Ilse Koch

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ilse Koch held no rank and no official post in Nazi Germany, yet by the end of the war she was among its most notorious figures. Her husband, Karl-Otto Koch, was the commandant of Buchenwald, and the press branded her the "Kommandeuse of Buchenwald". Her name became shorthand for one particular horror: the idea that prisoners had been killed so their tattooed skin could be turned into household objects.

  That accusation fueled a 1947 trial that drew worldwide media attention. It also drew the scrutiny of two U.S. Army lawyers, Harold Kuhn and Richard Schneider. Reading the trial record afterward, they found that on the charge of killing for tattooed skin "the record is especially silent".

  How does a woman with no title become the face of a concentration camp? What did the courts actually establish about her conduct, and what did they set aside? Why did an American general's decision to shorten her sentence send protesters into the streets carrying lampshades? And what became of her children?

  12113

• 2. From Dresden To Buchenwald

  ›

  Margarete Ilse Köhler was born in Dresden in 1906, to Max and Anna Köhler, whose maiden name was Kubisch. The family was Protestant and lower-middle class, and she grew up with two brothers. After her compulsory schooling she attended a trade school, learned secretarial skills, and worked as a secretary for several local firms.

  Germany in those years had not recovered from its defeat in World War I, and life was turbulent both economically and politically. In 1932 she joined the Nazi Party. Through her social life among members of the local SS detachment in Dresden, she met Karl-Otto Koch in 1934.

  In 1936 she followed Karl to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he had been posted as commandant. Before they could marry, the SS Office of Racial and Settlement Affairs had to investigate their "fitness for marriage". That judgment rested on racial criteria, and Ilse supplied evidence of her Aryan ancestry. The couple married at Sachsenhausen the following year.

  In July 1937 Karl left Sachsenhausen to found Buchenwald and take command of it. The couple had three children, the first born in October 1937, and all of them were born on the camp grounds. The family lived in the commandant's three-story villa. SS officers Theodor Eicke and Richard Glücks visited regularly, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler came once. Himmler would later step in to protect Karl when his command came under suspicion.

  113192728

• 3. The Lampshade Claim

  ›

  Two inmates, Josef Ackermann and Gustav Wegerer, testified in 1950 that around August 1941 they had seen a lampshade of human skin being prepared as a gift for Ilse Koch. This was the heart of the postwar accusation. She was said to have picked out Jewish prisoners for death so that lampshades and book bindings could be made from their skins.

  The claim has since been described as apocryphal. When Buchenwald was liberated, objects made from human skin were indeed found in its pathology department. Their link to Koch was weak, however, because she had left the camp in the summer of 1943. The more likely culprit was an SS doctor named Erich Wagner. While serving at Buchenwald, he wrote a dissertation on a supposed connection between habitual criminality and tattooing.

  Witnesses at her postwar trials did establish other things. She used slave labor at the camp, and she assaulted inmates on several occasions. She also reported prisoners to the camp SS for beatings, and at least once a beating caused a death.

  In 1940 she commissioned an indoor riding arena that cost over 250,000 reichsmarks, about $100,000 at the exchange rate of the time. Prisoners were reported to have died while laboring on it. Inmates called her "The Witch of Buchenwald", or Die Hexe von Buchenwald, because of her suspected cruelty and lasciviousness toward them.

  Money, as it happened, was what her own SS superiors cared about most.

  310132015

• 4. The SS Investigates

  ›

  In 1941 Prince Josias von Waldeck-Pyrmont, the SS and Police Leader for Weimar, opened an internal investigation of Karl-Otto Koch's running of Buchenwald. Rumors of corruption and embezzlement had reached his office. He found significant evidence of graft and had Karl arrested on the 18th of December 1941.

  Heinrich Himmler, a friend of Karl's, ordered him released as soon as he heard. Karl was still removed from Buchenwald and sent to command Majdanek, a concentration and extermination camp. Ilse stayed on in the SS settlement at Buchenwald while he was away.

  On the 24th of August 1943 both Kochs were arrested after a renewed investigation led by the SS judge Konrad Morgen. His indictment, issued on the 17th of August 1944, accused Karl of embezzling and concealing at least 200,000 RM. It also charged him with the premeditated murder of three inmates, apparently to keep them from giving evidence to the SS commission. Ilse was charged with habitually receiving stolen goods and taking at least 25,000 RM for her own benefit.

  The SS trial in December 1944 acquitted Ilse. Karl was found guilty and sentenced to death, and he was executed at Buchenwald only days before its liberation. Ilse had spent sixteen months in the Gestapo prison in Weimar. After her release she moved with her two children into a small flat in Ludwigsburg.

  On the 30th of June 1945, a former Buchenwald inmate recognized her on a Ludwigsburg street. American occupation authorities arrested her that day, and she soon faced thirty other defendants.

  2213261928

• 5. Dachau Verdict And Review

  ›

  Lieutenant Colonel William Denson prosecuted Koch and thirty other defendants before an American military court at Dachau in 1947. They faced a single charge, "participating in a common design to commit war crimes". That wording was broad. The prosecution did not have to show that Koch had committed any particular act of violence, only that she had helped the murderous enterprise of Buchenwald function.

  Denson told the court she was "no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world." Survivors described sadistic and perverse violence, and the testimony gave rise to her image as "the concentration camp murderess".

  On the 14th of August 1947 the court found her guilty, as it did every one of her codefendants, and sentenced her to life imprisonment. A death sentence had been probable. She avoided it because she was seven months pregnant with her fourth child, whose father was unknown.

  Before the sentence could take effect, military lawyers reviewed it at several levels. Kuhn and Schneider judged that key testimony against her was "based on presumption and of doubtful veracity". They accepted that she had beaten a few inmates, but "no deaths or serious injuries are shown to have resulted."

  The War Crimes Review Board, a separate advisory body of military and civilian lawyers, went further. It found no reliable evidence that she had prisoners killed. It added that "nor is there any evidence in this record of any kind that she at any time ever ordered any article made of human skin."

  Judge Advocate Colonel J.L. Harbaugh read the record himself and wrote, "I can't see anything on which we honestly can hold the accused." He blamed her unique position as the only woman at the camp, and said she had been tried in the newspapers. He called the sentence "excessive" and recommended cutting it to four years.

  61120262

• 6. Clay And The Uproar

  ›

  On the 8th of June 1948, General Lucius D. Clay, the interim military governor of the American Zone, accepted that recommendation and reduced the sentence to four years. His stated reason was that there was no convincing evidence she had selected inmates for extermination to obtain tattooed skins, or that she owned any article made of human skin.

  Clay did not defend her character. "I hold no sympathy for Ilse Koch," he said, calling her a woman of depraved character who had done many reprehensible things punishable under German law. The Dachau court, he explained, had tried her only as a war criminal on specific charges.

  The reduction became public on the 16th of September 1948, and the reaction was fierce. Years afterward Clay recalled that he had received more abuse for this than for anything else he did in Germany. In his telling, a reporter had called her the "Bitch of Buchenwald" and written that she kept lampshades of human skin. He insisted the court had proven the lampshades were made of goat skin, and that her crimes were mainly against German people, over whom the Americans had no jurisdiction.

  Newspaper editorials asked whether the U.S. Army had lost its judgment, while still describing her as a sexual deviant who killed for skin. The Miami Herald demanded to know what more the army needed in order to jail her and keep her there. The New York Post called the decision "Clay's counter-atrocity". Ed Sullivan, in the New York News, wondered whether the army had cut the sentence so she could return to the lampshade business.

  The protest spilled into the streets. Veterans associations and the American Jewish Congress organized rallies. Clay, visiting the United States in the middle of the controversy, was picketed by demonstrators, some carrying lampshades, who demanded his removal from European command.

  A group of U.S. Senators then opened an investigation, led by Homer S. Ferguson. Its hearings called major figures from the Dachau trial, and Denson insisted that his witnesses had justified both the conviction and the life sentence. The committee recommended a new trial, not by the U.S. Army but by the newly independent West German judiciary. Its report claimed her violence had been "more unnatural and more deliberate" because she was a woman acting independently.

  81411125

• 7. Trial At Augsburg

  ›

  Prosecutor Johann Ilkow of Bavaria brought the new case, and its scope was set by what Dachau could not reach. At the urging of the U.S. government, West German courts took up crimes against German nationals, which the American military court had no jurisdiction over. The military was told to give German investigators full assistance.

  Koch was re-arrested immediately upon her release from Landsberg prison in 1949. Ilkow indicted her on twenty-five misdemeanor counts of grievous bodily harm. He also charged incitement to grievous bodily harm in cases "no longer determinable", sixty-five counts of incitement to attempted murder, and twenty-five counts of incitement to murder.

  The hearing opened on the 27th of November 1950 before the District Court at Augsburg. It lasted seven weeks and heard 250 witnesses, fifty of them for the defense. Koch told the court, "I never saw anything at Buchenwald which might have been against humanity... I was too busy raising my two children." Her mental health deteriorated, and she collapsed in court in late December 1950 and again in January 1951.

  At least four prosecution witnesses said they had seen her choose tattooed prisoners who were then killed, or had seen or helped make lampshades from tattooed skin. The prosecution dropped this charge, because it could not prove that lampshades or any other items had actually been made from human skin.

  The verdict came on the 15th of January 1951 in a decision 111 pages long, and Koch was not in court to hear it. The judges ruled that the earlier trials did not bar the case under the principle of ne bis in idem. In 1944 she had faced only a charge of receiving stolen goods, and in 1947 she had been tried for crimes against foreigners after the 1st of September 1939.

  She was convicted of seven misdemeanor counts of incitement to grievous bodily harm, one count of incitement to attempted murder, and one count of incitement to murder. The sentence was life imprisonment and permanent forfeiture of her civil rights. The court said she had "consciously suppressed any feeling of compassion and pity she had as a woman" and indulged her pursuit of power and prestige. It also singled out her "stubborn and irresponsible denial" and her incapacity for the "slightest admission of guilt."

  The Federal Court of Justice dismissed her appeal on the 22nd of April 1952. The Bavarian Ministry of Justice rejected every pardon petition she later filed. She also protested her sentence to the International Human Rights Commission, without result.

  67171816

• 8. Family And Final Years

  ›

  Gudrun, the younger of Ilse and Karl's two daughters, died of pneumonia in February 1941 at four months old. Her brother Artwin, born in 1938, died by suicide in 1964. Her sister Gisela, born in 1939, lived until 2018.

  Ilse conceived one more child while awaiting trial at Dachau, with a fellow German war crimes internee, under circumstances the record calls murky. She gave birth to a son, whom she named Uwe Köhler, at Landsberg prison in October 1947. Bavarian child welfare authorities took him immediately. Uwe learned who his mother was only as a teenager, and in 1966 he began to write to her and visit her.

  On the 1st of September 1967, at the age of 60, Koch hanged herself with a bed sheet in Aichach women's prison. She had been suffering delusions and had become convinced that concentration camp survivors would abuse her in her cell. Her note was addressed to Uwe: "There is no other way. Death for me is a release."

  In 1971 Uwe asked for his mother to be rehabilitated after death. He turned to the press and used clemency documents from her lawyer in 1957, along with his own impressions of her from their time together. His aim was to change how people saw her.

  2223131925