Ilse Koch

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ilse Koch (1947)

Ilse Koch (born September 22, 1906 in Dresden as Margarete Ilse Köhler ; † September 2, 1967 in Aichach women's prison ) was the wife of the camp commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp , Karl Otto Koch . In the post-war period she became internationally known as the "Witch of Buchenwald" and was sentenced to long prison terms by both an American and a German court.

Live and act

Youth, education and family relationships

Ilse Koch, the third daughter of a foreman, graduated from elementary and commercial school and volunteered in an accounting department in 1922. Then she worked as a secretary in various companies. In April 1932 she joined the NSDAP ( membership number 1.130.836). Through her contacts with SA and SS men, she met her future husband, the SS man Karl Otto Koch , in the spring of 1934 . When she was 30 years old, the couple married in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , which was commanded by Karl Koch. After their wedding, they moved to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar , where they lived from July 1937 to January 1941. Here Koch gave birth to three children, Artwin (* 1938), Gisela (* 1939) and Gudrun (* 1940). Gudrun died in February 1941, Artwin in 1967, before his mother's death, by suicide .

Concentration Camp (KZ) Buchenwald

While the couple had lived in rather modest circumstances before Karl Otto Koch was appointed camp commandant, from 1937 they led a luxurious life in the Villa Buchenwald in the SS leaders' quarters of the concentration camp. This was mainly possible through extensive embezzlement of cash and valuables that were stolen from camp inmates (“state property”) and their exploitation as slave labor . The marriage was outwardly harmonious, but confidants described the relationship as chilly and functional. She is said to have been loving towards her children, but at times also disinterested. The children often spent time in the care of a stepsister of Karl Otto Koch. Ilse Koch was mostly unpopular with the guards and SS officers, especially their wives, who also lived in Buchenwald. So she boasted about her new wealth and played her position as the wife of the dreaded camp commandant with power. One reason for her bad reputation may also have been that she had various sexual affairs, including with Hermann Florstedt and Waldemar Hoven , who were married themselves and had children. In this context, it was also described on various occasions that Ilse Koch often dressed provocatively and flirted with it.

Because of this provocative appearance and as one of the few women in the camp complex, Ilse Koch was very well known among the concentration camp prisoners and also feared as sadistic . The extent to which the latter can be traced back to everyday experiences of the prisoners or rather arose from rumors for which Ilse Koch could have presented a suitable projection surface and personification of a sexually connoted sadism became a much-discussed question in the review of her Buchenwald time before and after the end of the war. Reports of Ilse Koch's cruelty towards prisoners earned her the name "Witch of Buchenwald". She is said to have kept inmates like pets. It can be proven that various prisoners were forced to work in the household of the Villa Buchenwald because Ilse Koch refused the work of a housewife. She is said to have beaten prisoners with a riding crop inside the prison camp while on horseback. Witnesses such as the camp inmate and later author Eugen Kogon testified at the Dachau court hearing that they themselves had never seen Ilse Koch enter the prison area, which was shielded by a barbed wire fence. However, outside of the barbed wire, too, she would often have had the opportunity to humiliate prisoners who were forced to do gardening and servant duties. What is certain is that, unlike other SS wives, she often attended punishments as a spectator, which is why she undoubtedly knew about the atrocities committed there and "her attitude towards the human misery in the camp was [at best] cold indifference".

Many inmates testified that they had been sentenced at every opportunity. If an inmate did not greet her, she was reported by her and had to expect severe punishment. On the other hand, she had inmates punished if they considered her to be indecent, often alleging that she had deliberately provoked this with her clothing. It is unclear whether these regular reports and requests for punishment were actually made by Ilse Koch or to what extent. Punishments could take place in Buchenwald for many, mostly trivial and arbitrary reasons; their frequent presence at punishments could have led the prisoners to assume that they had commissioned them. Although she was called "Kommandeuse" by both the guards and the inmates, she had no official influence on the management or organization of the camp. Only occasional paperwork by Ilse Koch in the administrative area of ​​the concentration camp was verifiable. The informal influence could hardly be reconstructed, especially since the statements made by both the SS perpetrators and the prisoners were highly contradictory. The term “Kommandeuse” seems to have been used in an ironic way by many SS officers and the guards.

A later widespread suspicion, especially in media reports, that Ilse Koch had made objects such as cleaning cloths, book covers, cases and lampshades from tattooed pieces of skin of camp inmates, could not be proven beyond doubt in court. Corresponding pieces were found in the camp and also in the Kochs villa when the camp was liberated, but at the time neither of them had lived there for over a year.

First arrest and SS trial

In August 1943, first Karl Otto Koch and a little later Ilse were arrested for corruption and triple murder . The investigations and ultimately the indictment were largely due to Konrad Morgen , who was able to convince Heinrich Himmler to take action against Koch, although Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and also Oswald Pohl had patronized him for a long time and let him go, the latter mainly because he was with Koch had been showered with expensive gifts. At the time when Ilse Koch was still living in Buchenwald, Morgen had ordered a surprise house search. In particular, the search was on for book covers or lampshades made of human skin. Despite another close examination by the Gestapo , no trace of tanned human skin was found anywhere in the house. The lampshades in the house were made of ordinary parchment paper. Only the Kochs' bank books were found. Tomorrow she was arrested for complicity, stolen goods and the risk of blackout . She spent 16 months in custody in the Weimar police prison. Although the SS made every effort to convict Ilse Koch in the subsequent process - Himmler had informed the court that he expected Koch to be in prison for at least six years - she had to be acquitted for lack of evidence. Her husband and other SS functionaries in the camp were convicted of receiving stolen goods, degrading military strength and murder and executed.

Ilse Koch spent the last months before the end of the war in Ludwigsburg , where parts of her family lived. Because of a lifestyle marked by sexual excesses and excessive alcoholism, a housekeeper and relatives tried to withdraw custody of the children from her, but this did not happen during the chaos of war until her arrest by allies allowed this to happen anyway.

Captured by the US Army and charged with war crimes

Ilse Koch in front of the military tribunal in Dachau (July 1947)

In June 1945, Ilse Koch was arrested in Ludwigsburg by the US Army as a suspected war criminal . During the trial in the summer of 1947, Koch untruthfully denied that he was in any way involved in or was aware of the abuse and murder of camp inmates, and also denied that many inmates were known to have died from starvation or weakness. The court considered that their knowledge of and at least indirect involvement in the exploitation and murder of the inmates was proven. In August 1947, she, the only female defendant in the Buchenwald trial , was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity . Koch was at an advanced stage of pregnancy at the time , which is said to have saved her from the death penalty of 22 of her 30 co-defendants . Her son Uwe, who was conceived while in custody, was born in October 1947. Koch successfully passed audit model: In June 1948, the sentence was the proposal of the Audit Tribunal of General Lucius D. Clay , military governor of the American zone of occupation , reduced to four years. The decisive factor was that only acts committed against Allied prisoners should have been the subject of the proceedings. In the USA, after the reduction of the sentence became known, there were major protests in the media, which led to the establishment of the Senate's own investigative commission in Washington . Clay justified himself with the findings of the revision, according to which the evidence against Koch was flawed, based mainly on hearsay and did not withstand an objective review. At the end of December 1948, however, the Senate Commission found the revision judgment to be unjustified and requested that Koch be brought before a German court.

Re-indictment, conviction, prison sentence and suicide

As early as October 1948, the American occupation authorities commissioned the Bavarian state government to initiate new criminal proceedings against Koch for crimes committed against German citizens. Immediately after her release from the war prison in Landsberg in October 1949. Koch was in custody taken. At the end of 1949, charges were again brought before the Augsburg Regional Court , including murder. On January 15, 1951, Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment for incitement to murder , attempted murder and incitement to grievous bodily harm . This made her the only woman who was sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with Nazi crimes in Germany (compared to 165 men). She hanged herself on September 2, 1967 in her cell in the Bavarian women's prison in Aichach , where she had been incarcerated since 1949.

literature

Movies

  • Ken Kipperman: Shadow of Silence. (Documentary, USA 2005)
  • Ilse Koch - The Witch of Buchenwald. (TV series History of Central Germany , MDR 2012)

Artistic processing

Web links

Commons : Ilse Koch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The death of Ilse Koch. In: Die Zeit vom 8 September 1967, accessed on 22 August 2014.
  2. ↑ Arthur Lee Smith: The "Witch of Buchenwald" - The case of Ilse Koch. Böhlau Verlag , Cologne 1983, p. 36 ff.
  3. ↑ Ibid., P. 28.
  4. ↑ Ibid., Pp. 58/59.
  5. ↑ Edb., Pp. 53/54.
  6. ↑ Ibid., P. 60.
  7. ↑ Ibid., P. 51 ff.
  8. ↑ "Is it true that the SS had lampshades made from human skin in the Buchenwald concentration camp?" Harry Stein, curator. Website of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, accessed on April 12, 2015.
  9. ↑ a b c d e Ilse Koch: Lady with a lampshade. In: Der Spiegel , February 16, 1950, accessed on August 22, 2014.
  10. ↑ Ilse Koch in: Munzinger people
  11. ↑ Alexandra Przyrembel: The spell of an image - Ilse Koch, the 'Kommandeuse von Buchenwald' , in: Insa Eschebach / Sigrid Jacobeit / Silke Wenk (eds.): Memory and gender. International studies on the reception history of National Socialism and its crimes , Frankfurt a. M. 2002, p. 255.
  12. ^ Andreas Eichmüller: No general amnesty: The prosecution of Nazi crimes in the early Federal Republic. Oldenbourg, Munich 2012, p. 238.
  13. ^ Andreas Eichmüller: The prosecution of Nazi crimes by West German judicial authorities since 1945. A balance sheet. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 56 (2008), p. 624 ff. ( PDF )
  14. ↑ Story: Appropriately great. In: Der Spiegel , March 13, 1995, accessed on August 22, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Cook, Ilse
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Margarete Ilse Köhler (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Karl Otto Koch
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH 2nd September 1967
Place of death Aichach women's prison