November 19, 2019 ▸ History, People, War & Conflict

Episode 430: Ilse Koch: The Bitch of Buchenwald

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On this episode of the world Famous Sofa King Podcast, we travel back to World War Two and tell the tale of Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald. Everyone knows the names like Dr. Mengele and tales of SS Officers who tortured and murdered the Jews in concentration camps. But this obscure, and truly evil woman, largely escapes the lens of history.

Born in Dresden, Germany, Ilse lived in the poverty that faced all of Germany in the aftermath of World War One. This very poverty was what led Hitler to power, by exploiting the desire for Germany to be great again. And Ilse Koch was exactly the type of person Hitler was aiming at. She joined the Nazi Party very early on, and by the time Hitler came to power, she and her husband Karl Koch were rewarded with promotions. Karl became the warden of a prison, and he was so sadistic that the Nazis decided to put him in charge of the construction and daily operation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp during the holocaust.

Unlike a lot of German women during the Reich, Ilse was not content to simply sit at home and be a house frau. Instead, she took a job at her husband’s first prison to prepare herself for life in Buchenwald, and once there, she really went off the rails. For one thing, she took money from the Jews as they got off the trains and used it—a lot of it—to build a mansion and massive structure in which she could horseback ride on the premises. She was known to ride around the camp and whip prisoners with her riding crop for a laugh. Oh, and she was also know to do it in skimpy clothes, so if any of the men stared at her, she could have them shot. This behavior went as far as her having servants come to her mansion while she was in a nightie and then killing off any man that looked at her, or lining Jews up in the nude and having any killed who got an erection.

But she was just getting started. Apparently, she liked tattoos. She liked them a lot. In fact, she would collect them. From dead Jews. And make lamps for the house and a favorite purse out of them. In fact, she figured out an evil scheme in which the doctors of Buchenwald would conduct experiments to see if people with tattoos were more likely to be criminal and have different physiology. The only way to know was to kill and dissect them. Then, she would have other prisoners skin and tan the dead Jews, so she could have her keepsakes.

The things that she and her husband did in the camp were so awful that even the Nazi party said enough. They had both of them arrested and tried. What were the results of the trial? Why did Karl get a much more harsh punishment than Ilse? What did the US and the new West German government do to punish her for war crimes? What happened to all the skin she had gathered? Did she really have shrunken Jew heads in a glass case? How did she finally die? Listen, laugh, learn.

Visit our Sources:

https://biographics.org/ilse-koch-biography-the-nazi-bitch-of-buchenwald/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Koch

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/06/26/ilse-koch/

https://allthatsinteresting.com/ilse-koch

http://www.auschwitz.dk/Women/Koch.htm

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-witch-of-buchenwald-is-sentenced-to-prison

https://www.ranker.com/list/ilse-koch-concentration-camp-guard/laura-allan

http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d//projects/naziwomen/ilse.htm

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ilse-koch

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ilse-Koch