Albert G. Rosenberg
[back] Buchenwald [back] Nazi shrunken heads

The American Lieutenant in charge of documenting Buchenwald (where the shrunken heads came from) was from the Psychological Warfare Division of the Allied Forces. Albert G. Rosenberg was Jewish, born and raised in Germany. He had recently become an American.
    "Psychological Warfare Division." That's a strange name for a department that's going to document a concentration camp for future generations isn't it? The Lieutenant in the PWD was Albert G. Rosenberg. Even though he was only in his late 20's at the time, he had a rare special pass called a "SHAEF Pass", which gave him the power to confiscate the posh villa belonging to Baldur Von Schirach, who had been the wartime mayor of Vienna and also the leader of the Hitler Youth. Rosenberg lived in the villa with 12-15 former Buchenwald inmates and the team wrote-up a documentation of the camp. Most of the former inmates were communists, led by a non-communist Austrian Catholic named Eugen Kogon. Kogon compiled the report while Albert Rosenberg supervised the overall project. One could say that the documentation of Buchenwald is largely a story of liberated communists working in a posh villa, under the supervision of a Jewish Psychological Warfare Division Lieutenant who had emigrated to the USA from Germany just seven years earlier. Objectivity you can count on.
    After this project, Albert Rosenberg confiscated a German suburban house for Eugen Kogon and his family to live in, so that Kogon could write a book on his personal experiences at Buchenwald. The Psychological Warfare Division, which by now had made the Orwellian move to change it's name to "Information Control" wanted this book to be read by the German population. The book, called "Der SS-Staat, is still the standard work for Buchenwald. In my June 2007, 2-hour phone conversation with the elderly Albert G. Rosenberg, he told me that Kogon could have become Chancellor of Germany instead of Konrad Adenaur, (something about Kogon knowing a "Cardinal Pacelli" and how that was a good thing.) but one was more right and the other more center, and Adenauer ended up becoming Chancellor. Months later out of curiosity I looked up Cardinal Pacelli on Wikipedia and saw he became Pope Pius XII in 1939.
    That would have been interesting though: Psych Warfare changes it's name to "Information Control" and promotes Kogon to become the head of Modernist Germany. It would have been 1984 in 1954.
    Much of the above is documented in University of Texas, El Paso Professor David A. Hackett's book, The Buchenwald Report. Published in 1995. Nazi Shrunken Heads

[2009] El Paso man collected evidence at Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald  Rosenberg never learned whether the Buchenwald report was declassified. But he learned that the original copy of the report was kept at a National Archives depository in Virginia, in box 149, before a fire in the 1970s destroyed it.  All copies of the report were thought to have disappeared until Rosenberg resurfaced with his. In 1995, the testimonies and evidence he collected were translated from German to English and published in a book,,"The Buchenwald Report," by David Hackett.

The internet video Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil (2008) makes the assertion that Psyche Warfare planted evidence at Buchenwald. Seeing Things by John Ellis (published by I.B. Taurus in 2000) mentions Billy Wilder forcing German audiences to watch footage of Buchenwald in order to receive bread rations. The movie Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal Of Evil Episode 2 points out that Wilder is actually in the Buchenwald footage, helping to direct. Buchenwald Flyer Sources

To my knowledge, every item on the Buchenwald table is now missing except the PhD dissertation, and that's because Albert G. Rosenberg took it home with him.
Karl Koch trial judgment and transcript have disappeared.
The nazis themselves executed Karl Koch in front of the Buchenwald inmates, but not for anything involving shrunken heads, lampshades, or tattooed skin, but rather because Koch had a few people killed. In the Nuremberg transcript on page 199 , on 1/14/46 we see that Dodd's staff has talked to the SS Judge who convicted Koch, Konrad Morgen. Dodd doesn't mention that his staff talked to Morgen at Dachau where the Americans had imprisoned him. Dodd then lies about Morgen seeing skin, heads, and lampshades as a way to "save face" for his own presentation of the shrunken head. Then on page 200, a German lawyer, Dr. Kurt Kauffmann tries to get the Karl Koch trial documents, and the judge states that it's up to Kauffmann to get these documents himself, but the German lawyers didn't have access to documents in archives, or to Morgen in the same way that the allied prosecution teams did. See page 482 in the transcript The German lawyers weren't even able to find out that Morgen was currently in Dachau, let alone ask him for a copy of the Karl Koch judgment. Also Konrad Morgen told John Toland in 1971 that the Americans almost killed him for not saying he'd seen heads and tattooed skin but Morgen still refused to lie. The source is David Irving's free online book "Nuremberg, The Last Battle" page 222 and 223 where Irving went into the Roosevelt Library and read John Toland's 1971 Konrad Morgen interview notes. If the Americans jailed Morgen and tried to coerce him to lie, and even hid him for a time from the German defense lawyers (Dodd knew where he was but the German defense lawyers didn't) then is it conceivable that the American prosecution team would destroy the Karl Koch Trial judgement which Morgen wrote? As well as the trial transcripts? Yes. And these documents are nowhere to be found today. Nazi Shrunken Heads

Among other things, I wanted to ask him about the table. How did the table with the heads and skins come about? He told me his answer: When he arrived at Buchenwald the table was already set up, and it had been set-up by the prisoners. He later mentioned that the prisoners had a self-governing structure, and their leaders were communists. I actually don't believe the prisoners set up the table. I think Psyche Warfare set up the table, but not Rosenberg--He was too low in the Psyche Warfare hierarchy and got to Buchenwald too late. David Hackett's introduction to The Buchenwald Report (pg. 15) states that Rosenberg arrived at Buchenwald on the 16th. That is the day the German tour took place, and the table was filmed with Billy Wilder directing the footage. But as was discovered by another researcher, we do know that Albert G. Rosenberg is the man who is speaking to the Germans on their forced tour of the camp. The researcher discovered a passage written by a Buchenwald inmate and author Jorge Semprun in his book, Literature or Life. Semprun had written this book many years later, and has mistakenly remembered Rosenberg as Rosenfeld. Nazi Shrunken Heads

Professor David A. Hackett has in his possession a 50-page dissertation on the subject of how criminality relates to tattoos. It was written by a German camp doctor on the Buchenwald camp premises, around 1939-'40

Of all the table items above, I believe that David Hackett has the only remaining object. He has the dissertation, because Albert G. Rosenberg gave it to him.
    In a phone conversation, and before I told him I was a denier (he won't respond to me now) Professor David A. Hackett, the translator of "The Buchenwald Report" told me that among all the papers that Rosenberg gave him around 40 to 50 years after the war, was this dissertation, written by a German doctor who was studying a perceived connection between criminality and tattoos. (Common criminals were a significant part of the inmate population at Buchenwald.) Hackett told me that he'd read the dissertation and it was of really poor-quality scholarship.
    But consider that the dissertation is a piece of withheld evidence. Ilse Koch's lawyers would have liked to have known about it. Afterall, it could have helped exonerate Koch from the incredibly cruel charges that she made lampshades out of human skin. Her lawyers could have offered an alternate explanation, using the dissertation to bolster the notion that tattooed skin was at the camp because a student had been studying the skin. Similarly, the Nuremberg defendants' lawyers would have also wanted to see it, since they could have used it to offer an explanation as to why tattooed skin was found at Buchenwald. The Germans' lawyers probably never knew the dissertation existed.
    During various trials, Rosenberg had this evidence and withheld it.
    Does the dissertation mention anything about tribalism? Hackett won't answer my emails.
    The dissertation is the only thing on the table that is known to be in existence today. Rosenberg gave it to Hackett in the 1980's or 1990's and Hackett currently possesses it. In my nearly two-hour phone conversation with Rosenberg, he told me that he "burned half of the reports" he had lying around from his days in Psych Warfare. Did he also get rid of things like the "human pelvis ashtray"? One wonders.
    Imagine this withheld piece of evidence, in trials where people were sentenced to death long ago in Germany, probably sitting in the bottom of some box in some garage in El Paso, Texas; as kids ride their Razor scooters by on the hot asphalt street out in front.
    It would be helpful if Professor Hackett could use a digital camera, and take photos of the pages of the dissertation and put them on his website so that others can take a look at this German language document Nazi Shrunken Heads