Ilse Koch


Ilse Koch was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald and Majdanek. In 1947, she became one of the first prominent Nazis tried by the U.S. military.
After the trial received worldwide media attention, survivor accounts of her actions resulted in other authors describing her abuse of prisoners as sadistic, and the image of her as "the concentration camp murderess" was current in post-war German society.
She was accused of taking souvenirs from the skin of murdered inmates with distinctive tattoos, although those claims were rejected at both of her trials. She was known as "The Witch of Buchenwald" by the inmates because of her cruelty and toward prisoners. In English, she is referred to as: "The Beast of Buchenwald", "Queen of Buchenwald", "Red Witch of Buchenwald", "Butcher Widow", and more commonly, "The Bitch of Buchenwald".

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 some friends in the SA and SS, she met Karl-Otto Koch in 1934.
incorporated to the 1st American Army, 16ème Bataillon de Fusiliers.
In 1936, she began working as a guard and secretary at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where her fiancé was the Commandant. The couple married the same year. In 1937, her husband was posted to Buchenwald.

War crimes

While at Buchenwald, Koch allegedly engaged in a gruesome experiment, where it was claimed that she ordered selected tattooed prisoners to be murdered and skinned to retrieve the tattooed parts of their bodies. It was allegedly done to help a prison doctor,, in his dissertation on tattooing and criminality.
In 1940, she built an indoor sports arena, which cost over 250,000 reichsmarks, most of which had been seized from the inmates. In 1941, Karl-Otto Koch was transferred to Lublin, where he helped establish the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. Ilse Koch remained at Buchenwald until 24 August 1943, when she and her husband were arrested on the orders of Josias von Waldeck-Pyrmont, SS and Police Leader for Weimar, who had supervisory authority over Buchenwald. The charges against the Kochs comprised private enrichment, embezzlement, and the murder of prisoners to prevent them from giving testimony.
Ilse Koch was imprisoned until 1944 when she was acquitted for lack of evidence. Her husband was found guilty and sentenced to death by an SS court in Munich, and was executed by firing squad on 5 April 1945 in the court of the camp he once commanded. She then lived with her surviving family in the town of Ludwigsburg, where she was arrested by U.S. authorities on 30 June 1945.

First trial

Koch and 30 other accused were arraigned before the American military court at Dachau in 1947. Prosecuting her was future United States Court of Claims Judge Robert L. Kunzig. She was charged with "participating in a criminal plan for aiding, abetting and participating in the murders at Buchenwald".
Koch announced in the courtroom that she was eight months pregnant but on 19 August 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for "violation of the laws and customs of war".

Reduction of sentence

Gen. Lucius D. Clay was the interim military governor of the American Zone in Germany, and he reduced the judgment to four years' imprisonment on 8 June 1948, after she had served two years of her sentence, on the grounds that "there was no convincing evidence that she had selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins, or that she possessed any articles made of human skin". News of the reduced sentence did not become public until 16 September 1948, and Clay stood firm despite the ensuing uproar. Jean Edward Smith reported in his biography Lucius D. Clay: An American Life that the general maintained that the leather lamp shades were really made out of goat skin. The book quotes a statement made by Clay years later:
The Buchenwald Memorial Foundation states that:

Second trial

Under the pressure of public opinion, Koch was re-arrested in 1949 and tried before a West German court. The hearing opened on 27 November 1950 before the District Court at Augsburg and lasted seven weeks, during which 250 witnesses were heard, including 50 for the defense. Koch collapsed and had to be carried from the court in late December 1950, and again on 11 January 1951. At least four witnesses for the prosecution testified that they had seen Koch choose tattooed prisoners, who were then killed, or had seen or been involved in the process of making human-skin lampshades from tattooed skin. However, this charge was dropped by the prosecution when they could not prove lampshades or any other items were actually made from human skin.
On 15 January 1951, the Court pronounced its verdict, in a 111-page-long decision, for which Koch was not present in court. It was concluded that the previous trials in 1944 and 1947 were not a bar to proceedings under the principle of ne bis in idem, as at the 1944 trial Koch had only been charged with receiving, while in 1947 she had been accused of crimes against foreigners after 1 September 1939, and not with crimes against humanity of which Germans and Austrians had been defendants both before and after that date. She was convicted of charges of incitement to murder, incitement to attempted murder and incitement to the crime of committing grievous bodily harm, and on 15 January 1951 was sentenced to life imprisonment and permanent forfeiture of civil rights.
On 10 May 1950 Koch was indicted by Dr.Hans Ilkow, who served at the superior court in Augsburg as chief prosecutor. On 15 June 1951, also known as "German Judgement" day, Koch officially started her life imprisonment sentence. Koch appealed to have the judgment quashed, but the appeal was dismissed on 22 April 1952 by the Federal Court of Justice. She later made several petitions for a pardon, all of which were rejected by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. Koch protested her life sentence, to no avail, to the International Human Rights Commission.

Family

Karl and Ilse Koch had two sons, one of whom committed suicide after the war "because he couldn't live with the shame of the crimes of his parents." Another son, Uwe, conceived in her prison cell at Dachau with a fellow German prisoner, was born in the Aichach prison near Dachau where Koch was sent to serve her life sentence and was immediately taken from her. At the age of 19, Uwe Köhler learned that Koch was his mother and began visiting her regularly at Aichach.
Koch hanged herself at Aichach women's prison on 1 September 1967 at age 60. She suffered from delusions and had become convinced that concentration camp survivors would abuse her in her cell.
In 1971, her son Uwe sought posthumous rehabilitation for his mother. Uwe was determined to clear his mother's name after her death in 1967. Through his usage of the press, he used clemency documents from her former lawyer in 1957 and his impression of her based on their relationship in an attempt to rewrite people's attitude towards Koch.

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