Ilse Koch (22 September 1906 – 1 September 1967) was a German war criminal who committed atrocities while her husband Karl-Otto Koch was commandant at Buchenwald. Though Ilse Koch had no official position in the Nazi state, she became one of the most infamous Nazi figures at war's end.
Because of the egregiousness of her alleged actions, including that she had selected tattooed prisoners for death in order to fashion lampshades and other items from their skins, her 1947 U.S. military commission court trial at Dachau received worldwide media attention, as did the testimony of survivors who ascribed sadistic and perverse acts of violence to Koch – giving rise to the image of her as "the concentration camp murderess."
However, the most serious of these allegations were found to be without proof in two different legal processes, one conducted by an American military commission court at Dachau in 1947, and another by the West German Judiciary at Augsburg in 1950-1951. Harold Kuhn and Richard Schneider, two U.S Army lawyers tasked with conducting the official review of her conviction at Dachau, noted that “in spite of the extravagant statements made in the newspapers, the record contains little convincing evidence against the accused… In regard to the widely publicised charges that she ordered inmates killed for their tattooed skin, the record is especially silent.”
That the wild claims were dismissed as lacking evidence did little to sway public opinion. She was known as "The Witch of Buchenwald" () by the inmates because of her suspected cruelty and lasciviousness toward prisoners. She has been nicknamed "The Beast of Buchenwald", the "Queen of Buchenwald", the "Red Witch of Buchenwald", "Butcher Widow", and "The Bitch of Buchenwald".
Koch died by suicide at Aichach women's prison on 1 September 1967 at age 60.
Early life
Koch was born Margarete Ilse Köhler in Dresden, Germany, the daughter of a former military commander. She was known as a polite and happy child in her elementary school. At the age of 15, she entered an accountancy school. Later, she entered employment as a bookkeeping clerk. At the time the economy of Germany had not yet recovered from defeat in World War I. In 1932, she became a member of the Nazi Party. Through her social engagement with members of the local SS detachment in Dresden, she met her future husband, Karl-Otto Koch, in 1934.
In 1936, she followed Karl-Otto Koch to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he had been posted as Commandant. The couple married the following year. In July 1937, Karl gave up his post at Sachsenhausen in order to establish and take command of Buchenwald.
War crimes
Following the war, Koch was accused of having selected tattooed prisoners to be killed, in order to have decorative objects such as lampshades and book bindings made from their skins. For example, two inmates, Josef Ackermann and Gustav Wegerer, testified in 1950 that they had witnessed (circa August 1941) a lampshade being prepared from human skin to be presented to Ilse Koch. This crime, however, has been said to be apocryphal. While various objects fashioned from human skins were discovered in Buchenwald's pathology department at liberation, their connection to Koch was tenuous, given that she had not been at the camp since the summer of 1943. The more likely culprit was SS doctor , who wrote a dissertation while serving at Buchenwald on the purported link he saw between habitual criminality and the practice of tattooing one's skin.
However, authoritative testimony from numerous witnesses at Koch's postwar trials firmly established that she had made extensive use of slave labor at the camp, had assaulted inmates on several occasions, and had reported inmates to the camp SS for beatings — beatings that resulted in death on at least one occasion. In 1940, Koch also commissioned the construction of an indoor riding arena, which cost over 250,000 reichsmarks (approximately $62,500). Prisoners were reported to have died laboring to complete its construction.