15 January 1951 A.D. “Witch of Buchenwald” Sentenced to Prison
Editors. “The `Witch of Buchenwald’
is sentenced to prison.” History.com. N.d.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-witch-of-buchenwald-is-sentenced-to-prison. Accessed 14 Jan 2015.
The "Witch of Buchenwald" is sentenced to prison
On this day, Ilse Koch, wife
of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life
imprisonment in a court in West Germany. Ilse Koch was nicknamed the
"Witch of Buchenwald" for her extraordinary sadism.
Born in Dresden, Germany,
Ilse, a librarian, married SS. Col. Karl Koch in 1936. Colonel Koch, a man with
his own reputation for sadism, was the commandant of the Sashsenhausen
concentration camp, two miles north of Berlin. He was transferred after three
years to Buchenwald concentration camp, 4.5 miles northwest of Weimar; the
Buchenwald concentration camp held a total of 20,000 slave laborers during the
war.
Ilse, a large woman with red
hair, was given free reign in the camp, whipping prisoners with her riding crop
as she rode by on her horse, forcing prisoners to have sex with her, and, most
horrifying, collecting lampshades, book covers, and gloves made from the skin
of tattooed camp prisoners. A German inmate gave the following testimony during
the Nuremberg war trials: "All prisoners with tattooing on them were to
report to the dispensary... After the prisoners had been examined, the ones
with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The
corpses were then turned over to the pathological department, where the desired
pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated
further."
Karl Koch was arrested,
ironically enough, by his SS superiors for "having gone too far." It
seems he had a penchant for stealing even the belongings of wealthy,
well-placed Germans. He was tried and hanged in 1944. Ilse Koch was tried for
crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, but the
American military governor of the occupied zone subsequently reduced her
sentence to four years. His reason, "lack of evidence," caused a
Senate investigation back home. She was released but arrested again, tried by a
West German court, and sentenced to life. She committed suicide in 1967 by
hanging herself with a bedsheet.
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