The Horrific Crimes of Ilse Koch: The Bitch of Buchenwald
Updated: Oct 6
Ilse Koch was put on trial three times, by three different courts, for more or less the same set of crimes. An SS court acquitted her. An American military court gave her life, then an American general cut it to four years. A West German court then gave her life all over again. Sixteen years later she hanged herself in a Bavarian prison, still denying the thing she was most famous for.
That thing was the lampshades. For eighty years Ilse Koch has been remembered as the woman who had prisoners skinned for their tattoos so she could turn them into home furnishings. The truth is stranger. The human skin objects at Buchenwald were real. Her link to them has never been proven. And the gap between those two facts has been exploited by everyone from tabloid editors to Holocaust deniers.
Quick Answers
● Who was Ilse Koch? The wife of Karl Otto Koch, the first commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, known in the press as the "Bitch of Buchenwald".
● What was she convicted of? A West German court convicted her in 1951 of incitement to murder, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm against prisoners. She got life.
● Did Ilse Koch really make lampshades from human skin? Objects made from tattooed human skin did exist at Buchenwald, but no court ever proved she ordered or owned them. The charge was dropped at her final trial.
● How many times was she tried? Three: by the SS in 1944, by a US military court at Dachau in 1947 and by a West German court in Augsburg in 1950 to 1951.
● How did Ilse Koch die? She hanged herself in Aichach women's prison on 1 September 1967, aged 60.
From Dresden to the Nazi Party
She was born Margarete Ilse Köhler in Dresden on 22 September 1906, the daughter of a factory foreman. By all accounts her childhood was ordinary. According to her Encyclopedia.com biography, she left school after eight years, worked in a bookshop and then as a secretary at a cigarette factory. She joined the Nazi Party in the spring of 1932, the year before Hitler took power.
Through the party she met Karl Otto Koch, a First World War veteran who'd failed at several civilian jobs before finding his calling in the SS. They married in May 1937 in what's been described as a quasi-pagan SS ceremony held by torchlight in an oak grove. That same summer Karl was put in charge of a new camp being built on the Ettersberg hill outside Weimar. It was called Buchenwald.
The Commandant's Wife
Ilse moved into the commandant's villa and lived there with Karl and their children: a son, Artwin, born in 1938, and two daughters, Gisela and Gudrun, born in 1939 and 1940. Gudrun died before her first birthday.
Life for the Koch family was comfortable, and it was paid for with stolen money. The most notorious example was her private indoor riding hall. It was built in the first year of the war, measured roughly 120 by 300 feet and cost at least 250,000 Reichsmarks, taken from prisoners and camp funds. At least 30 prisoners died building it.
Survivors described her riding through the camp and noting down the numbers of any prisoner who looked at her, after which they'd be punished. Konrad Morgen, the SS judge who later investigated the Kochs, told the New York Times she used to ride in front of the prisoners in revealing underwear. Legal scholars Mark Drumbl and Solange Mouthaan, in their detailed study of her three trials, quote him summing up her behaviour in two words: "Simply primitive."
It's worth pausing on how unusual it is that her own side's investigator was that disgusted.
Karl Koch's Corruption and the SS Investigation
Karl Koch ran Buchenwald like a personal business. He embezzled from the camp, extorted money from wealthy Jewish prisoners and had inmates who knew too much killed off. In 1941 he was moved to run Majdanek in occupied Poland, but his luck was running out.
Konrad Morgen was an SS lawyer whose job was to investigate corruption inside the camp system, not the murder of Jews and other prisoners the system existed to carry out. It's one of the Third Reich's darker ironies that he went after the Kochs for theft. On 24 August 1943 both of them were arrested.
Karl was charged with embezzling at least 200,000 Reichsmarks and with murdering prisoners who could have testified against him. Ilse was charged with receiving stolen goods. The SS court found Karl guilty and sentenced him to death. Ilse was acquitted for lack of evidence. Karl was executed by the SS at Buchenwald, according to Britannica on 5 April 1945, less than a week before the camp was liberated.
The Lampshade Story: What's Real and What Isn't
This is the heart of Ilse Koch's legend, so it's worth getting right.
The human skin objects were real. The Buchenwald Memorial's research on the SS's "gift items" shows that around 1941 an SS camp doctor called Hans Müller ordered tattoos to be cut from the bodies of dead prisoners and made into lampshades and other objects. Another SS doctor, Erich Wagner, wrote his 1940 doctoral thesis on tattooing, which he treated as a sign of low intelligence and criminality, and the evidence suggests he picked out tattooed prisoners to be killed for their skin. Tanned skin was sent to the SS medical academy in Graz, and as late as 1944 the chief SS camp doctor, Enno Lolling, was demanding Buchenwald send him its "existing 142 tattoos". Shrunken heads were produced too.
The link to Ilse Koch was never proven. Former prisoners testified that she picked out men with interesting tattoos, and that lampshades made from skin sat in her home. But no lampshade was ever traced to her, and she'd been gone from Buchenwald since her arrest in 1943, well before the Americans found the objects in the camp's pathology block.
The subject of human skin turned into objects has a long, grim history of its own. If you want the older version, we've written about anthropodermic bibliopegy, the practice of binding books in human skin.
Trial One: The Americans at Dachau, 1947
After the war Ilse was arrested by the Americans and put on trial with 30 former Buchenwald staff at the old Dachau camp. The case opened on 11 April 1947, exactly two years after the liberation. She was the only woman in the dock.
The press went wild for her. Newspapers called her the Witch, the Beast and the Bitch of Buchenwald. The lead prosecutor, William Denson, described her in court as "no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world", a line quoted by historian Tomaz Jardim in The Conversation. Jardim, who wrote a whole book on her trials, argues that her gender turned her into a convenient symbol of Nazi cruelty in a way her male co-defendants never were.
Denson had a different problem. Only 34, he'd already prosecuted other camp cases, and he admitted in the Warfare History Network's account of the trial that the hardest part was "trying to present a case that the court would believe". The tattooed skin and a shrunken head were shown to the court. Witnesses described her beatings and her interest in tattoos.
On 14 August 1947 she was found guilty and sentenced to life. By then she was seven months pregnant. Nobody's ever been sure who the father was, beyond the fact that it was a fellow internee. On 29 October 1947 she gave birth to a son, Uwe, in the prison hospital at Landsberg. He was taken from her and handed to welfare authorities.
General Clay's Four-Year Sentence
In June 1948 General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor of the American zone, reviewed the case and cut her sentence to four years. When the decision became public that September, there was uproar in the US. Congress held hearings, but there was no mechanism to overturn Clay's decision and he never backed down.
Clay's reasoning, according to Drumbl and Mouthaan, was that there was no convincing evidence she'd had anything to do with the lampshades, and much of the testimony against her rested on hearsay. Decades later, in a 1976 interview, he went further and said the objects had turned out to be made of goatskin.
That claim was a gift to Holocaust deniers. As Nizkor's research on the case sets out, deniers have used Clay's goatskin remark since the 1980s to argue that the whole human skin story was invented. It wasn't. A forensic report submitted to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg concluded, from microscopic examination and the positioning of nipples and a navel, that the skin samples from Buchenwald were certainly human. Clay may have been right about Koch. He was wrong about the skin.
Trial Two: Augsburg, 1950 to 1951
Ilse Koch was released in October 1949 and was re-arrested almost immediately, this time by the West German authorities. Because most of her victims had been German or stateless prisoners rather than Allied nationals, a German court could try her for crimes the Americans hadn't.
Her trial in Augsburg ran from 27 November 1950 to 15 January 1951. She was accused of instigating 45 murders and being complicit in 135 more. Around 250 witnesses gave evidence, 50 of them for the defence. She repeatedly collapsed and had to be carried out of court. Tellingly, the prosecution dropped the tattooed skin charges altogether, despite witnesses who said they'd seen her selecting prisoners.
She was convicted of incitement to murder, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm, and sentenced to life with permanent loss of civil rights. Her appeal was thrown out on 22 April 1952. She'd spend the rest of her life in prison.
Even at this stage, the gendered framing hung over everything. One court document from the German case argued that being a woman made her participation more unnatural and more deliberate, as if the crimes were worse because a woman committed them.
A Son She Didn't Raise
Uwe Köhler grew up without knowing who his mother was. He found out as a boy when he saw his birth certificate, and in 1966 he went to meet her in Aichach prison. After that they met every month.
It was a short relationship. Ilse had become increasingly paranoid, convinced that former concentration camp prisoners were coming to hurt her in her cell. On 1 September 1967, three weeks before her 61st birthday, she hanged herself with a bedsheet. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.
Afterwards Uwe campaigned for her to be rehabilitated, using clemency papers from her former lawyer, without success. Her eldest son Artwin is said to have taken his own life after the war.
The Lampshade That Turned Up in New Orleans
The lampshade legend has never gone away, and in 2006 it got a strange new chapter. Six months after Hurricane Katrina, a New Orleans man called Skip Henderson bought a lamp at a rummage sale for $35. The seller said the shade was made from the skin of Jews. Henderson sent it to journalist Mark Jacobson, who paid around $6,000 for DNA testing.
According to NPR's interview with Jacobson, the lab found that it was human skin, and later tests in Germany and Israel backed that up. Nobody could establish whose skin it was or where it came from, and there's no evidence at all linking it to Buchenwald, let alone to Ilse Koch. Jacobson's own summary was stark: it "used to be part of a human being." He wrote a book about it, The Lampshade, in 2010.
So Who Was Ilse Koch, Really?
The most honest answer is that there are two Ilse Kochs. One is a greedy, cruel Nazi who lived in luxury off stolen money, abused prisoners and was convicted by a German court of inciting murder. That woman was real, and she deserved to spend her life in prison.
The other is the "Bitch of Buchenwald", a figure built by newspaper headlines, rumour and a prosecution that knew exactly how much a female villain would grab the public. That version made the lampshade story about her rather than about the SS doctors who actually ran the skin programme, most of whom history has forgotten.
She wasn't the only woman to become a symbol like this. Irma Grese at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Jenny Barkmann at Stutthof were given the same kind of treatment. And if you want to know what the camp Ilse Koch left behind looked like when the Americans arrived, read our full account of the liberation of Buchenwald.
