When Nazi Queen of Buchenwald Finally Paid: Ilse Koch JJ
11 April 1945, Buchenwald concentration camp, Germany. Soldiers of the United States Army enter the site after most of the SS guards have fled and armed prisoners have taken control of the camp. Between the wooden huts they find unburied bodies, overcrowded barracks and thousands of inmates weakened by hunger, disease and years of forced labour, many of them barely able to stand.
Survivors speak of beatings, humiliation, theft and murder, and among the names they repeat is that of a commandant’s wife who had lived with her family in comfort in a villa above the camp. While inmates suffered below, she enjoyed expensive furniture, servants, horses, and property stolen from those held there. Former prisoners accuse her of striking and degrading them, and they also connect this woman with the selection of tattooed inmates whose skin was preserved after their deaths. Her name is Ilse Koch.
Ilse Koch was born as Margarete Ilse Köhler, on 22 September 1906 in Dresden, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Max, was a skilled tradesman, while her mother, Anna, managed their household. Ilse grew up in a strict Protestant, lower-middle-class family.
After completing compulsory education, she attended a trade school, where she learned secretarial skills and then found employment as a clerk and secretary for several local companies. Her early adult life took place during the Weimar Republic, the democratic German state created after Germany’s defeat in the First World War. She lived through political violence, mass unemployment and the economic problems that followed the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and the Great Depression which pushed Germany’s unemployment rate to nearly 30 percent, leaving around six million people across the country without work. Like many Germans,
Ilse was attracted by the Nazi Party’s promises of order, strength and national revival. She joined the party in April 1932 and received membership number 1,130,836. Nine months later, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. In new Nazi Germany, women were expected to serve as loyal wives and mothers, bearers of a pure Aryan race. Yet for Ilse, politics was also a path to power.
She was fascinated by the Nazi Party, and through its social circles she met various officers of the SS and SA, Nazi paramilitary organizations. Among them was a man whose destiny would soon connect with hers – Karl Otto Koch, her future husband. Karl Koch was an SS officer nine years older than Ilse and already had experience in the concentration camp system that Nazi Germany had begun to build in 1933. He represented the authority, status and privilege she wanted.
They married in 1937 at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he was commandant. Soon afterward, the SS assigned Karl to build and command a new camp near the city of Weimar in central Germany. The place was called Buchenwald and, in the summer of 1937, the couple moved into a large villa built for them on a hill overlooking the camp.
At Buchenwald, Ilse gave birth to three children between 1938 and 1940: Artwin, Gisela and Gudrun, who died as an infant in 1941. The Second World War began on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. As the conflict spread, the Nazi regime arrested growing numbers of people across occupied Europe, sending many of them to concentration camps, including Buchenwald.
The Koch family soon learned how much wealth could be taken from prisoners in the concentration camp. Watches, jewellery, money and other property were stolen, while the family lived with servants, horses and expensive furniture. Ilse displayed her position openly and was disliked by some women in the SS settlement because of her boasting and showing her new wealth.
Her strained relationships with the other SS wives were also attributed to her numerous sexual affairs with SS officers, including with camp’s deputy commandant Hermann Florstedt and physician Waldemar Hoven, who were themselves married and had children. This is where the work of our historians, researchers and editors becomes the story you hear. I’m Marchand Steenkamp, the voice behind World History since 2022.
In an era of automated content, we wanted to show you the real people who bring these documentaries to life. If you value human-made documentaries that tell history accurately and respectfully, please like, subscribe, and share your thoughts below. Now, let’s continue with today’s story. At Buchenwald, Koch became known for dressing provocatively and gained a reputation for her predatory sexual behaviour and sadism.
Allegedly she ordered prisoners to serve her while she was nude and enjoyed sexually humiliating them. Ilse also sexually abused the camp’s prisoners and forced male inmates to rape female prisoners in front of her. Despite having 3 children on her own, she hated pregnant women and she used to beat them with whip along the entire length of which pieces of a razor were inserted.
Ilse Koch also found pleasure in beating child inmates which she conducted with a smile on her face. According to the testimony of former prisoners, Ilse Koch could be even more cruel than her husband and many of the SS men who served in the camp. Unlike them, however, she held no official position and was under no orders to enter the camp or abuse prisoners, doing so entirely of her own free will.
Her fascination with tattoos gave rise to the most terrible legend of all. Allegedly she became obsessed with collecting pieces of tattooed human skin and inmates with distinctive tattoo designs were noted by number, taken to the infirmary, and never returned. After the liberation, pieces of tattooed skin were found in the camp’s pathology department, and lampshades made from human hides were displayed as evidence.
Although courts later struggled to prove her direct involvement, the horror became inseparable from her name. Modern forensic tests confirmed that at least one of the infamous lampshades was indeed made from human skin, verifying what survivors had claimed for decades. In the end, corruption rather than the mass murder of prisoners caused the SS to investigate the Koch household.
Karl Koch used property stolen from inmates to finance a lavish lifestyle and private projects, including an indoor riding hall for his wife costing more than 250,000 Reichsmarks—equivalent to almost 2.5 million US dollars today. He also purchased a luxury car, opened Swiss bank accounts with money extorted from prisoners, and bribed officials to look the other way.
In 1941, however, the SS began investigating his administration of Buchenwald. Karl Koch was arrested but released after Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, intervened. Despite Himmler’s intervention Koch lost his command in Buchenwald and was sent to Majdanek, a concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland.
Ilse remained in the SS settlement in Buchenwald for a time but on 24 August 1943, a renewed investigation led to the arrest of both husband and wife. The case was handled by SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who found evidence of theft, corruption and murder. The SS did not object to the killing of prisoners as part of the camp system. It acted because Karl Koch had stolen from the organisation and had ordered unauthorised murders, including the deaths of prisoners who had treated him for syphilis and could have revealed his condition.
He was sentenced to death for corruption and murder and was shot at Buchenwald on 5 April 1945, six days before American troops reached the camp. Ilse was acquitted because the SS court said there was not enough evidence against her. After about 16 months in detention, she was released, and then moved with her surviving children to Ludwigsburg, city in south-western Germany, where members of her family lived.
After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, her freedom, however, did not last long. A former Buchenwald prisoner recognised her, and the American occupation authorities arrested her on 30 June 1945. She remained in custody for almost two years before her first postwar trial opened on 11 April 1947, exactly two years after the liberation of Buchenwald.
The proceedings took place at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich in southern Germany, then being used by the American authorities for war-crimes trials. There were 31 defendants, and Ilse Koch was the only woman among them. The court found that she had not only known about the abuse and killing of prisoners but had also taken part in their mistreatment.
William Denson, the chief prosecutor during the trial said that she was “nothing less than a sadistic pervert of monumental proportions unmatched in history.” And the American press popularised the name by which she became widely known in English: “The Bitch of Buchenwald.” On 14 August 1947 she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Ilse Koch was pregnant at the time by a fellow German war crimes internee, although the identity of the child’s father has never been established.
Her pregnancy may have influenced the court’s decision not to sentence her to death, although this was never officially cited as the reason. Her son Uwe was born in Landsberg prison in October 1947 and was placed in the care of the Bavarian child welfare authorities. On 8 June 1948, General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor of the United States occupation zone in Germany, reduced her sentence from life imprisonment to four years.
The military review found no convincing proof that she had selected prisoners for death because of their tattoos or owned objects made from human skin. Clay argued that the original sentence was therefore too severe for the offences that had been proved in the American trial. The decision remained secret until September, but once it became public, widespread outrage in the United States prompted the authorities to transfer the case to the German courts.
Ilse Koch left prison on 17 October 1949 but was arrested again the same day by the West German authorities. Her second post-war trial opened on 27 November 1950 in the city of Augsburg in Bavaria, and continued for seven weeks. The court heard about 250 witnesses, including around 50 called by the defence. Ilse broke down several times and had to be removed from the courtroom.
Her lawyers argued that she had only been the commandant’s wife and had held no official authority inside Buchenwald. The court rejected this defence and on 15 January 1951, in a judgment of 111 pages, she was once again sentenced to life imprisonment. Ilse Koch was transferred to the women’s prison at Aichach in Bavaria in southern Germany, where she spent the next 16 years.
Her repeated requests for clemency were refused. In letters, she continued to claim that witnesses had lied and that others had created her reputation. Ilse’s mental health slowly became worse, with prison staff describing her as unstable and increasingly paranoid as she claimed that former concentration camp prisoners were entering her cell and attacking her.
The final part of Ilse Koch’s life was closely connected to the son she had never raised. Uwe Köhler grew up in foster care in Bavaria. As a child, he saw his mother’s name on his birth certificate and remembered it. When Uwe was 19, he read a newspaper article about her and understood who she was.
Ilse’s son visited Aichach prison during the Christmas season of 1966 and from then on, he came once a month, the maximum allowed by the prison. Uwe later described their meeting as happy. Outside the prison, however, the consequences of Ilse Koch’s past continued to shape her family. Her children lived under the shadow of her name, and her son Artwin, isolated and ashamed of his parents, took his own life in 1967.
Soon afterwards, Ilse’s mental state deteriorated further. On 1 September 1967, three weeks before her 61st birthday, Ilse Koch hanged herself in her cell, leaving Uwe a note saying: “I can’ t help it. For me, death is a salvation.”She was buried in an unmarked grave in Aichach cemetery. Thanks for watching the World History Channel.
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