Ilse Koch

Margarete Ilse Koch (née Köhler; 22 September 1906 – 1 September 1967) was a German war criminal who committed atrocities while her husband Karl-Otto Koch was the commandant at Buchenwald. Though Ilse Koch had no official position in Nazi Germany, she became one of the most infamous Nazi figures at the war's end and was referred to as the "Kommandeuse of Buchenwald".

Because of the egregiousness of her alleged actions, including that she had selected Jewish prisoners for death in order to fashion lampshades from human skin and other items from it, 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 was 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" (Die Hexe von Buchenwald) by the inmates of the camp 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".

She committed suicide by hanging at Aichach women's prison on 1 September 1967 at age 60.

Early life

Koch was born Margarete Ilse Köhler in Dresden, Germany, in 1906. Alongside two brothers, Koch was raised by her parents Max and Anna Köhler (née Kubisch), in a Protestant, lower-middle class household. After completing her compulsory German elementary and lower secondary schooling, she attended a trade school, where she learned secretarial skills and then found employment as a secretary in a number of local firms. During this period, Germany had not yet recovered from defeat in World War I and proved both economically and politically turbulent. In 1932, Koch joined 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 Koch to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he had been posted as Commandant. They requested permission to marry from the SS Office of Racial and Settlement Affairs, which investigated their "fitness for marriage". This was determined according to racial criteria and Ilse provided evidence of her Aryan ancestry. The couple married the following year at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

In July 1937, Karl gave up his post at Sachsenhausen in order to establish and take command of Buchenwald. Karl and Ilse had two daughters and one son, who were all born on the Buchenwald concentration camp grounds from October 1937. The family lived in the camp commandant's three-story villa at Buchenwald and were regularly visited by SS officers Theodor Eicke and Richard Glücks, and on one occasion by the SS leader Heinrich Himmler.

War crimes

Following the war, she was accused of having selected Jewish prisoners to be killed in order to have decorative objects such as lampshades and book bindings made from their skins. For example, 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 Erich Wagner, 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 ($100,000 US as per 1940 exchange rates). Prisoners were reported to have died laboring to complete its construction.

SS investigation and trial

In 1941, Prince Josias von Waldeck-Pyrmont, SS and Police Leader for Weimar, began an internal investigation into Karl-Otto Koch's governance of Buchenwald, as rumors of corruption and embezzlement reached his office. After discovering significant evidence of graft, Waldeck had Karl arrested on 18 December 1941. When Karl's friend, SS chief Heinrich Himmler heard of Karl's arrest, however, he ordered him released. Karl was nonetheless relieved of his duties at Buchenwald, and sent instead to command Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. Ilse Koch continued to live in the SS settlement at Buchenwald in Karl's absence. However, on 24 August 1943, both Karl and Ilse were arrested following a renewed investigation led by SS judge Konrad Morgen. Morgen's indictment, issued 17 August 1944, formally charged Karl Koch with the "embezzlement and concealing of funds and goods in an amount of at least 200,000 RM," and the "premeditated murder" of three inmates – ostensibly to prevent them from giving evidence to the SS investigatory commission. Ilse was charged with the "habitual receiving of stolen goods, and taking for her benefit at least 25,000 RM". While Ilse Koch was acquitted at the subsequent SS trial in December 1944, Karl was found guilty, sentenced to death, and ultimately executed at Buchenwald only days prior to its liberation. Following the trial, Ilse Koch was released – having spent sixteen months in the Gestapo prison in Weimar – and moved with her two children into a small flat in Ludwigsburg. She was arrested by American occupation authorities in Ludwigsburg on 30 June 1945, after being recognized on the street by a former inmate of Buchenwald.

Trial before the U.S. Military Commission Court at Dachau

Following her arrest by American occupation authorities, Koch was chosen to stand trial alongside 30 other defendants accused of having committed war crimes at Buchenwald. The defendants would be tried by an American military court at Dachau in 1947 and be prosecuted by Lieutenant Colonel William Denson for the single charge of "participating in a common design to commit war crimes." According to this expansive charge, the prosecution was not required to show that Koch or any of her codefendants had committed any specific act of violence or atrocity, but only that they had in some fashion aided and abetted the functioning of the murderous criminal enterprise that was Buchenwald. Denson described her during the trial as "no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world."

Like each of her codefendants at the Buchenwald trial, Ilse Koch was ultimately found guilty by the court on 14 August 1947; she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She avoided a probable death sentence since she was seven months pregnant with her fourth child at the time, by an unknown father.

Sentence reduction and controversy

Following Koch's conviction at Dachau, her sentence was subjected to various levels of mandatory judicial review, before going to General Lucius D. Clay, the interim military governor of the American Zone in Germany, for final approval. First to review Koch's case were two lawyers in the office of the Deputy Judge Advocate for War Crimes, Harold Kuhn and Richard Schneider. They concluded 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 publicized charges that she ordered inmates killed for their tattooed skin, the record is especially silent." They found key testimony given against Koch to be "based on presumption and of doubtful veracity." Though Koch was shown to have beaten a few inmates, "no deaths or serious injuries are shown to have resulted." The War Crimes Review Board, a separate advisory body made up of military and civilian lawyers, conducted its own review, and similarly concluded that there was no reliable evidence that she had prisoners killed, "nor is there any evidence in this record of any kind that she at any time ever ordered any article made of human skin."