The 6th of June 1944.
Allied infantry and armored divisions begin landing on the Normandy coast in France.
This largest seaborne invasion in history marks a turning point in World War 2 and becomes the beginning of the end of the war in Europe.
On the following month in July 1944, the Soviet forces liberate Majdanek – the first major Nazi camp located in German-occupied Poland.
Only after the liberation of the concentration camps, the full extent of Nazi horrors is finally exposed to the world.
Because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, only a small percentage of concentration camp inmates survive.
Compounded by months and years of mistreatment and torture, they resemble skeletons and many of them are so weak that they can hardly move at all.
One of the most infamous perpetrators of this criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Ilse Koch.
Ilse Koch was born Margarete Ilse Köhler on the 22nd of September 1906 in Dresden then part of the German Empire as the third daughter of a foreman.
She graduated from elementary and commercial school and in 1920s she worked in various companies as a secretary and bookkeeping clerk.
In 1932, one year before Adolf Hitler came into power, Ilse had joined the Nazi Party.
Women, such as Ilse, were central to Adolf Hitler’s plan to create an ideal “Aryan” community.
Hitler valued women for both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological power as generators of the race.
In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would enhance Germany’s military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered territory in eastern Europe.
The Third Reich’s aggressive population policy encouraged “racially pure” women to bear as many children as possible.
Nazi population policy took a radical turn in 1936 when SS leaders created the state-directed program known as Lebensborn meaning Fount of Life.
Lebensborn ordinance prescribed that every SS member should father four children, in or out of wedlock.
Lebensborn homes sheltered single mothers with their children, provided birth documents and financial support, and recruited adoptive parents for the children.
In the end, however, the Lebensborn program was never promoted aggressively and only around 7,000 children were born into the Lebensborn homes during the program’s nine-year-long existence.
Instead, Nazi population policy concentrated on the family and marriage.
The state encouraged matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child, publicly honored “child-rich” families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion.
However, German women played a vital role in the Nazi movement, which by far exceeded the Nazi Party’s propaganda that a woman’s place was strictly in the home as mothers and child-bearers.
Of the estimated forty million German women in the Reich, some thirteen million were active in Nazi Party organizations serving as welfare workers, teachers, secretaries, nurses, auxiliaries in the armed forces and police, and in many other occupations including as guards in concentration camps.
A minority of German women who resisted the
regime’s policies or were branded biologically inferior were persecuted.
Hundreds of thousands were forcibly sterilized and tens of thousands more were incarcerated in the camp system.
Part of that camp system included Sachsenhausen concentration camp where in 1936 Ilse got married to its commandant, Karl Otto Koch.
The SS established the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in July 1936 as the principal concentration camp for the Berlin area.
In the early stage of the camp’s existence the SS and police incarcerated into Sachsenhausen mainly political opponents and real or perceived criminal offenders.
By the end of 1936, the camp held 1,600 prisoners.
Ilse Koch worked in a camp as a guard and secretary.
In August 1937 Karl Otto was assigned to build a new concentration camp in Buchenwald.
While he was known for his personal greed in the camps that he worked in, Ilse was feared for her brutality.
Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps established within German borders.
Prisoners lived in the Buchenwald main camp which was surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, watchtowers, and a chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns.
At the entrance to the main camp, there was a notorious punishment block, known as the Bunker, where prisoners who violated the camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death.
In addition to the punishment block, the main camp included 33 wooden barracks, disinfection buildings, a brothel, and a crematorium.
Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners, people who had been arrested for some form of political opposition to the Nazi regime.
In addition to the political prisoners and Jews, Buchenwald prisoners also included repeat offenders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti and Roma people and German military deserters.
At Buchenwald, Ilse became known as the witch.
She was obsessed with tattoos and used to ride her horse around the Buchenwald looking for tattooed prisoners.
When she found one, she sent them to their death but before they were killed and burned, she would carve out the part of their skin where the tattoo was located.
She used to call these pieces of skin her “ trophies”.
She would go on to collect lampshades, book covers as well as gloves a handbags – all made of human skin.
She shared her obsession with tattoos with Dr.
Erich Wagner, allegedly her lover, who wanted to find the connection between tattoos and criminal tendencies.
Despite having her 3 of her own children, she hated pregnant women and she used to beat them with whip along the entire length of which pieces of a razor were inserted.
Koch also found pleasure in beating children inmates.
She would laugh loudly when seeing them going to the gas chambers She was also a sexual deviant.
She not only organized numerous orgies with SS men and their wives but also forced male prisoners to rape female prisoners in front of her.
She enjoyed walking around the camp half-naked or in skimpy clothes, provoking prisoners to make eye contact with her.
When they did, they were taken by the guards and shot in the head.
She was also reported that she had ordered prisoners to serve her while she was nude and enjoyed sexually humiliating the sex-starved prisoners.
However, after the war, Ilse Koch presented herself as a loyal SS wife, mother, holiday-taker, caregiver, and horseback rider.
In 1941, Buchenwald caught the attention of Josias Waldeck, the Higher SS and Police Leader for Weimar who in this position had supervisory authority over Buchenwald concentration camp.
Waldeck, when glancing over the camp’s death list, came across the name of Walter Krämer, a head hospital orderly at Buchenwald whom Waldeck recognized because Krämer had successfully treated him in the past.
Waldeck investigated the case and discovered that Karl-Otto Koch had ordered both Krämer and Karl Peix, a hospital attendant, killed as “political prisoners” because they had treated him for syphilis.
A fact that Koch had wished to keep secret.
Waldeck also received reports that a certain prisoner had been shot while attempting to escape.
By that time, Koch had been transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp in German occupied Poland, but Ilse still belonged to the Buchenwald personnel and continued living at the Commandant’s house in the camp.
Waldeck ordered a full-scale investigation of the camp.
It was discovered that the prisoner who had been “shot while trying to escape” had been told to get water from a well some distance from the camp and was then shot from behind because he had also helped to treat Koch for syphilis.
One of those killed was an SS man named Köhler.
He was murdered by Waldemar Hoven, a German medical doctor responsible for performing medical experiments on camps’ inmates regarding typhus and the tolerance of serums containing phenol and Evipan.
Hover, Ilse’s lover, injected Köhler with phenol because he was a potential witness in Koch’s investigation.
Throughout the investigation, more of Karl Koch’s orders to kill prisoners at the camp were revealed, as well as evidence of embezzlement of possessions stolen from prisoners thanks to which in May 1940 he had an indoor riding arena built
for himself and his wife Ilse which cost over 250,000 reichsmarks.
Karl Koch also bought a luxury car and opened Swiss bank accounts with money extorted from prisoners.
Ilse was accused of the embezzlement of over 700,000 Reichsmarks and Karl Otto was charged with both embezzlement and the unauthorized murder of three prisoners.
When it was revealed that the Kochs had used the massive Nazi apparatus to gain an enormous amount of wealth, their downfall became inevitable as all the possessions stolen from murdered Jews was regarded as the property of the Reich.
While Ilse was acquitted for lack of evidence, Karl-Otto Koch was executed by firing squad on 5th of April 1945.
The Buchenwald camp, place of Koch’s atrocities, was liberated in April 1945.
On the 8th of April 1945 Buchenwald camp prisoners, using a secret short-wave transmitter and small generator, send the Morse code message: “ To the Allies.
To the army of General Patton.
This is the Buchenwald concentration camp.
SOS.
We request help.
They want to evacuate us.
The SS want to destroy us.
” 3 minutes after the transmission, desperate prisoners receive the message “Hold out.
Rushing to your aid.
Staff of Third Army.
” 3 days later, on the 11th of April, the US 6th Armored Division liberated Buchenwald and found more than 21,000 survivors who were weak and emaciated.
They survived because when Gestapo headquarters at Weimar telephoned the camp administration to announce that it was sending explosives to blow up any evidence of the camp, including its inmates, the Gestapo did not know that the administrators had already fled and a prisoner answered the phone informing headquarters that explosives would not be needed, as the camp had already been blown up, which was not true.
After General Patton toured the camp, he ordered the mayor of the nearby city of Weimar to bring 1,000 citizens to Buchenwald to be shown the crematorium and other evidence of Nazi atrocities.
The Americans wanted to ensure that the German people would take responsibility for Nazi crimes, instead of dismissing them as atrocity propaganda.
Many of them were crying and some of them even fainted after seeing the dead bodies, starved survivors behind barbed wire fences as well as a table display of paintings on human skins, lampshade made of human skin, various parts of the human body preserved in alcohol and two heads which were shrunk to one-fifth their normal size Ilse Koch spent the last months before the end of the war in Ludwigsburg, where part of her family lived.
Because of her lifestyle which was characterized by sexual and alcohol excesses, her relatives tried to withdraw her custody from the children, but due to the war turmoil, this happened only after she had been arrested by the US authorities in late June 1945.
Ilse Koch was then tried at the Buchenwald trial which began on the 11th of April 1947 in the internment camp of Dachau, where the former Dachau concentration camp had been located until late April 1945.
Out of 31 defendants, Ilse Koch was the only woman.
During the trial, Koch denied being involved in any way or had any knowledge of the abuse and murder of camp inmates and also denied having known about the starvation and medical experiments carried out on numerous prisoners.
But her lies did not help her escape justice.
However, when the sentences were handed down on the 14th of August 1947, Koch was in the advanced stages of pregnancy, which is said to have saved her from the death penalty imposed on 22 of her 30 co-defendants.
She was sentenced to life imprisonment and her son Uwe, conceived while in custody, was born in October 1947.
Uwe’s father was another German prisoner.
Her sentence was initially commuted to four years, but after a general outcry, she was immediately indicted by a German court for instigation to murder in 135 cases.
The hearing of the Second Trial opened on 27th of November 1950 and lasted seven weeks, during which 250 witnesses were heard, including 50 for the defense.
Koch collapsed and had to be carried from court in late December 1950 and again in January 1951.
At least four witnesses for the prosecution testified that they had seen Koch choose tattooed prisoners, who were then killed, or had seen or been involved in the process of making human-skin lampshades from tattooed skin When on the 15th of January 1951, the Court pronounced its verdict in a 111-page-long
decision sentencing Ilse Koch to life imprisonment, she was not present in court.
She made several petitions for a pardon, all of which were rejected by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice.
Artwin, the only son of Ilse and Karl Koch could not live with the shame of the crimes of his parents and committed suicide in 1967.
At this time, his mother was experiencing delusions and had become convinced that concentration camp survivors would abuse her in her cell.
In addition, she complained that the dead prisoners of Buchenwald came to her through the walls and demanded to return their skin.
Mentally ill Ilse Koch committed suicide shortly after her son Artwin on the 1st of September 1967.
She was 60 years old when she hanged herself with a bedsheet after which she was buried in an unmarked grave.
There were no tears shed for Ilse Koch.
