No, it's not. It simply involves patiently explaining, yet again, the difference between the particular and the general, and how the two can overlap. You probably weren't very good at Venn diagrams at school, were you?
Eisenhower is quoted reacting to what he saw in a liberated concentration camp, Ohrdruf, after he had received reports from across the front about other liberated concentration camps and decided to see for himself what they were about. The liberation of the camps marked the end of the Holocaust because more than a third of the inmates in the camps in Germany in 1945 were Jews. The liberation of the camps also marked the end of many other forms of Nazi persecution, since nearly two thirds of the surviving prisoners were not Jews. Among the victims of such persecution were German and Polish political prisoners, a very few of whom were the victims of freelance Ed Gein-style haberdashery in one particular camp, Buchenwald.
To put it another way, Eisenhower was reacting to Nazi crimes against humanity, in the form of the state of the concentration camps in 1945 when they were liberated. The set of Nazi crimes against humanity includes a subset, the Holocaust, and another subset, freelance Ed Gein-style haberdashery. One subset, the Holocaust, overlapped with the 20 or so concentration camps of the WVHA, but was not restricted to those sites, while the other subset, freelance Ed Gein-style haberdashery, took place exclusively in one camp.
Thus, shrunken heads and lampshades do not have anything to do with the Nazi genocide of European Jews, whereas the fate of many European Jews interned in camps in the Reich in 1945, including Buchenwald, does.
Hi everybody! Did you miss me? I decided I needed to rebuild my system with an SSD boot drive and then I went on vacation. So I had some downtime. But
I'm back now and my system is screaming fast. Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, heads and shades....
That's a pretty good answer. But it features a dash of confusion-for which I am responsible--because I mixed up two different questions in my original post. The two questions which should be dealt with seperately are: 1) Was Eisenhower talking about the holocaust--the extermination of the Jews when he said he "saw things that beggar description" at Ohrdruf? and 2) Are the shrunken heads and lampshades atrocities part of the holocaust?
But first...you mischaracterized Eisenhower's visit to Ohrdruf. Eisenhower didn't visit Ohrdruf after receiving reports from across the front about other liberated concentration camps. With the Moscow declaration in 1943, the Allies had found the Germans guilty of crimes against humanity/war crimes and needed to find evidence to support the conviction. The conditions in the camps in the closing days of the war turned out to be a Psych Ops wet dream as far as gathering evidence of German atrocities. Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf for the simple reason that it was the first concentration camp liberated by the Americans. The British overran Belsen (their first camp) right around the same time the Americans lost their camp cherry so any "reports from across the front" regarding the concentration camps prior to Ohrdruf would have come from the Soviets. And because the Soviets didn't find conditions in the death camps that they overran in late 1944 and early 1945 horrific enough to publicize, document or photograph to any great degree, any of their "reports from across the front" would have been much ado about nothing.
Anyway, your answer about what things Eisenhower saw that "beggar description" when he did drop by Ohrdruf for a photo op a week after it had been discovered is spot on accurate: he saw what he believed was (or what he believed could be spun into) evidence of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity. Now, according to you, these Nazi Crimes Against Humanity are a "set" that includes other "subsets." One of these subsets is the holocaust--the extermination of the European Jews. Another subset is the Ed Gein style haberdashery. I agree with your categorization schema here. I'm sure you'd agree that there are many other subsets of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity and that the subset of the holocaust can be broken down even further into sub-subsets.
So Eisenhower was reacting to the horrorshow at Ohrdruf in the overall sense. But that doesn't mean that his reaction to the overall set of "Nazi Crimes Against Humanity" was a reaction to the subset of NCAH--the holocaust anymore than you can say it was reaction to the subset of NCAH--shrunken heads and lampshades, or NCAH--Russian POWs, or NCAH--Communists, or NCAH--Jehovah's Witness, etc. Because there were Jews present at most of the NCAH--the holocaust sites and there were Jews present at Ohrdruf isn't particularly relevant. It certainly doesn't automatically turn the overall set of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity at Ohrdruf into Nazi Crimes Against Humanity--the holocaust.
Because Eisenhower didn't expand upon the "things that beggar description" we can't know specifcally what he was talking about. But we can determine what he was NOT talking about by looking at what was NOT at Ohrdruf. We can be reasonably certain Eisenhower was not talking about the shrunken heads or the lampshades when he said he "saw things that beggar description."
But neither did he see anything that was evidence of the extermination of the European Jews (and this is not because there was no extermination of the Jews. Even what passes for evidence of a German policy of extermination wasn't present at Ohrdruf). There weren't any documents talking about a policy of exterminating the Jews at Ohrdruf. Nothing I've read leads me to believe Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf because he heard it was a camp where Jews had suffered.
I haven't seen any evidence that he connected anything he saw with Jewish suffering. IIRC, the emphasis was on the suffering of citizens of the United Nations, including POWs and not Jews.
Even though the Eisenhower Memorial Commission website says that Ohrdruf was a holding pen for prisoners on their way to the gas chambers at Buchenwald, we know that isn't true. Ike didn't see any gas chambers at Ohrdruf. He didn't see the bodies of anybody who had died in gas chamber. We know he didn't see a camp where comdemned prisoners, Jewish or otherwise, waited to be murdered. He didn't see any Einsatzgruppen mass graves. He saw some relatively healthy prisoners demonstrating interrogation and punishment techniques. He saw some crispy corpses on the griddle. He saw some dead people. He saw some skinny people and he saw some sick people. We know that most of the dead, skinny, and sick people he saw became that way in the few weeks prior to liberation because of the breakdown of transportation infrastructure at the end of the war. The conditions were not even evidence of Nazi Crimes Against Humanity let alone evidence of a Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews.
The presence of Jews at Ohrdruf, if it is meaningful in anyway, is evidence AGAINST a deliberate German policy to exterminate the Jews. So nothing Eisenhower saw can be said to be evidence of the Nazi Crimes Against Humanity--the extermination of the Jews. Ergo, whatever Eisenhower saw that beggared description, it wasn't the holocaust.
Now, to answer the second part of the question, are the shrunken heads and the lampshades part of the holocaust or not, I would say not. The fact is that the shrunken head is obviously not of European origin--Jewish or otherwise--and only the most gullible of people would believe it was. And if there was any tattooed skin being turned into lampshades, Jewish law makes it extremely unlikely that it came from a Jew.
The fact that these props were found at only one camp isn't particularly relevant and is only partially true anyway. The shrunken heads were found at one camp only. But the tattooed skin has connections extending beyond Buchenwald. As we all know, collecting tattooed skin was one of Frau Koch's hobbies. She was at Buchenwald until her arrest in 1943. But we have at least one eyewitness who says Ilse Koch traveled to Madjanek to look for specimens of human skin.
Because her husband had been transferred to Majdanek in 1941, it's very likely that she did indeed visit that camp for no other reason than to be with her husband and vice versa. So this means that the Ed Gein style haberdashery wasn't restricted to just one camp and has connections with what is often considered a true holocaust "death" camp.
Still, I tend to agree with you that they're not part of the holocaust because the heads and shades were never identified specifically as coming from Jewish victims.
But this is true for everything in the western camps. None of the other iconic holocaust imagery--the bulldozing bodies of Belsen or the skinny men of Buchenwald--can be considered holocaustal because these weren't identified as Jewish victims of Nazism either. There were probably some dead Jews among the heaps of corpses but they were not identified as such. So they don't count.
If you want to say that Eisenhower was reacting to Nazi Crimes Against Humanity--the holocaust, there's no rational reason for disclaiming the shrunken heads and the lampshades as part of the holocaust. They're part of a package. You need to take them together or reject them together. Unless all the evidence for the holocaust is evidence for the holocaust until it is proven to be false at which point it never was evidence for the holocaust.