On April 11, 1945, United States Army soldiers entered the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany after most SS guards had fled and armed prisoners had taken control of the site. Among the wooden barracks, they found unburied bodies, overcrowded blocks, and thousands of prisoners worn down by hunger, disease, and years of forced labor. Many could barely stand.
Survivors spoke of beatings, humiliation, theft, and killing. Among the names they repeated was that of the camp commandant's wife, who had lived with her family in luxury in a villa overlooking the camp. While inmates suffered below, she enjoyed expensive furniture, servants, horses, and property stolen from detainees. Former prisoners accused her of beating and humiliating them. They also linked her to a group of tattooed inmates whose skin was preserved after their deaths. Her name was Ilse Koch.
Ilse Koch was born Margarete Ilse Köhler on September 22, 1906, in Dresden, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Max, was a skilled tradesman, while her mother, Anna, managed their household. Ilse grew up in a strict, lower-middle-class Protestant family.
After completing her compulsory education, she attended a commercial school where she learned secretarial skills, then found work as a clerk and secretary at several local companies. She spent her early adult years in the Weimar Republic, the democratic German state established after Germany's defeat in World War I.
She lived through political violence, mass unemployment, and the economic problems that followed the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and the Great Depression, which pushed Germany's unemployment rate to nearly 30 percent, leaving about 6 million people across the country without work.
Like many Germans, Ilse was drawn to the Nazi Party's promises of order, strength, and national revival. She joined the party in April 1932 and received membership number 1,130,836. Nine months later, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
In the new Nazi Germany, women were expected to be loyal wives and mothers and bearers of a pure Aryan generation. For Ilse, however, politics was also a path to power. She was fascinated by the Nazi Party, and through its social circles she met various officers of the SS and the SA, Nazi paramilitary organizations. Among them was a man whose fate would soon be tied to hers, Karl Otto Koch, her future husband.
Karl Koch was an SS officer nine years older than Ilse and already had experience in the concentration camp system that Nazi Germany had begun building in 1933. He represented the power, status, and privileges she aspired to. They married in 1937 at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he served as commandant.
Shortly afterward, the SS assigned Karl to build and command a new camp near the city of Weimar in central Germany. The place 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.
At Buchenwald, Ilse gave birth to three children between 1938 and 1940: Arvid, Gisela, and Gudrun, who died as an infant in 1941. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. As the conflict widened, the Nazi regime arrested growing numbers of people across occupied Europe and sent many of them to concentration camps, including Buchenwald.
The Koch family soon learned how much wealth could be taken from concentration camp prisoners. Watches, jewelry, money, and other property were stolen while the family lived in comfort with servants, horses, and expensive furniture. Ilse displayed her status openly, and some women in the SS settlement hated her for her boasting and her display of new wealth. Her tense relations with other SS officers' wives were also attributed to her multiple sexual relationships with SS officers, including deputy camp commandant Hermann Florstedt and doctor Waldemar Hoven, both of whom were married with children.
At Buchenwald, Koch became known for wearing provocative clothing and gained a notorious reputation for predatory sexual behavior and sadism. She allegedly ordered prisoners to serve her while naked and took pleasure in humiliating them sexually. Ilse also sexually assaulted camp prisoners and forced male prisoners to rape female prisoners in front of her.
Despite having three children, she hated pregnant women and used to beat them with a whip into which razor blades had been inserted along its entire length. Ilse Koch also found pleasure in beating child prisoners, which she did with a smile on her face. According to former prisoners' testimony, Ilse Koch was even crueler than her husband and many of the SS men who served in the camp. Unlike them, she held no official position and received no orders to enter the camp or mistreat prisoners; she did so of her own free will.
Her fascination with tattoos gave rise to the most horrifying legend of all. She was alleged to have become obsessed with collecting pieces of tattooed human skin, and prisoners with distinctive tattoos were said to have their numbers recorded, then taken to the clinic and never returned. After liberation, tattooed pieces of skin were found in the camp's pathology department, and lampshades made of human skin were displayed as evidence. Although courts later struggled to prove her direct involvement, this horror became closely associated with her name. Modern forensic tests confirmed that at least one of the notorious lampshades was indeed made of human skin, proving what survivors had claimed for decades.
In the end, it was corruption, not the mass killing of prisoners, that pushed the SS to investigate the Koch family. Karl Koch used property stolen from prisoners to fund a lavish lifestyle and private projects, including an indoor riding hall for his wife that cost more than 250,000 German marks, equivalent today to nearly 2.5 million U.S. dollars. He also bought a luxury car, opened Swiss bank accounts with money extorted from prisoners, and bribed officials to overlook his actions.
But in 1941, the SS began investigating his administration of Buchenwald. Karl Koch was arrested but released after intervention by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Despite Himmler's intervention, Koch lost his command at Buchenwald and was sent to Majdanek, an extermination and concentration camp in occupied Poland. Ilse remained in the SS settlement at Buchenwald for some time, but on August 24, 1943, a renewed investigation led to the couple's arrest together.
The case was handled by SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who found evidence of theft, corruption, and murder. The SS did not object to killing prisoners as part of the camp system. It acted because Karl Koch stole from the organization and ordered unauthorized killings, including the killing of prisoners he had treated for syphilis and who could have revealed his condition. He was sentenced to death for corruption and murder and was shot at Buchenwald on April 5, 1945, six days before U.S. forces reached the camp.
Ilse was acquitted because the SS court said there was insufficient evidence against her. After about 16 months of detention, she was released and then moved with her surviving children to Ludwigshafen, a city in southwestern Germany, where some of her family lived. After Germany's surrender in May 1945, her freedom did not last long. A former Buchenwald prisoner recognized her, and U.S. occupation authorities arrested her on June 30, 1945.
She remained in custody for nearly two years before her first postwar trial began on April 11, 1947, exactly two years after the liberation of Buchenwald. The proceedings took place at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich in southern Germany, which U.S. authorities were then using for war crimes trials. There were 31 defendants, and Ilse Koch was the only woman among them.
The court found that she not only knew about abuses and killings of prisoners but also participated in mistreating them. William Denson, the chief prosecutor during the trial, said she was nothing but a sadistic pervert of enormous dimensions unmatched in history. The American press spread the name by which she became widely known in English, "the Witch of Buchenwald."
On August 14, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Ilse Koch was pregnant at the time by a fellow German war crimes inmate, although the identity of the child's father was never determined. Her pregnancy may have influenced the court's decision not to sentence her to death, though this was not officially stated as a reason. Her son, Uwe, was born at Landsberg prison in October 1947 and placed under the care of Bavarian child welfare authorities.
On June 8, 1948, General Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. military governor of the American occupation zone in Germany, commuted her sentence from life imprisonment to four years. The military review found no convincing evidence that she had selected prisoners to die because of their tattoos or that she had owned objects made of human skin. Clay argued that the original sentence was therefore far too harsh for the crimes proven in the American trial.
The decision remained secret until September, but once it became public, outrage in the United States pushed authorities to refer the case to German courts. Ilse Koch left prison on October 17, 1949, but was arrested again the same day by West German authorities.
Her second postwar trial began on November 27, 1950, in the city of Augsburg in Bavaria and lasted seven weeks. The court heard about 250 witnesses, including about 50 called by the defense. Ilse collapsed several times and had to be removed from the courtroom. Her lawyers argued that she was merely the commandant's wife and held no official authority inside Buchenwald. The court rejected this defense, and on January 15, 1951, in a 111-page ruling, she was again sentenced to life imprisonment.
Ilse Koch was transferred to the women's prison in Aichach in Bavaria, southern Germany, where she spent the next 16 years. Her repeated requests for clemency were denied. In her letters, she continued to claim that witnesses had lied and that others had created her reputation. Her mental health slowly deteriorated, with prison staff describing her as unstable and increasingly paranoid, as she claimed that former concentration camp prisoners were entering her cell and attacking her.
The final part of Ilse Koch's life was closely tied to the son she never raised. Uwe Köhler grew up in foster care in Bavaria. In his childhood, he saw his mother's name on his birth certificate and remembered it. When Uwe was 19, he read a newspaper article about her and realized who she was.
Ilse's son visited Aichach prison during the Christmas season of 1966, and from then on he came once a month, the maximum the prison allowed. Uwe later described their meetings as happy. Outside the prison, however, the aftermath of Ilse Koch's past continued to shape her family's life. Her children lived under the weight of her name, and her eldest son, Uwe, isolated and ashamed of his parents, took his own life in 1967.
Shortly afterward, Ilse's mental condition deteriorated further. On September 1, 1967, three weeks before her 61st birthday, Ilse Koch hanged herself in her cell, leaving Uwe a note that said: "I cannot help myself." "For me, death is salvation." She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Aichach cemetery.