'No woman in the usual sense': Ilse Koch, the 'Bitch of Buchenwald', was a Holocaust war criminal – but was she also an easy target?
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Tuesday, September 5, 2023
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In her indictment, the prosecutor described Ilse Koch as “a sexy-looking depraved woman who beat prisoners, reported them for beatings, and trafficked human skin”.
Key Points:
- In her indictment, the prosecutor described Ilse Koch as “a sexy-looking depraved woman who beat prisoners, reported them for beatings, and trafficked human skin”.
- Ilse’s husband, Karl Koch, had been commandant of Buchenwald, one of the first and largest concentration camps within Germany’s 1937 borders, from August 1937 to October 1941.
- He would then briefly serve as a commander of Majdanek, another notorious concentration camp.
- Read more:
It's not just about the rise in anti-Semitism: why we need real stories for better Holocaust education in Australia
Joined the Nazi party ‘early’
- She joined the Nazi party earlier than most of her peers, in 1932.
- At the time, the Nazi party appealed to young people because fascism seemed a viable solution to the deep economic recession that had followed the first world war, and had impoverished many German families.
- Koch lived with her family in a three-story villa on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
- The executions of Buchenwald prisoners, writes Jardim, occurred in multiple forms: “shooting, hanging, gassing, corporal punishment, experiments withholding food and [the] refusal of medical care”.
Tried for awareness and participation
- The officers who made up the military courts at Dachau were, writes Jardim, “honest and competent men”, but they were not lawyers or professional jurists.
- Dressed up and with her head held high, Margarete Ilse Koch entered the courtroom.
- She was the only woman among 31 indicted for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Buchenwald.
- And she was tried for her alleged awareness of the camp’s nature, and her voluntary and active participation in its enforcement.
‘A creature from some other tortured world’
- Ironically, the executions of 50,000 people at Buchenwald were “not wrongful according to the National Socialist system”.
- They became centres where food and other valuable items could find their way onto the black market.
- In the 1947 trials, American prosecutor Denson described Koch as “no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world”, making her a powerful symbolic representation of Nazi crimes.
- The court concluded that there was no overwhelming or substantial evidence against Koch and commuted her sentence to four years imprisonment.
‘Diabolical’
- Mounting criticisms of the court’s finding of clemency erupted into public protests.
- However, in the same year as her release, she was charged again – this time by the Western German authorities.
- While Jardim cites original data from the trial, there is still some confusion about the exact numbers attached to Koch’s charges.
Women and war crimes
- Studies on Ilse Koch have possibly been more common than those on other women war criminals, because the media sensationalised her story.
- Ilse Koch on Trial reminds us that women, too, are capable of committing war crimes.
- While it’s normalised that men can kill, especially in war, women are still stereotyped as peaceful and nurturing – which is reflected in the gendered reactions to women war criminals.
- While no one denies Ilse Koch was guilty of terrible crimes, the most sensational atrocities attributed to her remain unproven.