Even the SS Had Enough of Him: The End of Karl Otto Koch HH

The 30th of January, 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor and the Nazi movement begins to take control of the state. Political opponents are arrested, rival parties are destroyed, and thousands of people taken to prisons or improvised detention sites, which within months develop into a permanent system of concentration camps used to isolate anyone whom the regime considers an enemy.

At first, most prisoners are communists, social democrats, and other political opponents. Over time, Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, men persecuted for homosexuality, and many others are imprisoned as well. The camps become places of forced labor, starvation, torture, and murder, but they also create careers for men willing to enforce this violence.

One of them is a former clerk and First World War veteran who serves at several early camps before becoming commandant of Sachsenhausen and later Buchenwald concentration camp, where he gains almost unlimited power over thousands of prisoners. He exploits them, steals their property, and orders the murder of witnesses who could expose him.

His brutality does not trouble his superiors, but his greed [music] eventually crosses a line even they will not ignore. Before Nazi Germany collapses, he will pay for his crimes with his own life. >> [snorts] >> His name is Karl Otto Koch. Karl Otto Koch was born on the 2nd of August, 1897, in the city of Darmstadt, then part of the German Empire.

His father worked at the local registry office, but died in 1905 when Koch was only eight. After leaving school in 1912, he completed a commercial apprenticeship and found work as a clerk. Although the First World War had begun in 1914, Koch did not volunteer for the Imperial German Army until [music] 2 years later.

He fought on the Western Front where he received, among other awards, the Iron Cross Second Class, a German military decoration awarded for bravery and distinguished service. British forces captured him in 1918 and he remained a prisoner of war until returning home the following year. Koch then found employment in banking and insurance.

In 1924, Karl Otto Koch married Katharina Müller, with whom he had two sons, Manfred and Alfred. His repeated affairs led to their divorce in 1931. That same year, Koch joined the Nazi Party and the SS, a paramilitary organization created to protect Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders that was gradually expanding its role within the movement.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Koch’s membership in the SS gave him the career and authority that he never possessed before. He entered the rapidly expanding concentration camp system and spent the following years serving at several early detention sites. Koch also became part of the SS Totenkopf Verbände, or Death’s Head Units, which were responsible for guarding and administering the concentration and later extermination camps.

While serving in Saxony in central Germany in 1934, he met Margarete Ilse Köhler, a secretary from Dresden who was 9 years younger and had belonged to the Nazi Party since 1932. [music] Koch continued to advance and in 1936, he became commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp built near the town of Oranienburg, north of Berlin.

His position gave him almost unlimited power over the prisoners held there. Ilse followed him to Sachsenhausen and the couple married at the camp on the 25th of May, 1937. They had three children, a son Alvin and daughters Gisela and Gudrun, but Gudrun died of pneumonia in February 1941 when she was only 4 months old.

7 weeks after the wedding, Koch left Sachsenhausen to command Buchenwald, a new concentration camp near the city of Weimar in central Germany. On the 15th of July, 1937, the SS brought the first 149 prisoners there by truck from Sachsenhausen. By the end of the year, it held more than 2,500 men. They cleared trees, laid foundations, and built wooden barracks.

In the limestone quarry, inmates broke stone with simple tools, pushed loaded carts, and were brutally beaten if they slowed down. Buchenwald was not an extermination center built for mass murder in gas chambers. It imprisoned people whom the regime considered enemies or undesirable and subjected them to forced labor, hunger, disease, and violence outside the legal system.

However, this did not mean that systematic killing was absent. Inmates were executed, murdered by lethal injection, or deliberately worked and starved to death, while thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were later systematically shot in a converted stable. One of the prisoners who survived the war recalled how Karl-Otto Koch welcomed them in Buchenwald.

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Now, let’s get into today’s story. The violence directed at the new arrivals formed part of a wider system of punishment that threatened every prisoner in Buchenwald. Even the smallest alleged offense could lead to a public flogging, during which victims were forced to count every blow aloud. If they lost count or could no longer speak, the guards often started again, and the beating could prove fatal.

Other forms of torture took place away from the eyes of most prisoners, inside the camp jail known as the bunker. Its 26 cells were rarely empty. Men held there were locked in darkness, forced to stand all day, hanged from the bars of the cell, or killed by lethal injection. The same system that allowed such violence also gave Koch opportunities to enrich himself.

He treated Buchenwald almost as his private estate, exploiting prisoners as unpaid workers and diverting money and property stolen from them. Cash taken from new arrivals, valuables confiscated from inmates, and funds drawn from camp accounts helped finance the luxurious life he and Ilse built for themselves.

The couple lived in a large villa furnished with expensive items where prisoners worked as servants. Koch also forced inmates to construct leisure facilities for camp staff and their families. In 1938, they created a zoo near the camp fence complete with monkeys, brown bears, and deer. It was financed through money that inmates were compelled to hand over, while the animals received better food and protection than the prisoners living nearby.

In 1940, forced laborers built an indoor riding hall where Ilse, later known as the witch of Buchenwald for her brutal treatment of prisoners, could exercise her horse in bad weather. The Kochs became wealthy through this exploitation and made little effort to conceal their lifestyle. Koch’s treatment of the prisoners did not trouble his superiors, but stealing from the SS eventually did.

By 1941, suspicions were growing that he had manipulated Buchenwald accounts and diverted money and property for his own benefit. Walter Krämer, a prisoner who oversaw the camp infirmary, knew how Koch was enriching himself. He had also secretly treated the commandant for syphilis, a serious bacterial infection usually transmitted through sexual contact that could eventually damage the brain, heart, and other organs.

Koch had a history of extramarital affairs, although it is not known when or from whom he contracted the disease. Its discovery would have humiliated him and could have damaged his position in the SS, particularly because he had relied on prisoners rather than official doctors for treatment. Kremer and his assistant, Karl Pietsch, knew about both the illness Koch wanted to conceal and the financial crimes behind his wealth.

On the 6th of November, 1941, both men were taken to a Buchenwald satellite camp near Goslar, a town in central Germany, and shot from behind on Koch’s orders. Camp records falsely claimed that they had been killed while trying to escape. In December of the same year, Josias, hereditary prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, the senior SS and police commander responsible for the region where Buchenwald was located, had Koch arrested for corruption, but Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, soon ordered his release.

Karl Otto Koch was nevertheless removed from Buchenwald and sent to Eastern Europe, while his wife, Ilse, remained there with their children in the SS settlement. In January, 1942, Koch became commandant of a new prisoner of war camp near Lublin in German-occupied Poland. It later became the Lublin concentration camp, commonly known as Majdanek, and developed into a site of forced labor and mass murder.

When Koch arrived, the compound was still under construction. About 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war were forced to build its barracks and fences while sleeping outdoors with almost no food, and most died within weeks. Conditions remained appalling, while too few poorly trained guards left parts of the camp inadequately secured.

On the 14th of July, 1942, 86 Soviet prisoners escaped. Koch blamed shortages and his staff, but he was held responsible and removed from command the following month. He was transferred to administrative work and later served as a liaison between the SS and the German postal service. While Koch served in this new role, Josias continued examining the records left at Buchenwald.

On a list of dead prisoners, he found the name of Walter Kremer and immediately recognized it. Kremer had once successfully treated him, and the claim that he had been shot while escaping now appeared suspicious. In 1943, the investigation was placed in the hands of Georg Konrad Morgen, a lawyer and judge in the SS court system.

He examined the camp’s accounts, property records, and unexplained prisoner deaths. Large amounts of money, around 100,000 reichsmarks, were found in Koch’s private accounts, far more than his salary could explain, while further evidence revealed the theft of jewelry, gold, and other valuables. Morgen also connected the former commandant to the murders of Kremer, Pikes, and another inmate killed to prevent them from speaking.

On the 24th of August, 1943, Koch returned to the family villa beside Buchenwald, where investigators were waiting for him. Karl and Ilse were both arrested that night. Karl Otto Koch had crossed a line even the SS was unwilling to tolerate, not because of his treatment of prisoners, but because he had stolen from the organization itself and murdered witnesses to conceal his crimes.

The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, expected valuables taken from prisoners to be delivered to the state, not kept by individual officers. In September 1944, the trial against Karl Otto Koch began. During the proceedings, he said, “I can’t find an explanation for my actions unless I was spoiled by my superiors.

Everything I suggested and did was approved. I got nothing but praise and laurels. This got into my head. I became megalomaniac at the time.” On the 19th of December, 1944, Karl Otto Koch was convicted of theft and ordering unauthorized murders and was sentenced to death. Ilse was cleared for lack of evidence and released after nearly 16 months in custody.

[music] The wider inquiry also implicated Hermann Florstedt, one of Ilse’s lovers, who had served under Koch at Buchenwald before later becoming commandant of Majdanek. Florstedt was convicted of corruption and murder and also sentenced to death. Koch remained in an SS prison in Weimar through the winter as American forces advanced into central Germany.

On the 5th of April, 1945, the 47-year-old Karl Otto Koch was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, the same place he had once commanded. His last words before he was shot by an SS firing squad were, “Boys, shoot well.” Just 6 days later, the camp was liberated by the US 6th Army Division. Karl Otto Koch’s family did not fare any better.

Edwin, his only son, could not live with the shame of the crimes of his parents and committed suicide in 1967. [music] Shortly after, Ilse Koch, who after the end of the war was twice sentenced to life imprisonment, hanged herself in her cell, leaving a note saying, “I can’t help it. For me, death is a salvation.” >> Thanks for watching the World History Channel.

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