In 1941, Ilse became the senior guard among female guards. She often bragged about how she tortured prisoners, as well as “souvenirs” made from human skin, to her colleagues. In the end, information about what the Kokh couple was doing reached senior management. The Kochs were arrested. They were tried in Kassel for “excessive cruelty and moral corruption.” But the couple managed to whitewash themselves, saying that they were victims of slander on the part of ill-wishers.
In September of the same year, Karl Koch was appointed commandant of the Majdanek camp, where the couple continued their sadistic “activities”. But already in July next year Karl was removed from office, accused of corruption.
In 1943, the Koch couple were arrested by the SS for the murder of doctor Walter Kremer and his assistant. The fact is that doctors treated Karl Koch for syphilis and could have let it slip... In 1944, a trial took place. The Kokhs were also accused of embezzlement and misappropriation of prisoners' property. In Nazi Germany this was a serious crime.
In April 1945, Karl was shot in Munich, shortly before American troops entered there. Ilse managed to get away with it, and she went to her parents, who at that time lived in Ludwigsburg.
However, on June 30, 1945, she was arrested again. This time it's the American military. In 1947, she was tried, but Ilsa flatly denied all the charges, insisting that she was just a “victim of the regime.” She also did not recognize the fact of using human skin for crafts.
But hundreds of surviving former prisoners testified against the “Witch of Buchenwald.” For the atrocities and murders of prisoners, Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment. But several years later she was released at the request of General Lucius Clay, acting military commandant of the American occupation zone in Germany. He considered the accusations that, on the orders of Ilse Koch, people were killed in order to make souvenirs from their skin, unproven...
However, the public did not want to put up with the “Frau Lampshaded” excuse. In 1951, a West German court sentenced Ilse Koch to life imprisonment for the second time. She never expressed remorse for what she did.
On September 1, 1967, Ilse hanged herself with sheets in her cell at the Bavarian women's prison at Aichach. In 1971, her son Uwe, who grew up in an orphanage, whom she gave birth to in prison from a German soldier, tried to restore good name mother by going to court and the press. But nothing worked out for him. Although the name of Ilse Koch was never forgotten. In 1975, the film “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS” was made about her.
They ran the conveyor belt of death in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which crushed tens of thousands of lives. Even their SS colleagues felt uneasy when Frau Koch boasted of lampshades made of human skin.
Date of birth - 1897
First marriage - 1924
Second marriage - 1937
Position - camp commandant;
Date of birth - 1906
Place of birth - Saxony
At the end of 1941, the Koch couple appeared before the SS court in Kassel on charges of “excessive cruelty and moral corruption.”
The court decided that they were the victim of a conspiracy on the part of ill-wishers.
And only in 1944 a trial took place, at which the sadists were unable to escape responsibility. Koch was sentenced to death. On a cold April morning in 1945, literally a few days before the liberation of the camp by the Allied forces, Karl Koch was shot in the courtyard of the very camp where he had recently controlled thousands of human destinies.
The widowed Ilse was no less guilty than her husband. Many prisoners believed that Koch committed crimes under the diabolical influence of his wife. In the eyes of the SS, her guilt was insignificant. The sadist was released from custody. She remained free until 1947, when justice finally caught up with her. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released in 1959. However, Frau Koch was not destined to enjoy freedom. As soon as Ilse left the American military prison in Munich, she was arrested by German authorities and put back behind bars. That year, on September 1, in a Bavarian prison cell, she ate her last schnitzel and salad, wrote a farewell letter to her son, tied up the sheets and hanged herself. The "bitch of Buchenwald" took her own life.
The Nazis created many concentration camps in the territory they occupied, intended for the so-called “racial cleansing” of Europe. The fact that their prisoners were children, disabled people, old people, completely defenseless people, did not matter at all to the sadists from the SS. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and Buchenwald became living hells on earth, where people were systematically gassed, starved, beaten and forced to work until exhaustion.
To bring Hitler's delusional plans to life, executors were required - people without pity, compassion and conscience. The Nazi regime created a system that could produce them.
Some camp commanders, in particular Rudolf Hess in Auschwitz, did not directly kill prisoners and thus, as it were, fenced themselves off from the atrocities committed in the camps. At the trial, Hess proudly declared German ingenuity, which made it possible to maintain the illusion of innocence in the executioners.
The Kochs were a couple whose sophistication knew no bounds. These two - the camp commandant and his wife, who spent her evenings making lampshades from tattooed human skin - embodied the essence of Hitler's idea.
Ilse Koch's move to Buchenwald from Saxony, where she was born in 1906 and worked as a librarian before the war, does not yet provide an answer to what turned an ordinary woman into a beast. The daughter of a laborer, she was a diligent schoolgirl, loved and was loved, enjoyed success with the village boys, but always considered herself superior to others, clearly exaggerating her merits. And when her selfishness combined with the ambitions of the SS man Karl Koch, Ilse's hidden perversity became apparent.
They met in 1936, when the concentration camp system had already spread throughout Germany. Standartenführer Karl Koch served in Sachsenhausen.
Ilsa had a love affair with the boss, and she agreed to become his secretary.
Karl was born when his mother was 34 years old, and his father, a government official from Darmstadt, was 57. The parents got married two months after the birth of their son. Father died when the boy was eight years old. The future commandant of the concentration camp did not study well. He soon left school and went to work as a messenger at a local factory.
When the young man turned seventeen, he volunteered for the army. First world war was already blazing in Western Europe. However, his mother intervened, and he was returned home from the recruiting station. In March 1916, at the age of nineteen, he finally managed to get to the front.
The recruit had had his fill of trench life on one of the most tense sections of the Western Front.
The war ended for Karl Koch in a prisoner of war camp, and, like many others, he finally returned to a defeated, embittered Germany.
The former front-line soldier managed to get a good job. Having received the post of bank employee, he married in 1924. However, two years later the bank collapsed, and Karl was left without a job. At the same time, his marriage also failed. The young unemployed man found a solution to his problems in Nazi ideas and soon served in the SS.
Fate more than once confronted him with the commander of the “Death’s Head” unit, Theodor Eicke, one of the active participants in the creation of the first concentration camps.
Eicke praised Koch, writing about him in 1936, when he headed the camp in Sachsenhausen: “His abilities are above average. He does everything for the triumph of National Socialist ideals.”
In Sachsenhausen, Koch, even among “his own people,” acquired a reputation as an out-and-out sadist. Nevertheless, it was these qualities that helped him win Ilsa’s heart. And at the end of 1937 the marriage ceremony took place. The happy couple joined forces in the service of the devil.
MEDIEVAL TORTURE
Koch's sadistic tendencies were not slow to manifest themselves as soon as he began to perform his duties. The camp commandant took great pleasure in whipping the prisoners with a whip, along the entire length of which pieces of a razor were inserted. He introduced finger vices and hot iron branding. These medieval tortures were used for the slightest violation of camp rules.
The authorities of the Reich Main Security Office, encouraging the concentration camp system, nominated Koch for promotion. In 1939 he was tasked with organizing the concentration camp at Buchenwald. The commandant went to his new duty station with his wife.
Buchenwald was considered a "correctional" camp, like all its predecessors. The purpose of the camp would change by the middle of the war, when Hitler's extermination program was finally put into effect.
Subsequently, Buchenwald, like Auschwitz, had a dual purpose. Those who were sick, weak or too small to work were sent straight to death. Those who seemed suitable to work for the Reich were forced to work in inhumane conditions in a weapons factory next door to the camp. A meager diet and backbreaking labor inevitably led prisoners to death.
While Koch reveled in power, watching the daily destruction of people, his wife took even greater pleasure in the torture of prisoners. In the camp they were more afraid of her than the commandant himself.
The sadist usually walked around the camp, dispensing lashes to anyone in striped clothing. Sometimes she took a ferocious shepherd dog with her and became delighted, setting the dog on pregnant women or prisoners with a heavy burden. It is not surprising that the prisoners nicknamed Ilsa “the bitch of Buchenwald.”
When it seemed to the completely exhausted prisoners that there were no more terrible tortures, the sadist invented new atrocities. She ordered the male prisoners to undress. Those who did not have a tattoo on their skin were of little interest to Ilse Koch. But when she saw an exotic pattern on someone’s body, a carnivorous grin flashed in the sadist’s eyes. And this meant that in front of her was another victim.
Later, Ilse Koch was nicknamed “Frau Lampshade.” She used the tanned skins of murdered men to create a variety of household utensils, of which she was extremely proud. She found the skin of gypsies and Russian prisoners of war with tattoos on the chest and back most suitable for crafts. This made it possible to make things very “decorative”. Ilsa especially liked lampshades.
One of the prisoners, the Jew Albert Grenovsky, who was forced to work in the Buchenwald pathology laboratory, said after the war that prisoners selected by Ilsa with a tattoo were taken to the dispensary. There they were killed using lethal injections. There was only one reliable way Don't let the "bitch" fall into the lampshade - disfigure your skin or die in a gas chamber. To some, this seemed like a good thing.
Bodies of “artistic value” were taken to the pathology laboratory, where they were treated with alcohol and the skin was carefully torn off. Then it was dried, lubricated vegetable oil and packaged in special bags. Meanwhile, Ilsa improved her skills. She began to sew gloves and openwork underwear from the skin of prisoners. “I saw the tattoo that adorned Ilsa’s panties on the back of one of the gypsies from my block,” said Albert Grenovsky.
Apparently, the savage entertainment of Ilse Koch became fashionable among her colleagues in other concentration camps, which multiplied like mushrooms in the Nazi empire. It was a pleasure for her to correspond with the wives of the commandants of other camps and give them detailed instructions, how to turn human skin into exotic book bindings, lampshades, gloves or tablecloths.
This cannibalistic “craft” did not go unnoticed by the authorities. At the end of 1941, the Koch couple appeared before the SS court in Kassel on charges of “excessive cruelty and moral corruption.” Torture and murder were normal for the SS. But the hypocritical Nazi Themis considered it “immoral” to take pleasure from this. The crusaders of the “Third Reich” did not want to publicly act as sadists. Talk of lampshades and whips leaked out of the camp and brought Ilsa and Karl to the dock, where they had to answer for “abuse of power.”
However, that time the sadists managed to escape punishment. The court decided that they were the victim of a slander on the part of ill-wishers. The former commandant was for some time an "adviser" in another concentration camp. But soon the fanatical spouses returned to Buchenwald. And only in 1944 a trial took place, at which the sadists were unable to escape responsibility.
Karl Koch was brought before a military tribunal on charges of murdering an SS man who had repeatedly complained of brazen extortion by the camp commandant. It was discovered that most of the looted valuables, instead of going to the Reichsbank safes in Berlin, ended up in the form of astronomical sums in the Koch spouses' secret account in a Swiss bank.
Karl Koch snatched gold crowns from the dead, took jewelry from the living, wedding rings and the money they tried to hide in their clothes. In this way, the camp commandant hoped to ensure his post-war well-being. Koch was a devoted Nazi, but he was even more devoted to himself and understood that Germany was losing the war. The commandant of Buchenwald did not intend to die along with the “Third Reich”. But he did not take into account one thing: not torture and murder, but theft was the most serious crime in the eyes of the highest ranks of the SS.
The Nazis found a pastor who was to testify against Koch at the tribunal. The witness was kept under close guard in prison. Incomprehensibly, he was found murdered in his cell the day before his trial. But this death also meant the end for the defendant Karl Koch: potassium cyanide was found in the pastor’s entrails during an autopsy, and it became clear who killed the witness and why.
THE LAST DAYS OF BUCHENWALD
Koch, also accused of murdering a pastor, was sentenced to death. The closed SS tribunal heard Judge Konrad Morgen, who, having received authority from Himmler, went to Buchenwald to establish the commandant's guilt in the thefts. He discovered evidence of the defendant's numerous crimes. Was found large sum money hidden under Koch’s bed - he “requisitioned” this money from the prisoners. The former commandant begged to be given a chance to atone for his guilt in a penal battalion somewhere on the Eastern Front. This request was rejected.
Koch's reputation was below the limit allowed even by Nazi "morality." And on a cold April morning in 1945, literally a few days before the liberation of the camp by the Allied forces, Karl Koch was shot in the courtyard of the very camp where he had recently controlled thousands of human destinies.
The widowed Ilse was no less guilty than her husband. Many prisoners believed that Koch committed crimes under the diabolical influence of his wife. In the eyes of the SS, her guilt was insignificant. The sadist was released from custody.
However, she did not return to Buchenwald. Shortly before the end of the war, the criminal was already on her parents' farm near Ludwigsberg.
But her name was not forgotten by those who survived. The famous American radio commentator Edward Murrow shocked listeners with the story of what he saw when the Allied troops liberated Buchenwald: “We reached the main entrance. The prisoners huddled behind the barbed wire. As soon as we passed the gate, a crowd of people gathered around me and tried to touch me They were in rags. Death had already breathed on them, but they smiled with only their eyes. When I reached the barracks and entered one of them, I heard the faint applause of the prisoners, who were no longer able to rise from their bunks. One person walked out into the yard. in my eyes, I fell dead. People were skeletons covered in skin... Children clung to my hands and looked at me as if it were a miracle. Men came up and tried to talk to me. There were people from all over Europe. I asked about the cause of death of the fallen man. The doctor said: “Tuberculosis, hunger, physical fatigue and complete loss of the will to live.”
I beg you to believe what I have told you about Buchenwald. But this is only a small part of the huge truth that the world will comprehend for many years."
WHAT IS IT WORTH FIGHTING AGAINST?
General Eisenhower ordered the 80th Division, which liberated Buchenwald, to see the terrible picture with its own eyes. “They may not have known what they were fighting for,” he noted, “but now at least they see what is worth fighting against.”
The Americans tried to comprehend the meaning of such mass extermination of people. Those who took an active part in this did not have to remain in the shadows for long. In the days following the liberation of Buchenwald, two names kept popping up.
After the collapse of the "Third Reich" Ilse Koch hid, knowing that the authorities were catching more big fish in the SS and Gestapo. She remained free until 1947, when justice finally caught up with her.
Before the trial, the former Nazi was kept in prison. Forty-year-old Ilse was pregnant by a German soldier. In Munich, she appeared before an American military tribunal to answer for her crimes.
For several weeks, many former prisoners, their eyes burning with anger, came to the courtroom to tell the truth about Ilse Koch's past.
“The blood of more than fifty thousand victims of Buchenwald is on her hands,” the prosecutor said, “and the fact that this woman is currently pregnant does not exempt her from punishment.”
American General Emil Kiel read out the verdict: “Ilse Koch - life imprisonment.”
Once in prison, Ilsa made a statement in which she insisted that she was only a “servant” of the regime. She denied making things from human skin and claimed that she was surrounded by secret enemies of the Reich, who slandered her, trying to take revenge for her official zeal.
In 1951, a turning point came in the life of Ilse Koch. General Lucius Clay, High Commissioner of the American occupation zone in Germany, with his decision shocked the world on both sides of the Atlantic - both the population of his country and the Federal Republic of Germany, which arose from the ruins of the defeated "Third Reich". He granted Ilse Koch her freedom, saying there was only “slight evidence” that she ordered anyone to be executed, and there was no evidence of her involvement in making tattooed skin items.
When the war criminal was released, the world refused to believe the validity of this decision. The most outraged was Washington lawyer William Denson, who was the prosecutor at the trial that sentenced Ilsa Koch to life imprisonment. He spoke on behalf of millions of dead and living: “This is a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Ilse Koch was one of the most notorious sadists among Nazi criminals. It is 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 that this is a creature cursed by God."
However, Frau Koch was not destined to enjoy freedom. As soon as Ilse left the American military prison in Munich, she was arrested by German authorities and put back behind bars.
RETRIBUTION
The Themis of the new Germany, trying to somehow make amends for the mass crimes of the Nazis, immediately put Ilse Koch in the dock. The Bavarian Ministry of Justice began searching for former prisoners of Buchenwald, obtaining new evidence that would allow the war criminal to be locked in a prison cell for the rest of her days.
240 witnesses testified in court. They talked about the atrocities of a sadist in a Nazi death camp. This time, Ilse Koch was tried by the Germans, in whose name the Nazi, in her opinion, faithfully served the Fatherland. The war criminal was again sentenced to life imprisonment. She was firmly told that this time she could not count on any leniency.
In 1967, in a letter to her son Ove, whom Ilse gave birth to shortly after the first verdict, she complained indignantly that she had become a “scapegoat” for someone else’s sins, while many important people managed to escape punishment. However, there was not a shadow of repentance in these letters.
That year, on September 1, in a Bavarian prison cell, she ate her last schnitzel and salad, wrote a farewell letter to her son, tied up the sheets and hanged herself. The "bitch of Buchenwald" took her own life.
It would probably not have occurred to anyone to look for excuses for the Buchenwald executioners, but one person decided to do so in 1971. Uwe Kohler, taking his mother’s maiden name, tried to restore “the good name of Ilse Koch” through the courts. He wrote a heartfelt letter to the New York Times: “Since retrial in West German courts is virtually impossible, I thought that the Americans who sentenced my mother to life imprisonment should know her true story.”
Uwe was born in 1947. He owes his birth to a chance connection between Ilsa and a former German soldier in Landsberg prison. The boy was immediately sent to one of the Bavarian orphanages - the first of many that he would go through as he grew up, remaining completely unaware of who his parents were and whether they were alive.
NO LEDNESS!
At the age of eight, Ove accidentally saw his birth certificate with his mother's name and remembered it. Eleven years later, the young man read a headline in one newspaper: “No leniency for Ilse Koch.” The state-appointed guardian confirmed that it was Ove's mother.
At Christmas 1966 he visited his mother in Landsberg for the first time. “For me, she was not a “Buchenwald bitch,” said Uwe. “I was glad to meet my mother.” He continued to visit his mother until she committed suicide.
Ove said: “In conversations with her, I always avoided mentioning the war. She herself touched on this topic, denied her guilt and said that she was a victim of treachery. I did not discuss these issues in more detail, since it was clear that it was painful for her I wanted her to hope that after 20 years in prison she would be released. It is difficult for me to imagine her during the war. I am not convinced that she was innocent. But I feel that she accepted the concentration camp system like many others. who did not know how or could not resist it. She was overwhelmed by the hysteria of the time."
Historians and psychiatrists often return to the “phenomenon” of Ilse Koch, who plunged into the abyss of the most serious sin on earth, and agree that this woman initially had a whole “bouquet” of bad inclinations.
But historian Charles Leach does not agree with this: “Before and after Karl Koch, Ilse did not exhibit the cruelty for which she became famous at Buchenwald. Her madness, if there really was one, was caused solely by her connection with this man. With his death, It seems that the witchcraft’s bonds were asleep. Perhaps if they had not met as truly diabolical partners, what happened would not have happened.”
However, it is difficult to agree with this statement. “Fatal” coincidences have nothing to do with it. It's not so much about the personal qualities of one or another Nazi criminal, as much as in the criminal, misanthropic nature of the Nazi system itself. What happened to her and her "attendants" was not an accident at all. This is how History decreed.
35 years ago, on September 1, 1967, on the 28th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, whose name became synonymous with Nazi cruelty and immorality, hanged herself in her prison cell.
A girl from a respectable Saxon working family She studied diligently at school and was quite pretty. The village boys looked at the beauty. But the arrogant Ilsa brushed off everyone who tried to hit on her.
Working in a modest position as a librarian, she went through suitors until the age of 30, until she was struck down by Standartenführer Karl Koch, commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, with his SS uniform.
When the newlyweds began to build a cozy family nest in a service apartment on the camp grounds, Ilsa’s habit of ruling over men degenerated into an unbridled desire to rule over people, into a pathological desire to do with them whatever her heart desired. She was taught something by her husband, who loved to whip prisoners with a whip with pieces of a razor inserted into its end, insert the fingers of guilty people into a bench vice, or brand the enemies of the Reich with a hot iron.
Both prisoners and fellow soldiers feared Koch. Therefore, from an organizational point of view, the concentration camp worked like clockwork. And in 1939, the zealous Standartenführer was instructed to create the same “company” near Buchenwald.
The tattoo that adorned Ilsa's panties previously adorned the gypsy's back
Soon people in the camp began to fear not so much the commandant himself as his wife. The gas chamber and the crematorium seemed to many Buchenwald prisoners almost a happy deliverance from the more cruel torments to which the “Buchenwald bitch” subjected the unfortunate people - she distributed lashes to everyone she met, set a ferocious shepherd dog on pregnant women or people with a heavy burden. Sadistic entertainment gave this fury almost physiological pleasure.
But “barely” doesn’t count! In the camp, Frau Koch was pleasantly surprised by the abundance of men. And some of those who had not yet been mauled were quite good-looking. So what if they are enemies of the Reich? They won't live anyway. But what males! And the loving lady, who was fed up with her always-drunk husband, dragged the prisoners she liked into the first store she came across. And woe to the poor fellow who was unable to satisfy her irrepressible lust: Ilse Koch ordered the guilty to be castrated.
After some time, at social events and parties, the observant wives of SS officers began to notice the commandant’s wife had elegant handbags and gloves made of wonderfully crafted soft light leather. And Ilsa’s friends almost burst with envy at the sight of the elegant leather lampshades that decorated her house. Particularly piquant were the designs that showed through on the material, very reminiscent of the tattoos that men like to decorate their bodies with. Imagine the surprise of the ladies when they learned that all this beauty was made from real human skin, and in many cases - by Ms. Koch’s own hand! Frau Ilse proudly said that the skin of gypsies and Russian prisoners of war, who have many tattoos on their chests and backs, is especially good for crafts.
A former prisoner who worked as a pathologist in Buchenwald later said that prisoners who liked “Frau Lampshade” as raw materials were killed using lethal injections. The bodies were taken to the anatomical center, where the skin was carefully removed from them, processed, etc.
Our craftswoman has learned to sew even openwork underwear from human skin! The mentioned pathologist recalled that he saw the tattoo that adorned Ilse’s panties on the back of the subsequently disappeared gypsy.
They say that Ilse Koch took great pleasure in explaining in letters to her friends - the wives of commandants of other camps, how best to make book bindings and festive tablecloths from human skin
The Koch couple were accused of excessive cruelty by the SS court
Perhaps Ilse Koch would have gotten away with this fun if it weren’t for the active work of her hubby. Less burdened with aesthetic feelings than his wife, Karl Koch worked more pragmatically: he snatched gold dental crowns from dead (and sometimes living) people, and robbed jewelry and money from the living. All this stuff had to be sent to the Reichsbank safes. But, as often happened, most of the confiscated goods ended up in the pockets of Mr. Commandant. One day, Koch was forced to shoot his obstinate subordinate, an SS officer, who began to scribble complaints against his superior that he was allegedly engaged in extortion, set impossible tasks for collecting and delivering jewelry, and, instead of turning them to the benefit of the Fatherland, appropriated them. The informer also remembered the leather goods creations of the commandant’s eccentric wife. And at the end of 1942, the sweet couple appeared before a Nazi court on charges of “excessive cruelty and moral decay.” But that time, thanks to influential friends and, possibly, bribes, Karl and Ilse managed to escape punishment. The court found that the spouses were victims of a slander.
But in 1944, Gestapo bloodhounds found evidence of the Standartenführer’s guilt. They found a pastor who could give serious testimony. He was kept under close guard in prison. Alas, the day before the trial the witness was found dead in his cell. During the autopsy, potassium cyanide was found in his stomach.
It is likely that Müller's and Himmler's people would have turned a blind eye to Koch's murders. Their hands were covered in blood up to their elbows. But the Nazis considered stealing immoral.
In vain Koch begged to be given the opportunity to atone for his guilt with blood in the penal battalion on Eastern Front. A closed SS tribunal sentenced the perpetrator to death. And in April 1945, a few days before the liberation of the camp by the Americans, Karl Koch was shot.
The sadistic wife was forgiven again. In 1947, retribution seemed to have overtaken her. After a trial that lasted several weeks, a US military tribunal sentenced 41-year-old pregnant Ilse Koch to life imprisonment. But that was not the case. Four years later, after numerous appeals by the convicted woman, who denied her guilt, the high commissioner of the American occupation zone in Germany released the criminal, arguing that the evidence of her guilt was allegedly insignificant.
The world was shocked. The public was outraged. And before Frau Koch could leave the American military prison in Munich, she was immediately arrested by the German police. German authorities, fearing that the international community would accuse them of collaborating with the Nazis, began searching for new evidence. 240 witnesses testified in court! Ilse Koch was again sentenced to life imprisonment. No longer the right to appeal.
Ilse Koch's son hoped that after 20 years in prison his mother would be released
Her four-year-old son Uwe, born in 1947 to a former German soldier, was sent to an orphanage by the authorities.
At the age of eight, the boy accidentally saw his birth certificate and remembered his mother’s name; at nineteen, after reading the newspaper headline “No mercy for Ilse Koch!”, he visited his mother for the first time. She, Ove said, started the conversation herself, denied her guilt, said that she had become a victim of treachery. The son was not convinced that she was innocent. He believed that she was drawn into the crimes committed by her mother, as Ove put it, “the hysteria of time.” In his opinion, Ilsa deserved punishment, but not so severe. He himself hoped and tried to instill in his mother the idea that after serving 20 years, she would be released.
Now it is difficult to talk about how further events would have unfolded if the prisoner Ilse Koch had crossed this line. For on September 1, 1967, at the age of 61, she tied a rope out of a sheet and hanged herself.
No, these were not pangs of conscience. In her suicide letter to her son, the war criminal wrote with indignation that she had been made a scapegoat for the sins of important people who managed to escape punishment. But the halo of a martyr did not work out. Back in 1945, having visited the liberated Buchenwald with the uncooled ovens of the crematoria, General D. Eisenhower, commander of American troops in Europe, ordered a terrible excursion to the concentration camp for all soldiers and officers of the 80th division that liberated this area. “They,” said the general, “perhaps did not know what they were fighting for. Now at least they see what is worth fighting against.”
The phenomenon of Ilse Koch, whose name has become synonymous with cruelty and immorality, has been tried by historians and psychiatrists. Some believed that this woman had a whole “bouquet” of innate bad inclinations. Others tend to see Frau Koch as a victim of the influence of her sadistic husband. But, most likely, the reasons for such a moral decline should be sought in the criminal misanthropic nature of Nazi ideology, which, unfortunately, turned not only the “heroine” of our story into animals.
(Based on materials from foreign press).
No wonder they say: “There are devils in still waters.” When a person - a decent, intelligent person with a peaceful profession - begins to treat his fellow humans as non-humans, he himself turns into a beast. Something similar happened to Frau Elsa Koch, who was born in 1906 as Elsa Köhler, a lady who volunteered to work in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
It is appalling that ideological propaganda could have such an impact on a quiet, inconspicuous librarian. Having reached the age of thirty and having married Commandant Karl Koch, Elsa felt her own impunity and behaved like a rich slave owner, whose main entertainment was numerous defenseless victims.
These are just some of the outrages that came into the mind of serial killer Elsa Koch.
Having driven the prisoners to the parade ground and forced them to clean it with toothbrushes, she rode out to the area in front of the house on a snow-white horse, and from there, like a general, she admired the meaningless work of dozens of people.
When going on a walk, Elsa Koch invariably took a ferocious shepherd dog with her and trained it along the way, setting it on children and pregnant women if they had the misfortune of accidentally being in her path. Sometimes Mrs. Koch also grabbed a whip, whose merciless tip cut the backs of prisoners who did not manage to give way to her in time.
However, Mrs. Koch took all this as self-evident pranks. They were afraid of her because of the punishments, which were much more serious and cruel - real atrocities. For example, she periodically sent prisoners to a nearby zoo - to an enclosure with Himalayan bears. Nothing personal, I just didn’t want to spend money on animal feed. Why, if she had 250 thousand “subhumans” at her disposal?
When an unprincipled lady had a desire to have a lover, and Elsa looked for a pleasantly built young man- Czech by nationality (naturally, he was one of the prisoners) - first of all, the German woman ordered him to be fattened. And a week later, having received his refusal, considering herself insulted, she gave the order to shoot the poor fellow, cut out the heart from his corpse and “pickle” the organ in glass jar, in formaldehyde. Then, placing her heart, which was gently swaying in the liquid, by her bed, Elsa Koch became sad for all to see and wrote love poems near it in the evenings.
But her most terrible activity is for which Elsa Koch received two nicknames at once - “ The Witch of Buchenwald" and "Frau Lampshaded", was that, according to rumors, she used the skin of prisoners as improvised materials for making various crafts: gloves, handbags, thin underwear and lampshades, one of which even stood in her room, causing disgust among the few guests of the Koch family. In addition, the Buchenwald Witch preferred tattooed areas of skin for such souvenirs.
However, after the arrest of this terrible insane woman, despite the testimony of 240 people, the American general ordered her life sentence to be overturned. By this time, Elsa Koch had spent only a few years in prison. However, his decision caused such a violent protest from society that in 1951 the trial with the same charges and sentence was repeated, and “Frau Lampshade”, realizing that freedom was definitely not going to shine on her anymore, hanged herself in her cell in 1967 on the sheet. She did not express any remorse for her horrific actions - no posthumous note was found.
The creepiest thing about this drama, in our opinion, is that now some people perceive Elsa Koch solely as a role model. Pages on social networks are created in her name, memories of her atrocities are savored by young Nazis with true pleasure. I would like to believe that the ideology of division into people and non-humans using the technique of hidden hypnosis has not yet penetrated into all young heads. And they, unlike the weak, spineless librarian, still have a chance to come to their senses.
Elsa Koch can rightfully be called one of the most cruel women fascist Germany. Frau Lampshaded - this is the nickname given to her by journalists who covered the post-war trials in the media.
Elsa Koch (nee Koehler) was born in 1906 into a low-income family. The hardships of life fostered in young Elsa the understanding that life is not an easy thing. Elsa's parents could not provide a decent future for their daughter. Therefore, from an early age she learned to rely only on herself.
Pure gene pool
Although not particularly beautiful in childhood and adolescence, Elsa nevertheless had a high opinion of herself. Due to a strong desire to escape from the working environment, at the age of fifteen, Elsa entered accounting school and subsequently got a job in the accounting department as a clerk. The times were not the best: hunger reigned all around. Therefore, it is not surprising that Elsa developed sympathy for the new party in Germany and its leader, Adolf Hitler. Another ten years passed before Elsa Köhler decided to join the ranks of the NSDAP. In 1932, Elsa's idol, Adolf Hitler, came to power. And from that moment it begins to write new story states of Germany.
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At this moment, Elsa is already 26 years old and membership in the party gives her a huge advantage - entering into a decent marriage. A party acquaintance introduces her to a divorced man, Karl Otto Koch. Her future husband also came from the lower strata of society, and in addition to this, in the past he was a thief and a swindler. For a short time he collaborated with the German police, acting as an informer, but thanks to party membership he quickly climbed the career ladder.
Mutual sympathy flares up between them and in 1936 they legalize their marriage. At first, their marriage proceeded as casually as possible against the backdrop of the formation of a new German society. But when her husband is appointed commandant of the German concentration camp Buchenwald, she follows him and her life begins to change dramatically.
"Camp Joys"
The “promising” party member that Elsa considered her husband to be, in fact turned out to be a sadist with pronounced homosexual inclinations. It seems that such tendencies should have bothered and even irritated Elsa, but she simply did not pay attention to it. And in this regard, each of them lived the way he wanted - Elsa Koch openly asserted herself with the help of power, and Karl Koch raped the imprisoned men. The Buchenwald prisoners feared Frau Koch much more than the Commandant himself.
Elsa became famous for her ingenuity. Under her close supervision, prisoners could spend the entire day scrubbing the camp's staging area with toothbrushes. Elsa could also whip herself with the whip that she always carried with her. She also liked to order her subordinates to select the most beautiful prisoners in the camp and bring them to her to satisfy her sexual needs. And Elsa’s such needs were very specific: she liked to instill fear and horror in her victims, and she received her greatest pleasure in humiliating others.
Those who survived this terrible time in the concentration camp say that sometimes Frau Koch appeared accompanied by a large German Shepherd and with a smile on her lips she lowered this animal so that this creature could satisfy its hunger with human flesh. Often such entertainment ended in the death of one of the prisoners.
Lack of evidence or cruelty breeds cruelty
In 1943, Mr. and Mrs. Koch were taken into custody. Karl is convicted, and Elsa is released for lack of evidence. Frau Koch continued to live quietly until her arrest by the Americans, which occurred in June 1945. Her husband was less fortunate - Karl was shot a month before the fall of Berlin.
Elsa Koch was tried three times for the same crime, for which no evidence could be found. But at the last trial it was decided to find her guilty even in the absence of evidence.
During the Nuremberg trials, another terrifying fact is revealed that Elsa did while in Buchenwald - she tore off tattooed skin from prisoners (sometimes even from living ones) and made lampshades and handbags out of them, with which she later went out into the world. Ten witnesses confirmed these rumors, but none of the objects of her “creativity” were ever found. And after the publication of a new fact from Elsa’s life, journalists began to call her Frau Lampshade.
