Ilse Koch was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, who commanded the Buchenwald concentration camp from 1937 to 1942. She lived at the camp during his command, ran a small household at the commandant’s villa within the camp perimeter, and was, after his removal in 1942 and execution by the SS in 1945, the principal surviving Koch household figure to face post-war justice. She is best known for the lampshade legend that took shape around her in the immediate post-war months. That legend, as the dedicated lampshade page sets out, has a real but smaller core than the popular story implies. This page treats Ilse Koch herself, the documented record of her conduct at the camp, the trials that produced two convictions, and the controversies that have surrounded her case since 1947.
Buchenwald, 1937 to 1943
Ilse Köhler had been born in Dresden in 1906, married Karl-Otto Koch in 1936 and moved with him to Sachsenhausen and then, when he was promoted to its command in 1937, to Buchenwald. The Koch villa stood inside the Buchenwald perimeter, around 200 metres from the main prisoner area. From 1939 onwards Ilse Koch acted on her own authority within the camp regime; she had been formally appointed by her husband to the position of Oberaufseherin (head supervisor) of the women working in the camp, although the role had limited operational substance because there were few women prisoners at Buchenwald at that period.
The substantive charges against her at the post-war trials were not about the head-supervisor role. They were about her conduct in the camp as the commandant’s wife. Survivors testified that she had ridden through the camp on horseback, observed selections, and reported prisoners to her husband for punishment, in some cases for offences as trivial as failing to remove their caps in her presence. The most serious specific charges were that she had personally identified prisoners for selection on the basis of their tattoos, that she had reported prisoners to the SS for punishment that resulted in their deaths, and that she had been involved in the pathology block where preserved tattooed skin was retained. The full corroboration of each specific charge varied; the cumulative pattern was substantial.
The Koch corruption case, 1943 to 1945
Karl-Otto Koch was investigated by the SS itself in 1943 on charges of corruption and unauthorised killing. The SS investigation, conducted by Dr Konrad Morgen, was unusual in that it produced a real internal SS prosecution; Karl-Otto Koch was found guilty of embezzlement and of the unauthorised murder of two camp doctors who had treated him for syphilis (the murders had been intended to suppress the medical record). He was executed by the SS on 5 April 1945, six days before American forces reached Buchenwald. Ilse Koch was charged in the same investigation with receiving stolen property and acquitted in 1944.
The 1943 to 1944 SS investigation is significant for the post-war record because it produced documented evidence on the Koch household’s conduct that was not survivor testimony. The Morgen investigation files survived the war and were used at the post-war trials.
The American Buchenwald trial, 1947
Ilse Koch was tried by an American military court at Dachau between April and August 1947 as one of thirty-one defendants in the Buchenwald case. She was pregnant by another defendant at the time of the trial; her son was born in custody and was raised in West Germany. The court convicted her of “common design” participation in the camp regime and sentenced her to life imprisonment. Lucius Clay, the American military governor of Germany, reviewed the sentences in 1948 and reduced hers to four years on the basis that the specific direct-evidence link between her conduct and named victim deaths was weaker than the verdict had implied. The Clay decision provoked sustained American press and political reaction. The United States Senate held hearings on it in 1948 in the form of the Ferguson Committee.
The West German trial, 1950 to 1951
Koch was released in 1949 on completion of her reduced American sentence and was immediately arrested by West German authorities. The West German prosecution charged her with incitement to murder of named individuals at Buchenwald, principally on the basis of survivor testimony that was specific enough to support criminal charges in German law (which had higher specificity requirements than the American “common design” charge). The trial was conducted at Augsburg and ran from November 1950 to January 1951. She was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Aichach, 1951 to 1967
Koch served the rest of her life at Aichach prison in Bavaria. Her son, who had been born during the 1947 trial, met her once in 1967 when he was nineteen years old. She killed herself at Aichach on 1 September 1967, by hanging in her cell, six weeks after the meeting. The note she left expressed regret to her son rather than to her victims.
What is documented and what is myth
The Buchenwald pathology archive of preserved tattooed skin is documented. The lampshade legend that attached itself to that archive and was personally hung on Ilse Koch is mostly mythical, in the sense set out on the lampshade page. The senior position Koch held in the camp household, her involvement in the punishment-reporting system, her complicity in the conduct of the camp regime: all documented. The convictions she received were, by the standard of the post-war trials, well-supported. She was not the unique cartoon villain of the post-war American press, and she was not innocent. She was a senior figure in a documented atrocity who was tried twice for parts of her role in it.
Sources
- Alexandra Przyrembel, “Transfixed by an Image”: Ilse Koch, the “Kommandeuse of Buchenwald”, German History, vol 19 no 3, 2001
- Mark Falkoff, The Witch of Buchenwald: A Reassessment of Ilse Koch, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol 28 no 1, 2014
- Arthur L. Smith, The War for the German Mind: Re-educating Hitler’s Soldiers, Berghahn Books, 1996
- United States Senate, Hearings on the Reduction of Sentences in the Buchenwald and Other German War Crimes Trials, 80th and 81st Congress, 1948 to 1949 (the Ferguson Committee record)
- Konrad Morgen, Buchenwald investigation files 1943-1944, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 4 series
- Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, “Ilse Koch”, https://www.buchenwald.de
- USHMM, “Ilse Koch”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Robert Sigel, Im Interesse der Gerechtigkeit: Die Dachauer Kriegsverbrecherprozesse 1945-1948, Campus, 1992