The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and their Crimes Against Humanity by Roland Paul

Author:Roland, Paul [Roland, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Gruesome Exhibits

On 13 December Thomas Dodd wheeled in a small table covered in a white sheet and asked for it to be introduced into evidence as Exhibit 253. After a brief introduction he whipped the sheet away to reveal the shrunken head of a Polish prisoner, which had been used as a paperweight by the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp. There was an audible gasp in the court. His next exhibit was no less shocking – a piece of tattooed skin flayed from the body of a prisoner for the commandant’s wife, who was known to take perverse pleasure in boasting that she had lampshades fashioned from human skin.

Dodd’s son later defended his father’s melodramatic tactics:

‘When we are talking statistics nobody pays much attention, but if I can show you one person who gets murdered you’re more apt to pay attention to that. And my father by boiling this stuff down to, in that particular case, one of the atrocities, one individual... If I talked about thousands who lost their lives in Buchenwald, your eyes might glaze over. I hold this up in my hand and say, “This is what happened,” even for a seasoned judge it’s hard to ignore that.’

But it was evidently not enough to move the defendants to admit their part in these atrocities.

‘It would be relieving to hear one of them admit some blame for something,’ Dodd wrote to his wife. ‘They blame everything on the dead or the missing.’

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