The Horrific Crimes of Ilse Koch: The Bitch of Buchenwald
Updated: Aug 4
A woman goes on trial three separate times for the same set of horrors: riding a horse through a concentration camp, whipping prisoners who dared look at her, and, most infamously, having the skin of murdered inmates turned into lampshades for her own home. She's acquitted once, sentenced to death once, then quietly released after only a fraction of that sentence, then arrested all over again and handed life imprisonment by an entirely different court. Two decades later, she hangs herself in her cell, still insisting some of it never happened at all. That's the strange legal and moral tangle at the center of Ilse Koch's story, known to history as the "Bitch of Buchenwald," one of the most notorious women of the Third Reich, and also one of the hardest cases in Holocaust history to separate from its own myth.
Born Margarete Ilse Köhler on 22 September 1906, her life began unremarkably in Dresden. As the wife of Buchenwald Commandant Karl Otto Koch, she used her position to torment prisoners in ways that shocked even the Nazi regime's own internal investigators. Her life, trials, and mysterious legacy continue to raise questions about the depths of human depravity, and about how easily verified cruelty and unverified legend can end up sitting side by side in the same historical record.
Ilse Koch's early life was far from extraordinary. Raised by a factory foreman, her childhood was described as unremarkable, with her teachers noting her as polite and content. At the age of 15, she enrolled in accounting school, one of the few professional opportunities available to women at the time. She soon found work as a bookkeeping clerk in post-World War I Germany, a period marked by profound economic turmoil and social disillusionment.
Ilse Koch's early life was far from extraordinary. Raised by a factory foreman, her childhood was described as unremarkable, with her teachers noting her as polite and content. At the age of 15, she enrolled in accounting school—one of the few professional opportunities available to women at the time. She soon found work as a bookkeeping clerk in post-World War I Germany, a period marked by profound economic turmoil and social disillusionment.
In the early 1930s, as Germany's struggles deepened, Koch, like many of her peers, joined the Nazi Party. Hitler's ideology, promising economic recovery and the restoration of German pride, resonated with a populace beleaguered by the Treaty of Versailles and the hardships following the Great War. The Nazi Party first focused on turning the German people against democracy and the Weimar Republic, blaming its politicians for Germany's defeat and subsequent miseries.
Adolf Hitler, with his magnetic speeches and promises of abolishing the hated Treaty of Versailles, captivated Koch and others. The treaty had stripped Germany of its military might and forced it to pay enormous reparations, worsening the already dire economic situation. Many Germans, like Koch, were desperate for solutions, and the Nazi Party appeared to offer hope.
The Buchenwald Years
It was through her involvement in the Nazi Party that Koch met her future husband, Karl Otto Koch. They married in May 1937, the same year Karl Koch was appointed Commandant of Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany, located near Weimar. The camp, which opened shortly after Dachau, was marked by an iron gate inscribed with the words Jedem das Seine, meaning "to each his own." However, for the prisoners, it carried a far more sinister implication: everyone gets what he deserves.
Ilse Koch quickly embraced the chance to actively participate in her husband's gruesome work at Buchenwald, seizing the opportunity to carve out her own place within the Nazi regime. Far from staying in the background, she became one of the most feared and sadistic figures at the camp. Her cruelty and desire for power were evident from the outset.
One of her earliest acts was to commission the construction of an extravagant indoor sports arena, costing $62,500, a fortune at the time, equivalent to roughly $1 million today. The money for this lavish project was stolen from the very prisoners she and her husband oversaw, highlighting her complete disregard for human life and suffering.
Koch's love of horseback riding became another tool for her cruelty. She frequently rode not just within the arena but also through the camp itself, where her presence was met with terror. Prisoners who made the mistake of catching her eye were met with brutal consequences. She took pleasure in taunting those already enduring unimaginable conditions, sometimes whipping those who dared to look at her as she passed. Her actions, particularly towards children and the vulnerable, solidified her reputation as one of Buchenwald's most merciless tormentors, a woman whose cruelty knew no bounds.
Survivors of Buchenwald would later claim during her trial that Koch took special pleasure in sending children to the gas chambers. Another horrifying aspect of her sadistic behaviour was her supposed fascination with human skin. It was claimed that she collected lampshades, book covers, and gloves made from the skin of prisoners, particularly those with distinctive tattoos. These prisoners were said to be skinned after execution, and their remains were then incinerated. Items reportedly made from human skin were found after the camp's liberation and used as evidence during her trial.
This crime, however, has been said to be apocryphal. While various objects fashioned from human skins were discovered in Buchenwald's pathology department at liberation, their connection to Koch was tenuous, given that she had not been at the camp since the summer of 1943. The more likely culprit was SS doctor Erich Wagner, who wrote a dissertation while serving at Buchenwald on the purported link he saw between habitual criminality and the practice of tattooing one's skin.
Arrest and Trials
On 24 August 1943, both Karl and Ilse were arrested following an investigation led by SS judge Konrad Morgen, an internal SS investigator known even within his own organisation as the "Bloodhound Judge" for how relentlessly he pursued corruption inside the camp system. Morgen, testifying against Koch at all three of her eventual trials, described watching her ride through the camp "in sexy underwear," marking down for punishment anyone who dared to look at her, behaviour he called simply primitive, a striking condemnation given it came from a man still working inside the SS's own machinery. Morgen's indictment, issued 17 August 1944, formally charged Karl Koch with the "embezzlement and concealing of funds and goods in an amount of at least 200,000 RM," and the premeditated murder of three inmates, ostensibly to prevent them from giving evidence to the SS investigatory commission.
Ilse was charged with the habitual receiving of stolen goods, and taking for her benefit at least 25,000 RM. While Ilse Koch was acquitted at the subsequent SS trial in December 1944, Karl was found guilty, sentenced to death, and ultimately executed at Buchenwald only days prior to its liberation, a very different fate from the more famous postwar hangings carried out at the Nuremberg trials by Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the US Army's own controversial executioner.
Despite their numerous crimes, Ilse Koch was initially acquitted due to a lack of conclusive evidence. While the grisly lampshades and other items were recovered, investigators could not prove they were made from human skin. Koch herself insisted they were made from goatskin.
The liberation of the camp brought Koch's sadistic actions into the public eye. Survivors gave interviews detailing her atrocities, and there was a public outcry for her to face justice. In 1947, she was brought before the General Military Government Court for the Trial of War Criminals.
Koch conceived another child with a fellow German war crimes internee under murky circumstances while awaiting her trial at Dachau. Koch gave birth to a son she named Uwe Köhler while incarcerated at Landsberg prison in October 1947. The child was immediately handed over to Bavarian child welfare authorities. Uwe only discovered the identity of his mother as a teenager, and began to correspond with, and visit, his mother in 1966.
In a controversial turn of events, General Lucius D. Clay, the interim military governor of the American Zone in Germany, reduced Koch's sentence to just four years in 1949.
The reduction of Koch's sentence to four years resulted in an uproar when it was made public, but Clay stood firm by his decision for the rest of his life. He later argued the trial transcript held no real evidence to support a death sentence beyond the fact that she was, in his own blunt words, "a rather loathsome creature," and that the lampshade allegations, which had been "proven" in court to be made from goat skin rather than human skin, had unfairly shaped public opinion of the case before it ever reached him. He also pointed out that most of the crimes she'd actually been convicted of were committed against German citizens rather than American or Allied prisoners, territory he argued fell outside American jurisdiction entirely. Clay was careful to add that he held no personal sympathy for Koch, calling her a woman of depraved character who'd done many things reprehensible under German law, but insisted he simply hadn't been trying her for those things, only for the specific charges before his court.
The public was outraged by her release, and Koch was soon rearrested. During her second trial in 1950, she frequently collapsed and had to be removed from the courtroom. The proceedings saw over 250 witnesses testify, with four witnesses confirming they had seen Koch selecting prisoners for their tattoos or had been involved in creating human-skin lampshades. However, due to a lack of concrete evidence, the charge was once again dropped.
On 15 January 1951, Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment, convicted of charges of incitement to murder, incitement to attempted murder, and incitement to the crime of committing grievous bodily harm.
A Family Undone
Ilse and Karl had three children together during their years at Buchenwald: son Artwin, born in 1938, and daughters Gisela and Gudrun, born in 1939 and 1940. Gudrun died in infancy. The two surviving children, Artwin and Gisela, lived with relatives while their mother stood trial, and the toll of what their parents had done followed them into adulthood. Artwin, the eldest, took his own life in 1964, three years before his mother's own suicide, reportedly unable to live with the full weight of what his parents had been responsible for. Gisela largely disappeared from public life afterward and is reported to have lived until 2021, decades removed from the family name that had made headlines around the world.
Final Years and Legacy
During her imprisonment, Koch appealed her conviction multiple times, but all were dismissed. She even petitioned the International Human Rights Commission but was again rejected. Her son Uwe, born during her imprisonment at Dachau, discovered his mother's identity later in life and visited her frequently in prison.
Koch hanged herself with a bed sheet at Aichach women's prison on 1 September 1967 at age 60. She experienced delusions and had become convinced that concentration camp survivors would abuse her in her cell. Her suicide note was written to her son Uwe: "There is no other way. Death for me is a release."
In 1971, Uwe sought posthumous rehabilitation for his mother. Via the press, he used clemency documents from her former lawyer in 1957 and his impression of her based on their relationship in an attempt to change people's attitude towards Koch. She was buried in an unmarked grave at the prison's cemetery.
The mystery surrounding the infamous lampshades endures. While many historians doubt their existence, a Jewish writer named Mark Jacobson sought to verify the story after a man named Skip Hendersen purchased a lampshade said to be a Nazi relic. Initial DNA testing suggested the lampshade was made from human skin, but later tests pointed to it being cowskin. This uncertainty remains one of the many dark secrets Koch took to her grave, leaving behind a legacy of cruelty and horror that continues to haunt history.
Koch wasn't the only woman to emerge from the camp system with a similarly infamous, and similarly contested, reputation. Jenny Barkmann, a young guard at Stutthof concentration camp, was tried and executed after the war for her own documented cruelty, one of a small number of women whose wartime conduct turned them into lasting symbols of Nazi brutality in a system built almost entirely around male command structures.
Ilse Koch will forever be remembered as the Bitch of Buchenwald, a symbol of the extremes of human depravity and the unchecked cruelty that defined the Nazi regime.
