Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi concentration camp warden whose atrocities at Buchenwald became synonymous with the darkest depths of human cruelty, ended her own life in a Bavarian prison cell on September 1, 1967, hanging herself with bedsheets in an apparent final act of a woman who never expressed remorse for the horrors she inflicted upon thousands of helpless prisoners.
The death of the woman prisoners called “The Buchenwald Bitch” and “Frau Lampshade” closed one of the most disturbing chapters in the history of Nazi war crimes, a chapter that shocked even the hardened leaders of the Third Reich and continues to horrify historians and the public more than half a century later.
Born in Dresden in 1906, the future torturer was once known by a far different nickname. As a young girl who spent countless hours in her local library, regular visitors affectionately called her “Angel.” She trained as an accountant, dreaming of a comfortable life, and in 1934 met Karl Koch, a committed member of the Nazi Party and the SS.
The two quickly became inseparable, and Ilse followed her lover wherever his career in the Nazi apparatus would take him.
That path led directly to some of the most infamous killing facilities in human history. In 1936, Karl Koch was appointed commandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Ilse joined him there two years later as an accountant.
It did not take long for the couple to establish themselves as among the most sadistic figures in the entire camp system.
At Sachsenhausen, Karl Koch earned a reputation as one of the worst sadists in the SS, beating prisoners with a whip into which pieces of razor blades had been inserted, branding their flesh, and torturing victims with a vice. Ilse watched these atrocities without a trace of outrage. According to accounts from the period, she greedily absorbed the new sensations, her appetite for cruelty growing with each act of violence she witnessed.
In 1937, Karl Koch was transferred to Buchenwald, where he was tasked with building a new concentration camp practically from scratch. His devoted partner followed him once again. It was at Buchenwald that Ilse Koch would cement her reputation as a monster whose name would be spoken in whispers of terror by prisoners who survived her reign.
Many former prisoners later recalled that Ilse Koch was feared far more than her husband. She enjoyed strolling through the camp, selecting a random victim, and beating him half to death with a lash. But random beatings soon failed to satisfy her appetite for suffering.
She acquired a shepherd dog and made it her primary pastime to set the vicious animal upon prisoners, particularly pregnant women. She delighted in watching the terror on her victims’ faces as the dog’s fangs tore into their bodies.
It was during this period that the prisoners of Buchenwald bestowed upon her the nicknames that would follow her to her grave: “The Buchenwald Witch” and “The Buchenwald Bitch.” Her inventiveness in cruelty only increased as time went on. She developed a fondness for selecting prisoners to be sent to the zoo, where they were devoured by Himalayan bears.
Ilse Koch herself would stand at the cage, watching the bloody spectacle with evident pleasure.
But it was her most disturbing hobby that would earn her the name that echoed through the postwar trials: “Frau Lampshade.” Koch began selecting prisoners who had tattoos on their bodies. Those chosen were put to death by lethal injection.
Their skin was then removed, processed, and delivered to Ilse Koch, who fashioned it into lampshades, gloves, handbags, and even underwear.
Prisoners became so aware of her macabre passion that many deliberately cut themselves to ruin their tattoos or even tried to get into the gas chamber so that their markings would be permanently destroyed before she could claim them. One well-documented case involved a French cabaret actress who had a beautiful tattoo covering her entire back. The moment Ilse Koch noticed the woman, her fate was sealed.
The Buchenwald Witch made herself a tablecloth from the poor woman’s skin.
Albert Gronowski, a prisoner who worked in the camp morgue, testified that Koch sewed her panties from the skin of a Roma prisoner. Another prisoner recognized a tattoo on the unfortunate victim’s body, which later turned out to be on her underwear. “The tattoo that adorned Ilse’s underwear, I saw on the back of a Roma from my block,” the prisoner recalled.
The prison doctor who wrote out death certificates helped falsify documents, listing the cause of death for tattoo holders as heart attacks.
Ilse Koch became so consumed by her craft that she began corresponding with the wives of commandants at other camps, sharing the secrets of fashioning and processing human skin. Lampshades remained her favorite creation, and the nickname “Frau Lampshade” stuck.
Yet even this monstrous figure displayed what some observers described as strangely human moments. One day she spotted a tall, athletic young Czech among the prisoners. On her orders, the man was washed, fed heavily for several days, and then dressed in a strict suit and taken to Ilse’s apartment.
She met him wearing a pink dressing gown, hinting at a more intimate encounter. This sort of debauchery, according to testimony, she arranged regularly. The Czech refused her advances and immediately signed his own death warrant.
He was brutally beaten by Koch and then shot.
By the light of a lampshade made from human skin, Ilse Koch wrote gentle and romantic poems, a contradiction that continues to baffle those who study her case.
The madness of the Koch couple eventually became known at the highest levels of the Nazi regime. Karl Koch was accused of murdering an SS man who had complained of being extorted by his superiors, as well as a doctor who had secretly treated him for syphilis. But the most surprising charges were embezzlement and excessive cruelty to prisoners.
It was a unique case in which executioners were accused of exceeding the limits of their authority as executioners.
While the cruelty charges might have been overlooked, the embezzlement of approximately one million marks was considered the worst crime. Despite all his requests to be sent to the front to redeem himself, Karl Koch was convicted and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out in April 1945, when he was shot in the courtyard of the Buchenwald concentration camp he had once commanded.
Ilse Koch managed to escape punishment initially. No direct evidence of her guilt was found, and she had successfully hidden her crimes. After her release, she was no longer given her previous position and tried to keep a low profile, avoiding attention.
Ironically, her arrest and detention briefly earned her the status of an anti-Nazi activist, a status she happily maintained until 1947, when charges were finally brought against her for the crimes she had committed at Buchenwald.
Koch assured her accusers that all the facts were part of a conspiracy by co-workers who were retaliating against her for her official eagerness. Despite being pregnant, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. But in 1951, the High Commissioner dismissed all charges against Ilse Koch, stating that the evidence gathered was insufficient and that what had been presented to the court was no more than non-essential evidence that she ordered the execution of someone.
There was, the commissioner claimed, no evidence of her involvement in the manufacture of tattooed skin crafts.
The decision provoked outrage across Germany. The public could not believe that one of the most brutal women of the Third Reich had gained her freedom so easily. Even William Denson, the American prosecutor who had originally sentenced Koch to life imprisonment, was stunned.
“This is a monstrous failure of justice,” Denson declared. “Ilse Koch was one of the most extreme sadists among the Nazi criminals. It is simply impossible to count the number of people willing to testify against her, not only because she was the wife of the camp commandant, but also because she was a creature damned by God.”
In the interest of justice, Ilse Koch was almost immediately arrested by German authorities upon her release from the American prison in Munich, and a new trial was launched. The Bavarian Ministry of Justice began actively searching for witnesses to gather indisputable evidence. In the end, 240 surviving prisoners from Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were summoned for the new trial.
Based on the evidence gathered, Ilse Koch was resentenced to life imprisonment.
The sadist herself never acknowledged her guilt. Even in letters to her son, she adamantly denied any wrongdoing, stating that she had only sincerely and honestly fulfilled her duty to her country. Her son was the only person who visited her in prison.
During his last visit, the Buchenwald Witch complained of injustice and told him she had not been sleeping well. The souls of the dead concentration camp prisoners, she said, visited her at night.
Unable, perhaps, to withstand the constant terrifying visions, Ilse Koch ate her final meal on September 1, 1967, wrote a farewell letter to her son, and hanged herself in her cell using bound bedsheets. She was 60 years old.
Her son later took his mother’s maiden name, Keller, and in 1971 even attempted to restore her good name by writing a heartfelt letter to the editorial board of the New York Times. The letter went without an answer.
The case of Ilse Koch remains one of the most disturbing in the annals of Nazi war crimes. Her ability to evade justice for years, the bizarre decision by the High Commissioner to dismiss charges in 1951, and her eventual suicide have made her a subject of enduring fascination and revulsion. Historians continue to study her case as an example of how ordinary people can descend into extraordinary evil, and how the pursuit of justice, however delayed, can ultimately prevail.
For the survivors of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, the memory of the Buchenwald Witch and her human skin lampshades remains a wound that time has never fully healed. The testimony of those 240 witnesses at her final trial ensured that the truth of her atrocities would be preserved for future generations, a warning of what humanity is capable of when cruelty is given free rein.