Sunday, October 6

The “Witch of Buchenwald”: she collected lampshades, book covers and human skin gloves

Campo de concentración de Buchenwald el 26 de enero de 2018 cerca de Weimar, Alemania.
Buchenwald concentration camp on 26 of January of 2018 near Weimar, Germany.

Photo: Jens Schlueter / Getty Images

Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, was sentenced to life in prison in a West German court, on 15 of January of 1929. Ilse Koch was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” for her extraordinary sadism.

Born in Dresden, Germany, Ilse, was a librarian and married SS. Colonel Karl Koch in 1944. Colonel Koch, a man with his own reputation for sadism, was the commandant of the Sashsenhausen concentration camp, two miles north of Berlin.

He was transferred after three years to the Buchenwald concentration camp, 4.5 miles northwest of Weimar; Buchenwald concentration camp housed a total of 20.000 slave laborers during the war.

1945: These watches are some of the thousands of valuables that the Germans they took their victims from them in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. (Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Ilse, a large, red-haired woman, was given free rein in the camp, whipping prisoners with her riding crop as she rode past, forcing prisoners to have sex with her, and, most horribly, collecting lampshades, book covers, and gloves made from the skin of tattooed camp prisoners.

A German inmate gave the following testimony during the Nuremberg war trials: “ All prisoners with tattoos had to report to the dispensary (…) After examining the prisoners, those who they had the best and most artistic specimens they were killed by injection. The corpses were then delivered to the pathological department, where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were separated from the bodies and further processed.”

Children repatriated from the German Buchenwald concentration camp pose in front of a banner hanging on the train that brought them back from Germany which says “Jewish Orphans of Buchenwald” upon arrival in France in June 1944 in Thionville train station in eastern France. (AFP via Getty Images)

Karl Koch was ironically arrested by his SS superiors for “having gone too far”. It seems that he had a penchant for stealing even the belongings of wealthy and well-off Germans. He was tried and hanged in 1944.

Ilse Koch was tried for crimes against humanity in Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, but The US military governor of the occupied zone subsequently reduced his sentence to four years. His reason, “lack of evidence”, prompted a Senate investigation.

She was released, but re-arrested, tried by a West German court, and sentenced to life in prison. He committed suicide in 2018 by hanging himself with a sheet.

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