Konrad Morgen
[back] Eye Witnesses  [back] Auschwitz-Birkenau

[It is remarkable to read that Morgen went to Buchenwald and had a commandant executed for killing inmates!]

See: Nazis Punishing Nazis For Mistreating Jews

Quotes
 Morgen worked as both investigator and judge prosecuting officials and guards in the concentration camps for illegal activities. In the Buchenwald camp, four people were arrested, including the former camp commander's wife, Ilse Koch. The main issue was that 3-4 prisoners had been killed some years earlier. Morgen sentenced two of them to death. Ilse was acquitted on the charge of embezzlement, and the charge against her levelled by the inmates of making items out of human skin was withdrawn due to lack of evidence. Morgen had interviewed the prisoners at Buchenwald, but couldn't prove their stories about Ilse making tattooed lamp shades so he withdrew the charge.
....What Morgan did during the war flies in the face of the standard holocaust story: Morgen sentenced to death the top two officials of a concentration camp for killing just 3-4 inmates, years earlier. Not hundreds, not thousands. Yet holocaust survivor stories tend to describe the average guard as killing that many people every day, with and without an alcoholic drink in one hand. Contrast with Morgen: he moved to the Buchenwald area for 8 months, and had to really look, placing his staff to live in the concentration camp itself. He wasn't investigating the current camp commander Hermann Pister, but rather the former camp commander who had left 2 years earlier. After some major sleuthing, Morgen found some corruption practices but turned up no murder leads. Finally, near the end of 8 months, and looking at records that were 3-5 years old, Morgen uncovered a stealthy way in which the camp commander, Karl Koch, with the help of the camp doctor had killed around 4 inmates, and Koch was tried and sentenced to death. That doesn't fit with the holocaust at all does it? In short, Morgen spent an enormous amount of time in regard to the deaths of a few inmates that had occurred years before. Konrad Morgen

The Allied Psychological Warfare Department (called PWD-SHAEF) came up with a plan to exploit a rumor which they had heard about. The rumor was that at Buchenwald, Ilse Koch, the sadistic wife of the camp commander Karl Koch, would ride out into the prison yard on a horse, have prisoners strip, and then choose tattoos on their bodies she liked. These prisoners would then be sent to a place where they would be killed, so that their tattooed skin could be removed and made into lampshades and other items. Konrad Morgen

The Buchenwald Report, translated, edited, and with an introduction by David A. Hackett, Westview Press, 1995
Professor David A. Hackett, who is not a holocaust denier, documents this in the introduction of his book, page 5. The book is a translation of the 1945 "The Buchenwald Report."
Hackett inadvertently reveals that nearly everyone in psyche warfare involved regarding Buchenwald was Jewish. You can tell from their names: Edward A. Tenenbaum, Albert G. Rosenberg, Daniel Lerner, Saul Padover. Rosenberg was German Jewish. Tenenbaum was American Jewish. Jews were probably around 2 percent of the US population at the time. Tenenbaum was the first American to arrive at the camp along with a civilian named Egon Fleck. On page 5 of Hackett's book, it mentions that Tenenbaum stayed overnight in block 50. Maps show that that is in the medical experiments area, which would have been the right place to plant skin and shrunken heads. Then again Rosenberg could have planted them when he arrived 5 days later.
    Then shortly after, an American film crew arrived, headed by Billy Wilder, an Austrian Jew turned American Film Corps officer, and lo and behold, there on a display table ready to be filmed were dried pieces of tattooed human skin. Oh, and two shrunken heads. Never mind that they were South American shrunken heads. Konrad Morgen

The Logic of The Psych Warfare Plan: Ilse Koch was killing prisoners and making items out of their tattooed skin. When the Americans were coming in April 1945, she hastily left, and morbid objects indicating what she had done were there for the Americans to find. Konrad Morgen

The Problem with The Psych Warfare Plan: If Psych Warfare had known about Konrad Morgen, they might have done the math. The math is that no one associated with the rumor of the tattooed skin, shrunken heads, and lampshades had been at Buchenwald for almost two years. Morgen had arrested four people: Karl Koch, his wife, the deputy camp commander, and the lead camp doctor, all in late 1943. In the subsequent trial the charge against Ilse Koch regarding making items out of skin was withdrawn due to lack of evidence, (20) and Ilse was acquitted on the charge of embezzlement, but her husband was found guilty of murdering 4 inmates. He was sentenced to death and later executed, as was the deputy. When the Americans arrived, Ilse Koch hadn't lived at Buchenwald for almost 2 years. And during the Morgen crackdown, one would think the camp would have been run by the book. The new commander of Buchenwald, Hermann Pister, was already there in July 1943 when Morgen started his 8 month investigation. Karl Koch had transferred to be the head of Majdanek in 1941. The new commander, Hermann Pister, was never charged by the SS nor later the Americans with making shrunken heads or procurring human skin, so it doesn't make sense that the Americans would find these items when they arrived almost 2 years later. Morgen threw a wrench into the works of the Psych Warfare plan, because they didn't know about him.
    But the plan worked anyway, because when it comes to a psychologically powerful atrocity spectacle, the public doesn't really think. That could be seen in 1991, when a Hungarian Jew turned US congressman, Tom Lantos, staged a spectacle: A 15 year-old girl testified that she had been in a Kuwait hospital room when the Iraqi soldiers came in and yanked babies off life-support systems so they could take the incubators back to Iraq. No one noticed that the girl testifying spoke perfect American English. She had no accent whatsoever. What are the chances of a 15 year old Arab girl in Kuwait speaking flawless American English happening to be in the neo-natal intensive care unit when Iraqi troops barge in? The horrible spectacle she described, her brown skin, and her Arabic name was enough to fool everybody. Konrad Morgen

So Morgen's name enters the court transcript, but as part of a lie Dodd is telling in order to save the integrity of his presentation. Because Morgen never saw a head, tattoos and lampshades in his investigation of Buchenwald. And as mentioned, that charge against Ilse Koch was withdrawn due to lack of evidence. At that point, around January 1946, the Americans start looking for Morgen in Germany. When they find him, they imprison him at Dachau and threaten to turn him over to the Soviets if he doesn't testify that he saw the tattooed human skin, lampshades and shrunken heads. He refuses. Konrad Morgen

Dodd claims that SS Judge Konrad Morgan, saw a shrunken head, saw the tattooed skin, and saw a human skin lampshade. But, explains Dodd, Morgen simply didn't prosecute Koch for these offenses. Dodd says this to protect his famous presentation of a head and skin in the Nuremberg courtroom; and to hedge against the logic that the skin, shrunken heads, and lampshades might have come up in a trial by the Nazis against Karl Koch. And Dodd isn't going to be "called" on that because the Americans have SS Judge Konrad Morgen imprisoned at Dachau. It will be a months of delay before the German lawyers are finally able to find Morgen so that he can testify. Ideally, Dodd wanted Morgen to take the stand and say all this himself and tried to get him to do so. In David Irving's free online book Nuremberg, The Last Battle, page 223, we read how Konrad Morgen felt about this: 
    "But he (Konrad Morgen) refused to give perjured testimony at Nuremberg to the effect that Ilse Koch, widow of the commandant hanged by the S.S., had made lampshades out of human skin. 'That was a legend,' he said: 'totally untrue. The Americans almost killed me,’ recalled Morgen. ‘They threatened three times to turn me over to the Russians or French or Poles.'"
    and here is Irving's source:  Note 492. Transcript of John Toland’s interview with Konrad Morgen, attorney, Frankfurt, Oct 25, 1971. (Roosevelt Library, John Toland papers, box 53). For Morgen’s Nuremberg testimony see IMT, Aug 7-8, 1946, pages 488-515 Nazi Shrunken Heads

From July 1943 until the end of the war, Morgen investigated some 800 cases of corruption and murder within the SS, which resulted in about 200 trials. Five concentration camp commanders were arrested, and two of them were shot. For example, Buchenwald commandant Karl Koch was executed by the SS for corruption and murder. After the war Morgen established himself as a successful attorney in Frankfurt.
    I quoted from Morgen's description of Buchenwald, where he lived for eight months:
The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working ... The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commander Diester, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy of human beings. They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even books in foreign languages. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting contests and even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald. (Source: IMT "blue series," Vol. 20, p. 490)
    Morgen also explained the reason for the terrible conditions in the camps in the final months of the war, which resulted in the horrible scenes filmed by the British and Americans when they overran the camps:
To a great extent the horrible conditions at times prevailing in some concentration camps did not arise from deliberate planning, but developed from circumstances which in my opinion must be called force majeure, that is to say, evils for which the local camp leaders were not responsible. I am thinking of the outbreak of epidemics. At irregular intervals many concentration camps were visited by typhoid fever, typhus, and other sicknesses caused especially by the arrival of prisoners from the concentration camps in the eastern areas. Although everything humanly possible was done to prevent these epidemics and to combat them, the death rates which resulted were extremely high. Another evil which may be considered as force majeure was the fluctuating numbers of new arrivals and the insufficient billets. Many camps were overcrowded. The prisoners arrived in a weakened condition because, due to air raids, the transports were under way longer than expected. Towards the end of the war, there was a general collapse of the transportation system. Supplies could not be carried out to the necessary extent; chemical and pharmaceutical factories had been systematically bombed, and all the necessary medicines were lacking. To top all, the evacuations from the East further burdened the camps and croweded them in an unbearable manner. (IMT "blue series," Vol. 20, pp. 498-499) [1989] My Role in the [Ernst] Zündel Trial

Pearson later made quite a lot of the fact the Morgen also testified at Nuremberg that he believed that mass killings of Jews were carried out. However, I was able to show that Morgen believed that these mass killings were carried out not at Auschwitz I (the main camp) or Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is supposed to have been the main Auschwitz extermination center, but instead at Auschwitz-Monowitz, which no serious historian, including those who accept the Holocaust extermination story, now contends was an extermination center.
    Pearson suggested that Morgen may have mixed up the two sites, but I was able to point out that the SS official not only referred to "the extermination camp Monowitz" several times, but that he also specifically said that it "lay far away from the concentration camp. It was situated on an extensive industrial site and was not recognizable as such and everywhere on the horizon there were smoking chimneys." As even Pearson had to concede, this clearly refers to Monowitz and not Birkenau. (Source: IMT, Vol. 20, pp. 499, 503, 504.)
    I also pointed out that Morgen was not able to complete his judicial investigation of the Monowitz extermination story and bring formal charges against Commandant Höss before the Soviets overran the camp complex. Finally, I quoted Morgen as confirming that an internal inquiry established that there was no German or SS extermination policy. In this case, I emphasized, the prosecution has failed to carefully read or understand its own evidence, which actually refutes the Holocaust story. (IMT, vol. 20, pp. 507, 510)
    It is not surprising that Morgen might have made the mistake of believing that mass killings were being carried out at Auschwitz-Monowitz, I said. Apparently most Auschwitz inmates believed the same thing, and its likely that Morgen accepted their testimony. In this regard, I quoted from an affidavit by Charles Coward, a British soldier who was interned at Monowitz in 1943 and 1944. He testified after the war that "everybody" there believed that mass gassings were being carried out. This is quite understandable, I said, when one considers the following portion of Coward's affidavit:
... At Auschwitz we got radio broadcasts from He outside speaking about He gassings and burnings at Auschwitz. I recall one of these broadcasts was by [British foreign secretary] Anthony Eden himself. Also, there were pamphlets dropped in Auschwitz and the surrounding territory, one of which I personally read, which related what was going on in the camp at Auschwitz. These leaflets were scattered all over the countryside and must have been dropped from planes. They were in Polish and German. Under those circumstances, nobody would be at or near Auschwitz without knowing what was going on. (Nuremberg Document NI-11696, printed in NMT "green series." vol. 8, p. 606) [1989] My Role in the [Ernst] Zündel Trial

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

According to a book entitled "The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS," by Heinz Höhne, Otto Koch had extorted money from Jewish prisoners who were sent to Buchenwald in November 1938 following the state-sponsored pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Approximately 10,000 Jewish men had been brought to Buchenwald in November 1938 but they were offered the opportunity to be released if they promised to leave Germany with their families within six months. Koch was accused of taking money from these prisoners without official authorization. Koch had also ordered the deaths of two prisoners, allegedly in an attempt to cover up his misdeeds.
    Another version of the story, according to the Buchenwald Report commissioned by the US Army, is that Koch had syphilis and he had ordered the deaths of two hospital orderlies to prevent them from revealing his secret.
    Before his crimes at Buchenwald were uncovered, Commandant Karl Otto Koch had been transferred to the Majdanek death camp in Poland in September 1941, but his wife stayed behind, continuing to live in the Commandant's house. According to the Buchenwald Report, it was rumored that Ilse Koch was having simultaneous love affairs with Dr. Waldemar Hoven, a Waffen-SS Captain who was the chief medical doctor at Buchenwald, and Hermann Florstedt, the Deputy Commandant.
    Both Florstedt and Dr. Hoven were put on trial in the special Nazi court, which was run by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, also an officer in the Waffen-SS. Florstedt was convicted by the Nazi court and was executed. Dr. Hoven, who was a Communist sympathizer, was convicted of killing non-Communist Buchenwald prisoners by injecting them in the heart. He was sentenced to death by the SS court, but his sentence was never carried out. After serving 18 months in the Buchenwald camp prison, he was reprieved because there was a shortage of doctors in the camp and his services were needed.
After the war, an International Military Tribunal again charged Dr. Hoven with killing Buchenwald political prisoners by injection. He was one of 23 Nazi doctors who were put on trial in June 1947 in the case of USA vs. Karl Brandt and others at Nuremberg, where he was again convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Dr. Hoven was executed by hanging on June 2, 1948. The Trial of Ilse Koch