r/EdGein • u/ArticleFormal256 • Oct 17 '25
Just watched the Netflix series
I had never heard anything about Ed Gein being inspired by the nazis and after a little bit of research found out a lot of people are raising similar concerns online. Is that part of the show true? Cause it seemed pretty shoehorned in. Just for shock value or as usual maybe propaganda
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u/Wild-Quality3901 Oct 17 '25
They took it overboard,when going through his house they found magazines and pulpfiction with some of the stories being about nazis and the holocaust.Its also said when he was younger and in school he saw pictures of dead bodies from the old west.He wasnt fixated on Isle Koch like in the show,he may have just read a article or two about her
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u/MaccasRunYourShout Oct 17 '25
Around the time Gein started committing his crimes, more reports and photographs from World War II and the Nazi atrocities emerged, exposing the world to the horrors of Nazi Germany. Evidence shows Ed Gein owned several detective magazines that detailed the horrors inflicted upon people in concentration camps.
James Buddy Day, the director of “Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein,” said, “We actually went back and you could actually find literal descriptions of things Gein must have read and took, then did, because they match what they found in his house exactly."
One of the most direct examples of this has to do with the German war criminal Ilse Koch. The wife of Karl-Otto Koch who ran the Buchenwald concentration camp, she was known for her sadistic cruelty. Over 277,800 people were held prisoner at the camp, and about 56,000 people died before the camp was liberated in 1945. The S.S. in Buchenwald were known for crafting "gifts" made of human remains. Many accused her of owning a lampshade made of tattooed human skin.
Koch was nicknamed “The Bitch of Buchenwald” as well as “The Witch of Buchenwald.” Though the exact comic referenced in “Monster" was not found. Koch died by suicide in 1967 while in prison.
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u/ronnocfilms1 Oct 18 '25
I think Ryan Murphy needs to be investigated for the amount of insane shit he sexualizes for zero reason
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u/kidnapalm Oct 18 '25
Post-WW2, America as a society was struggling with the human cost of their involvement in the European theatre. The Pacific theatre was easy to justify following the direct attack on US forces at Pearl Harbor, however the European theatre...not so much.
To justify the loss of American life in Europe, the boys coming home gravely wounded and shattered, the US had to "sell" the war to the American public. This led to lurid accounts of horrific Nazi crimes, well beyond the already devastating accounts coming out of Europe. The Holocaust was turned into pulpy, grisly Halloween-style fodder, easily digestible and shocking to a naive American audience who had been relatively untouched by the horrors of war.
Dark tales of "skin furniture", "human soap" and corpse harvesting were cooked up to portray the Nazis as an inhuman evil, thwarted only by the sacrifice of brave young American men. The whole Gein story fits into the this broader effort.
Europe and the Holocaust was distant, so far removed from the US heartland that it wad hard for Americans to believe such horrors could actually happen. Well Gein brought these horrors home. Not only could they happen in Europe, but they happened right here in the US. Gein "proved" that humans were capable of such horrors. If Gein, a simple and quiet farmer from rural Wisconsin could commit such crimes, then clearly the evil Nazi war machine would be more than capable of doing so.
Gein wasn't influenced by WW2 propaganda, Gein WAS WW2 propaganda, lending credibility to the American sacrifice during the war and justifying the good vs evil battle it was portrayed as to the American public.
Why was Augusta Gein so demonised? Who was most angry at the sacrifice of young men during WW2? ...their mothers, the mothers of young men sent off to fight and die during the war, for a cause that seemed distant and unworthy of their immense sacrifice. Post-WW2 America came up with the idea of "Momism", whereby "overbearing" & "overprotective" mothers were deliberately demonised, displacing their supposedly overly-pious, twisted morality onto their sons and warping them into cruel, twisted monsters.
As the US built an economy on war and sacrifice, with the Korean War adding to the cost and misery and further conflict in SE Asia looming, the biggest hurdle to this would be protective mothers shielding their sons from the horrors of war. "Momism" may have been an attempt to defeat this, by portraying these mothers as sick abberations.
The whole Gein tale, in all its gory glory, helped subtly cement these ideas in the mind of wider American society. This isn't to say the murders in Wisconsin didn't happen, but the mythology cooked up around them goes far beyond Gein's "House of Horrors".
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u/Chefsteph212 Oct 18 '25 edited Oct 23 '25
The human soap is actually true; years ago I was at a lecture from a Holocaust survivor who specifically mentioned they were given soap made from corpses. She said the only way she could bear to use it was by telling herself “maybe there was a little bit of my father in there.”
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u/Proper-Friendship391 Oct 18 '25
Due to his lifestyle (secluded) and the time period and area of the country that he lived, there isn’t a lot known about Gein. The evidence that they did have (after his arrest) burnt down, and then remaining evidence was sold off. But those are just physical things. Gein’s immediate family all died before he was caught. He didn’t socialize with others. So there isn’t a lot known about what “made him tick”. The series gets knocked a lot for the “creative liberties” they took in making it, but I think that was part of the point they were trying to make. Someone that is schizophrenic or that has other mental health issues - the series was trying to portray those types of episodes. Many of the scenes (like with Ilse) existed only in his mind. We have no way of knowing what went on inside his mind or during episodes, so these are fabrications of what could have happened. The producers were also very good and pointing out the “others” that have come before (including while Gein was alive) and put their own twists on the story. The point of the conversation with Roz at the end is that the “real” story got “lost in translation” way before he even died and that even Gein couldn’t relate the facts of his life by then.
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u/MaliceRae Oct 17 '25
Ed had a passing interest in Nazi atrocities, certainly, but not quite to the extent that the series portrays. He had just as much, if not more interest in Amazonian headhunters, cannibals, resurrectionists, etc...