Ilse Koch Biography

Ilse Koch was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, the chief of the Nazi concentration camps in Buchenwald and Majdanek. She was one of the first well-known Nazis tried by the U.S. military. The trial was majorly broadcast. While her husband was notorious for his materialist greed, his wife was famous for her inhuman cruelty towards the Jewish. The survivors of nazi camps confirmed her to be a sadisctic woman, “the concentration camp murderess”. She and her husband lived in a luxurious house within the grounds of the Buchenwald camp. Karl-Otto Koch had created a special horseback arena for his wife’s entertainment and she used to ride through the camp and whip any prisoner that came in her way. Ilse Koch was also a nymphomaniac and the couple held orgies for the political soldiers of the Nazi party. She was fond of torturing the prisoners by making them do excruciatingly strenuous tasks. A witness at The Nuremberg Trials confirmed that she used to collect lampshades, book covers and gloves made from the tattooed skins of the dead inmates. The prisoners used to call her ‘Die Hexe von Buchenwald’ (‘The Witch of Buchenwald’) because of her brutality and libidinousness towards prisoners. Her other names include The Beast of Buchenwald", "Queen of Buchenwald", "Red Witch of Buchenwald", "Butcher Widow" , and "The Bitch of Buchenwald".