"In October 1948, General Clay commuted Ilse Koch's sentence to four years, causing an international uproar.
According to Jean Edward Smith in his biography, "Lucius D. Clay, an American Life," the general maintained that the leather lamp shades were really made out of goat skin. The book quotes a statement made by General Clay years later:
"There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the "Bitch of Buchenwald," had written that she had lamp shades made of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lamp shades were made out of goat skin."
According to the Buchenwald Report, there was a factory at Buchenwald, which produced leather goods out of animal skins, but it had caught on fire during an Allied bombing raid on the camp on August 24, 1944."
(...)
In his autobiography, entitled "Decision in Germany," General Clay wrote the following:Among the 1672 trials was that of Ilse Koch, the branded "Bitch of Buchenwald," but as I examined the record I could not find her a major participant in the crimes of Buchenwald. A sordid, disreputable character, she had delighted in flaunting her sex, emphasized by tight sweaters and short skirts, before the long-confined male prisoners, and had developed their bitter hatred. Nevertheless these were not the offenses for which she was being tried and so I reduced her sentence, expecting the reaction which came. Perhaps I erred in judgment but no one can share the responsibility of a reviewing officer. Later the Senate committee which unanimously criticized this action heard witnesses who gave testimony not contained in the record before me. I could take action only on that record.(...)
According to Arthur Lee Smith, author of "Die Hexe von Buchenwald," the American government put pressure on the Germans to put her
on trial again in 1949 on charges of ordering the murder of Buchenwald inmates.
(...)
The German court found Ilse Koch guilty of one count of incitement to murder, one count of incitement to attempted murder, five counts of incitement to severe physical mistreatment of prisoners, and two counts of physical mistreatment.
In January 1951, she was again sentenced to life in prison.
While not finding her guilty of ordering prisoners killed for their tattooed skin, the court did take judicial notice that there was no doubt that lamp shades made from human skin had been found at Buchenwald, even though it had not been proved that Ilse Koch had ordered these lamp shades to be made. 
(...)
But Joseph Halow, who claims to have seen a lamp shade which was displayed in the courtroom during Isle Koch's trial, thinks that it was not made of human skin. He wrote the following description in his book, "Innocent at Dachau":
During my time at Dachau, I saw one of the "human-skin" lampshades. It looked like translucent skin, approximately one-quarter of an inch thick, and was adorned with a tattoo somewhat fuzzy in outline, not at all like the distinct tattooed figures I was familiar with. The shade must have struck me as rather odd, for I recall some puzzlement at the look of the skin and the crude tattoo. In those days, it would never have occurred to me that the human lampshade was a cruel and vulgar hoax.(...)
Today, visitors to the former Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar can see a dimly-lit basement room, shown in the photograph below, with a display sign that says this is the very room where the skin was flayed from the dead bodies of tattooed prisoners. After being exhibited at various war crimes trials, including the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, the three large pieces of tattooed human skin, but not the lamp shade, found at Buchenwald were sent in 1951 to the Army Medical Museum, now called the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington, D.C.
(...)
According to an article in the Washington Post on June 24, 2001, written by Jeff Leen, the lamp shade which was allegedly made of human skin is nowhere to be found. On June 23, 1995, Ken Kipperman, an American Jew who was born in Poland in 1946, requested to see the evidence from the Dachau trial of Ilse Koch and was allowed to view a piece of tattooed leather labeled "USA 258." According to the Post article, Kipperman had his picture taken with the skin, which he was told was part of the evidence shown at the Nuremberg trial. The tattoo showed a nude woman with butterfly wings. The Post article said that the tattooed skin "did not appear to be part of a lampshade, because it was not properly shaped and had no perforations for stitching."
In his quest to find the missing human lamp shade from the Ilse Koch trial, Kipperman located an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, headlined "Ex-Officer Has Human Skin From Ilse Koch's Home." According to Jeff Leen's story in the Washington Post, "The article quoted Lorenz Schmuhl, who as a U.S. Army major commanded Buchenwald upon liberation. Schmuhl, the article said, had taken home camp souvenirs and kept them in a glass-covered bookcase in his basement in Michigan City, IN: two large tattooed skins, a human-skin book cover and "most pieces of the famous lampshade." Kipperman found a photograph of Schmuhl's souvenir skins that had run in the Indianapolis Star in 1949. The picture was blurry, but the skins, sectioned into trapezoids, appeared to have holes along the edges, as if they had been strung together around the frame of a lampshade. He found another picture showing the top of the lampshade on the table at Buchenwald. He could see two oddly cut corner pieces that clearly matched two of Schmuhl's souvenirs." According to the Washington Post, Schmuhl sold the lamp shade pieces to a collector who later got rid of them because he couldn't stand to look at them.
Jeff Leen wrote that he had also interviewed Robert Wolfe, who said that pieces of the lampshade are stored in Washington, DC. "The lampshade I certainly saw," said Wolfe, now 80. "Four pieces. They were shaped in a trapezoid form." Wolfe said he saw them 10 to 15 years ago at the main Archives. But Tim Nenninger, who replaced Wolfe, told the Washington Post reporter that no leather lampshade is stored in the Archives today.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScr ... Koch4.htmlJerzy
ing. Only so many "tribes" were able to do it and still do by the way. They never mentioned Germans. hmmmmmmmm 
