On April 11, 1945, American soldiers of the Fourth and Sixth Armored Divisions entered Buchenwald concentration camp. The gates had burst open, and what the soldiers found stopped them cold. Piles of corpses lay everywhere, and the living could barely be distinguished from the dead. Some soldiers wept.
Others could not speak at all. Inside the camp’s officer quarters, investigators uncovered objects that seemed beyond belief: pieces of tattooed human skin, shrunken heads, and human remains displayed on a table like specimens. The Americans forced citizens from the nearby city of Weimar to come and witness what had been done in their name. Among the survivors, one name was spoken again and again.
A name that would soon become infamous around the world. The woman who lived in the villa above the camp, known as the Bitch of Buchenwald. Her real name was Ilse Koch. Born Margarete Ilse Köhler on September 22, 1906, in Dresden, she grew up in a strict middle-class household.
Her father was a master craftsman, her mother a housewife. She completed her compulsory schooling, trained as a secretary, and worked for several local firms. Like many of her generation, she lived through the chaos of the Weimar Republic, the hyperinflation, the unemployment, the street battles between left and right. To her, the Nazi Party seemed to offer direction and strength.
In April 1932, at age twenty-five, she joined the Nazi Party. Less than a year later, Hitler came to power. For most women in the new Germany, the expected role was that of loyal wife and mother. But Ilse saw politics as a path to power.
She moved through Nazi circles and met SS and SA officers, among them Karl Otto Koch, a disciplined, proud SS officer nine years her senior who already had experience running concentration camps. He represented everything she admired: authority, ambition, privilege. They married in 1937 inside Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Koch had been appointed commandant. It was a strange wedding, held within a place of terror, surrounded by guards and prisoners.
Soon after, Koch was assigned to build and command a new camp near Weimar. The place was called Buchenwald. In the summer of 1937, the couple moved into a villa on a hill overlooking the camp. Between 1938 and 1940, Ilse gave birth to three children at Buchenwald.
One of them, Gudrun, died of pneumonia in February 1941. On the surface, Ilse appeared to be the perfect SS wife: elegant, educated, devoted to her husband and to Hitler. Beneath that surface, greed and cruelty took hold. The Kochs quickly realized how profitable their position could be.
They stole from prisoners everything they could take: watches, jewelry, money, gold teeth. They lived like aristocrats, with servants, horses, and fine furniture. Ilse wore expensive dresses, flaunted her wealth, and humiliated anyone beneath her. Her relationships with other SS wives soured, partly because of her arrogance, partly because she carried on affairs with men in the camp, including the deputy commandant and the camp physician, both of them married.
Toward prisoners, she was brutal. She rode through the camp on horseback, striking inmates with a whip and shouting insults. Survivors later said she laughed during executions. It was alleged that she walked near the barracks in revealing clothing and had prisoners who looked at her beaten half to death or shot.
She ordered prisoners to serve her while she was nude and enjoyed sexually humiliating inmates. She forced male prisoners to rape female prisoners in front of her. Despite having her own children, she hated pregnant women and reportedly beat them with a whip into which pieces of razor blade had been woven. She also enjoyed beating child inmates, doing so with a smile on her face.
Her most terrible legend concerned tattoos. She became obsessed with collecting pieces of tattooed human skin. Inmates with distinctive tattoos were noted by number, taken to the infirmary, and never returned. After liberation, pieces of tattooed skin were found in the camp’s pathology department, and lampshades made from human hide were displayed as evidence.
Courts later struggled to prove her direct involvement, but modern forensic tests confirmed that at least one of the lampshades was indeed made from human skin, verifying what survivors had claimed for decades. Greed corrupted the Koch household even beyond brutality. In 1940, Karl Koch built an indoor riding arena for his wife that cost more than 250,000 Reichsmarks, a small fortune stolen from prisoner property. He bought a luxury car and opened Swiss bank accounts with money extorted from prisoners.
They stole from the camp treasury and bribed officials to look away. In 1941, the crimes drew attention. An investigation began into Karl Koch’s governance of Buchenwald. He was arrested but soon freed when SS chief Heinrich Himmler intervened.
He was relieved of his duties at Buchenwald and sent to command Majdanek concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland. Ilse continued to live in the SS settlement at Buchenwald in his absence. On August 24, 1943, both Karl and Ilse were arrested after a renewed SS investigation. The case was assigned to SS Judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who found evidence of theft, corruption, and murder.
In the eyes of the SS, the crime was not the deaths of prisoners themselves, but the fact that Koch had ordered murders without authorization, including killing prisoners who treated him for syphilis, fearing they might expose him. The trial that followed was extraordinary, as the SS was judging its own. Karl Koch was sentenced to death for disgracing himself and the SS, and he was executed by firing squad on April 5, 1945. Ilse spent sixteen months in Gestapo prison in Weimar but was released and moved with her two children to Ludwigsburg, where part of her family lived.
When Nazi Germany collapsed, Allied forces began uncovering the full scale of Nazi crimes. Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945. On June 30, 1945, Ilse Koch was arrested by American occupation authorities after being recognized on the street by a former Buchenwald inmate. She was held in prison for two years before her trial opened on April 11, 1947, at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich.
Out of thirty-one defendants, she was the only woman. The court considered her knowledge and at least indirect involvement in the exploitation and murder of inmates proven. The chief prosecutor described her as nothing less than a sadistic pervert of monumental proportions unmatched in history. In August 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.
She was in an advanced stage of pregnancy at the time, which reportedly saved her from the death penalty imposed on twenty-two of her thirty co-defendants. A year later, in December 1948, General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the US occupation zone, commuted her sentence to four years citing insufficient evidence. The decision caused outrage in the United States.
Under public pressure, the case was handed to German courts. The second trial opened on November 27, 1950, and lasted seven weeks. Two hundred fifty witnesses were heard, fifty of them for the defense. Koch collapsed and had to be carried from court in late December 1950 and again in January 1951.
Her defense claimed she was merely the wife of a commandant and had no authority in the camp. The court was not convinced. On January 15, 1951, in a 111-page verdict, Ilse Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment, the only woman in West Germany to receive such a sentence for Nazi crimes. She was not present when the judgment was read.
She was transferred to the women’s prison in Aichach, Bavaria. There she spent the next sixteen years. Her petitions for pardon were rejected one after another. In letters, she insisted she had been falsely accused and that lies had destroyed her reputation.
But her mental state deteriorated. Guards described her as unstable, paranoid, haunted by visions, sometimes claiming that concentration camp survivors would abuse her. Outside the prison, her children lived under the shadow of her name. Her son Artwin, isolated and ashamed of his parents, committed suicide in 1967.
Soon after, Ilse lost contact with reality. On September 1, 1967, she hanged herself. She was buried in an unmarked grave. She was sixty years old.
Ilse Koch became the image of the female face of the Nazi regime, proof that evil could dwell behind the face of an ordinary woman who chose privilege and luxury over conscience.