the skin of a murdered inmate at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. The camp gained notoriety for its gruesome executions and ghastly human experiments.

What makes this camp stand out from every other extermination camp that originated during the Third Reich, was a lady named Karl-Otto Koch, more commonly known as ‘The Bitch of Buchenwald’ by many holocaust survivors. Wife of camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch, she used to order the slaughtering of Jewish men prisoners with tattoos before using them as accessories like albums, table covers, lampshades. In fact, she made so many of these mementoes, she was known as "Lady of lampshade."


It is alleged that the abovementioned-experiments were done to help out a prison doctor in his dissertation on tattooing and criminality.

Ilse Koch was convicted for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg trials and sentenced to life in prison. However,  her sentence to four years for 'lack of evidence'. She later committed suicide in at Aichach women's prison on  September 1, 1967, at age 60. She was serving time there, after being tried by a West German court following her re-arrest in 1949 for the crimes she committed in the death camp.

'The research suggests that it is very likely that both covers, owing to their technology and composition, came from the same bookbinding workshop,' Head of the Auschwitz Museum Collections, Elzbieta Cajzer said.

'The use of human skin as a production material is directly associated with the figure of Ilse Koch, who, along with her husband, inscribed her name in history as the murderer from the camp in Buchenwald.' she added.