“Merely a Housewife”
Born and bred in Dresden, Germany, Ilse Koch began working in a cigarette factory at age fifteen, giving half her wages to her impoverished family. Two years later she went to work in a bookshop. A voluptuous blue-eyed blonde, by then, she was enthralled by Hitler’s storm troopers and had joined the Nazi Youth Party. The bookstore was an official branch of that party and the elderly owner pandered to the racist tastes of the Nazis. He told the naive Ilse that he would introduce her to classic literature but instead gave her obscene books to read to heighten her passions for the young storm troopers who visited the store to purchase Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other party-approved dogma. (This tactic, of course, was in keeping with Hitler’s program in the mid-1930s to promote youthful marriages, which in turn would produce more babies for the Third Reich.)
Ilse had many affairs with SS men but was singled out by Heinrich Himmler, the dreaded leader of the SS and Gestapo, for marriage to his then top aide, Karl Koch. Himmler entered the bookstore with Koch in 1937, spotted the oversexed Ilse, and ordered Koch to mate with her. Himmler himself arranged for their marriage later that year.
A thick-set, bullet-headed man with the manners and morals of a pig, Koch assumed command of the new Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar. After his wedding, he took his youthful bride to a magnificent villa near the camp and promptly forgot about her—except to produce two children through their union in compliance with party dictates. Koch then began indulging in orgies with women at Weimar, staggering “sex feasts” costing fortunes. Ilse was left to her own diversions.
At first she spent her time riding to the hounds in Brandenburg. Then she flirted with Koch’s junior officers, finally having affairs with a half dozen at a time, staging her own orgies where she would drink with several SS officers until taking them all into her bed. Her appetite for sex was insatiable, and her desire for perversion and sadistic acts obsessive. The prisoners at Buchenwald became her playthings.
Not until the war was in full progress did Ilse give vent to her incredible depravities. Ilse also took particular delight in sunbathing naked at her villa, where potential SS lovers would ogle her, and close to the camp, where she could tantalize the prisoners. She would greet all incoming trucks and trains standing semi-nude next to lines of male prisoners, mostly Jews by then, wiggling her hips, fondling her large breasts, and making lewd remarks. If one prisoner dared look up at her, he was beaten senseless. On one such occasion, guards noticed three prisoners glance up from the ground to stare at the “Bitch of Buchenwald.” Two were beaten to death on the spot with clubs, the other was pushed face first to the ground, a guard standing on his neck grinding the man’s face into the mud until he suffocated to death. Smirking, Ilse filled out a report that these men had been executed for giving her lascivious looks.
For sport, Ilse Koch encouraged the guards to participate in random mass slayings. One day, at her urging, guards opened up with pistols, shooting at prisoners as one would scurrying turkeys in a barnyard. Ilse was beside herself with ecstasy and grabbed a pistol, helping to murder many of the twenty-four prisoners killed that day.
Ilse brought a young female relative to live with her in her camp villa and ordered the girl to watch for attractive male guards newly arriving at Buchenwald and arrange orgies for her mistress. Ilse also forced the girl to participate in these acts.
One afternoon Ilse spied two male prisoners working without their shirts. Both had livid tattoos on their backs and chest. She ordered that the prisoners be killed immediately—they were taken to the camp hospital and murdered by injections that night—and their skins prepared and brought to her. Thus began one of the most heinous hobbies the world had ever known. Ilse’s fascination for human skin, particularly that bearing tattoos, never abated. She had lampshades made from the skin, with which she adorned her living room. Skin from other selected victims went to make up pairs of gloves which Ilse proudly wore on her delicate hands.
Ever inventive, Ilse ordered the heads of executed prisoners to be severed and, in an elaborate process, shriveled down to grapefruit size. Dozens of these grotesque human trophies decorated the sideboards of Ilse’s dining room, where she dined each day with her children.
At the close of the war, Ilse Koch was arrested and tried as a war criminal, although she fared far better than her counterpart from Belsen, Irma Grese. She was placed on trial in 1947–48 in Nuremburg before an American military court and sentenced to life in prison, a judgment that prompted deep resentment the world over. A U.S. review board, headed by the military governor of the U.S. zone, General Clay, ordered her release two years later. The world-wide protest to that action was of hurricane proportions. President Truman ordered a special investigation, but authorities finally declared that offenses by one German against other Germans could not be considered a war crime.
It was left to the German people to judge the woman. She was placed on trial again in 1950–51 in Augsburg, Bavaria, charged with murdering 45 prisoners and being the willing accomplice in another 135 concentration camp homicides. The woman standing in the dock was anything but beautiful. Her Titian hair was now a straggly dirty blonde, her features were bloated, her body a lumpy sack. She had no defense, really, and blamed her husband for everything, which was convenient in that Karl Koch had long ago been executed by the Nazis for embezzling party funds to pay for his orgies.
Ilse stood in the dock terrified, her eyes darting to the open windows. Outside, hundreds were screaming incessantly, “Kill her! Kill her!” She appealed for mercy from the court, stating the tired excuse that she had no knowledge of what went on at Buchenwald. “I was merely a housewife,” she sobbed. “I was busy raising my children. I never saw anything which was against humanity!”
When confronted with photos showing mounds of corpses at Buchenwald, Ilse screamed, “Lies! All lies!” She had seen nothing, she had done nothing. The dozens of camp survivors who testified against her were impostors, actors, she said, playing out roles assigned to them by the Allies.
Halfway through the proceedings, Ilse Koch pretended to go into an epileptic state, forcing her body to twitch uncontrollably, responding to nothing, a blank stare masking her emotions. Doctors who examined her told the court that she was in perfect health. In her cell, Ilse laughed at one physician, telling him that he was enjoying her “First-class comedy act.”
Yet Ilse persisted in the pretense, faking illness that prevented her from leaving her cell bed to hear the court declare her guilty of all the charges. She was to be imprisoned for life, and that decision too, caused this horrible woman to convulse with laughter; she had, unlike Irma Grese and others, escaped the headsman. Her eerie cackle was stilled by her death in 1971.
—JRN