On April 11, 1945, American soldiers of the 4th and 6th Armored Divisions entered the Buchenwald concentration camp. What they found inside the gates left many of them weeping and others unable to speak at all.
Piles of corpses lay alongside living prisoners who were barely distinguishable from the dead. In the officers' quarters, investigators soon discovered objects beyond comprehension: pieces of tattooed human skin, shrunken human heads, and a table on which human remains were displayed as samples.
The Americans ordered the residents of nearby Weimar to come and see what had been done in their name. Among the survivors, one name was repeated again and again, a name that would soon become notorious around the world. It belonged to a woman who had lived in a villa above the camp and ruled there with cruelty and vanity. She was called the Witch of Buchenwald, but her real name was Ilse Koch.
Ilse Koch, born Margarete Ilse Köhler, was born on September 20, 1906, in Dresden, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Max Köhler, was a master craftsman, and her mother, Anna, kept the household. Ilse had two siblings, and their upbringing was strict and orderly.
After finishing compulsory German elementary and lower secondary school, she attended a commercial school, where she learned office and secretarial skills. She then worked as a secretary in several local firms.
As a young woman in the 1920s, she lived through the chaos of the Weimar Republic, a time of hyperinflation, unemployment, and street fighting between the far right and the left. For most of her generation, the promises of strong leadership and national revival offered by the growing Nazi Party seemed to be the answer to the desperation of those years.
In April 1932, Ilse joined the Nazi Party and received party number 1,130,836. She was 25 at the time, ambitious and drawn to the energy and pomp of Nazism. Less than a year later, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power.
In the new Nazi Germany, women were expected to be devoted wives and mothers, bearers of the pure Aryan race. For Ilse, however, politics was also a path to power. She was fascinated by the Nazi Party and met various officers of the SS and SA paramilitary organizations in her social circles.
Among them was Karl Otto Koch, a man whose fate would soon become linked with hers. Karl Otto was an SS member, disciplined and proud, already experienced in the rapidly expanding system of concentration camps being established across Germany. He was nine years older than Ilse, self-confident, and represented everything she admired: authority, ambition, and privilege.
They began a relationship and married in 1937 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Karl Otto had been appointed commander. It was a strange wedding held in the middle of a place of horror surrounded by guards and prisoners, but it symbolized their shared devotion to the Nazi regime.
Shortly afterward, Karl Otto Koch was entrusted with building and commanding a new camp near the city of Weimar. The site was called Buchenwald, and in the summer of 1937 the couple moved into a large villa built for them on a hill overlooking the camp.
Two years later, on September 1, 1939, the Second World War began. Between 1938 and 1940, Ilse gave birth to three children at Buchenwald: Artwin, Gisela, and the youngest, Gudrun. Gudrun died of pneumonia in February 1941 at the age of four months.
On the surface, Ilse appeared to be the perfect wife of an SS officer: elegant, educated, devoted to her husband and to the ideals of Adolf Hitler. Beneath the surface, however, greed and cruelty took root in her.
The Kochs soon discovered how profitable their position could be. They stole everything from the prisoners: watches, jewelry, money, and even gold teeth. Thanks to this, they lived like nobility, with staff, horses, and luxury furniture.
Ilse wore expensive clothes, ostentatiously displayed her wealth, and despised anyone she considered subordinate. Other SS officers' wives found her boastful. She crudely flaunted her newly acquired wealth and abused her position as the wife of the feared camp commander.
Her many love affairs with other men in the camp, including deputy commander Hermann Florstedt and camp doctor Waldemar Hoven, both of whom were married with children, also contributed to tense relations with the other SS women. She flirted with SS men, but was brutal to prisoners.
She rode through the camp on horseback, whipping prisoners and shouting insults at them. Witnesses remembered her laughing during camp executions, and according to testimony she walked by the barracks in provocative clothing just so that men who looked at her would be beaten unconscious or shot in the head.
At Buchenwald, Ilse Koch became notorious for predatory sexual behavior and sadism. She ordered prisoners to serve her while she was naked and indulged in sexual humiliation. She sexually abused prisoners and forced male prisoners to rape female prisoners in front of her.
Although she herself had two children, she hated pregnant women. According to testimony, she was the one who ordered a whipping bench fitted along its entire length with razor blades. Ilse Koch also took pleasure in whipping child prisoners, and she did so with a smile on her face.
Her fascination with tattoos gave rise to the most terrifying legend of all. According to testimony, she became obsessed with collecting pieces of tattooed human skin. Prisoners with distinctive tattoos were registered under a number and taken to the infirmary, from which they never returned.
After liberation, pieces of tattooed skin were found in the camp's pathology department and displayed as evidence, along with lamps made from them. Although courts later had difficulty proving her direct involvement, this horror became inseparably linked with her name. Modern forensic tests confirmed that at least one of the famous lamps was indeed made from human skin, confirming what survivors had claimed for decades.
In addition to cruelty, the Kochs also succumbed to greed. In 1940, Karl Otto built an indoor riding hall for his wife for more than 250,000 Reichsmarks, equivalent today to nearly 2.5 million US dollars. The result was enrichment from the prisoners' property.
Karl Otto Koch also bought a luxury car and opened Swiss bank accounts with money extorted from prisoners. They stole money from the camp treasury and bribed officials to look the other way.
In 1941, their crimes attracted attention and an investigation into the Koch case at Buchenwald was opened. Ilse's husband was arrested, but was soon released again after his friend, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, intervened on his behalf.
Koch was nevertheless stripped of his position as commander of Buchenwald and sent to command the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland. Ilse Koch, meanwhile, remained living in the SS settlement near Buchenwald during his absence.
On August 24, 1943, however, after the investigation was reopened, both Karl Otto and Ilse were arrested again. The case was taken up by SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who found evidence of theft, corruption, and murder.
From the SS's point of view, the crime was not the fact that prisoners were dying, but that Koch had them killed on his own initiative without permission, and that he had prisoners who treated him for syphilis executed because he feared they could incriminate him.
The trial that followed was extraordinary. The SS was judging itself. It ended with Karl Otto Koch sentenced to death for abuse of his position, and on April 5, 1945, he was executed by firing squad.
After the trial, Ilse Koch was released after 16 months in the Gestapo prison in Weimar and moved with her two children to a small apartment in the town of Ludwigsburg, where part of her family lived.
As Nazi Germany collapsed, the Allied armies began to uncover the full extent of Nazi crimes. The Buchenwald camp, the site of the Kochs' crimes, was liberated on April 11, 1945. On June 30 of that year, Ilse Koch was arrested by the American occupation authorities after a former Buchenwald prisoner recognized her in the street.
Because of her lifestyle, marked by sexual and alcoholic excesses, her relatives tried to have her children taken from her care, but due to the postwar chaos this happened only after she was arrested.
Ilse Koch was held in prison for two years before her trial began on April 11, 1947, in the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Of the 31 defendants, she was the only woman.
The court considered it proven that she knew about the exploitation and killing of prisoners and was at least indirectly involved in them. Chief prosecutor William Denson declared during the trial that she was nothing less than a sadistic perverse being of monumental dimensions, without parallel in history.
In August 1947, Ilse Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. At the time she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, which probably saved her from the death penalty, which was imposed on 22 of her 30 co-defendants.
A year later, in December 1948, however, the military governor of the American occupation zone in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, commuted her sentence to four years in prison due to a lack of direct evidence. The decision caused outrage in the United States, and under public pressure the case was handed over to German justice.
The proceedings in the second trial began on November 27, 1950, and lasted seven weeks. During them, 250 witnesses were heard, 50 of them for the defense.
In December 1950 and again in January 1951, Ilse Koch collapsed in the courtroom and had to be carried out. The defense tried a different strategy. It claimed that she was merely the commander's wife, who had no authority in the camp. The court did not believe it.
On January 15, 1951, in a 111-page verdict, Ilse Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was the only woman in the Federal Republic of Germany to receive such a sentence for Nazi crimes. She was not present in the courtroom when the verdict was announced.
She was taken to the women's prison in Aichach, Bavaria. There she spent the next 16 years behind bars. Her requests for clemency were rejected one after another.
In letters, she insisted that she had been falsely accused and that her reputation had been destroyed by untruths. Her mental state, however, deteriorated. Guards described her as unstable, paranoid, and haunted by visions. She claimed, for example, that former concentration camp prisoners came into her cell to torture her.
To the world, she was a symbol of the moral collapse of those who accepted absolute power. Ilse Koch became a symbol of the female face of the Nazi regime, proof that evil is not limited to men or monsters, but can hide behind the face of a seemingly ordinary woman who chose to cast off her conscience in exchange for a life of luxury and privilege.
Outside prison, her children lived in the shadow of her name. Her son Artwin, isolated and shamed because of his parents, committed suicide in 1967. Shortly after her son's death, Ilse finally lost contact with reality, and on September 1, 1967, she hanged herself in her cell. She was buried in an unmarked grave. The Witch of Buchenwald was dead. She was 60 years old.