Ilse Koch was a German Nazi war criminal notorious for extreme cruelty toward prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where her husband Karl-Otto Koch was commandant.

Who Ilse Koch Was

  • Ilse Koch (born Margarete Ilse Köhler, 1906–1967) was the wife of SS officer Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of Buchenwald and later Majdanek.
  • She became infamous under nicknames like the “Witch of Buchenwald” and “Kommandeuse of Buchenwald” because of her sadistic behavior toward inmates.

What She Did in the Camps

  • As an unofficial overseer at Buchenwald, she routinely beat prisoners, often using a riding crop or whip, and was known to have prisoners forced into exhausting exercises purely for her amusement.
  • Witnesses testified that she rode on horseback through the camp; prisoners who merely glanced at her could be punished with brutal lashings ordered or encouraged by her.

Atrocities She Was Accused Of

  • Survivors and postwar accounts accused her of selecting prisoners with distinctive tattoos to be killed so their skin could be turned into items like lampshades, book covers, and gloves.
  • These “human-skin” allegations became central to her public image, though some specific claims were never fully proven in court even as they remained part of survivor testimony and popular memory.

Trials, Conviction, and Sentence

  • After World War II, she was arrested by Allied authorities and tried in a U.S. military court at Dachau in 1947 for war crimes linked to abuses at Buchenwald.
  • Her initial life sentence was controversially reduced to four years, provoking public outrage; West German authorities then retried her, focusing on incitement to murder and grievous bodily harm.
  • In 1951 she was convicted on multiple counts of incitement to murder and serious assault, receiving a life sentence and permanent loss of civil rights.

Death and Legacy

  • Koch remained imprisoned in Bavaria and died by suicide in Aichach prison in 1967.
  • Her name became a symbol of Nazi-era sadism and of the role some women played in perpetrating concentration camp atrocities, and she is still discussed in historical works and online forums as one of the most infamous female perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.