Ilse Koch - proves that women are just as sadistic as men.

15th January 1951

Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life imprisonment in a court in West Germany. Ilse Koch was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” for her extraordinary sadism.

Born in Dresden, Germany, Ilse, a librarian, married SS. Col. Karl Koch in 1936. 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 Buchenwald concentration camp, 4.5 miles northwest of Weimar; the Buchenwald concentration camp held a total of 20,000 slave laborers during the war.

Ilse, a large woman with red hair, was given free rein in the camp, whipping prisoners with her riding crop as she rode by on her horse, forcing prisoners to have sex with her, and, most horrifying, 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 tattooing on them were to report to the dispensary…

After the prisoners had been examined, the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department, where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further.”

Karl Koch was arrested, ironically enough, by his SS superiors for “having gone too far.” It seems he had a penchant for stealing even the belongings of wealthy, well-placed Germans.

He was tried and hanged in 1944. Ilse Koch was tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, but the American military governor of the occupied zone subsequently reduced her sentence to four years. His reason, “lack of evidence,” caused a Senate investigation back home.

She was released but arrested again, tried by a West German court, and sentenced to life. She committed suicide in 1967 by hanging herself with a bedsheet.

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JB comments:

I remember reading about lampshades and so forth made from human skin when I was a kid - reading all about the Jews treatment at the hands of the Nazi's in various concentration camps, and one wonders, who actually did the work - who skinned and treated and manufactured these lamps, gloves and so forth as she may have been the instigator, but someone actually did the work. How, in all honestly, can someone live with themselves after such a thing ?

It astounds how basic and how cruel mankind can be to others and how appallingly sadistic and torturous men- AND WOMEN - can be, and when women complain that men abuse, just remember that AS MANY WOMEN ABUSE MEN than men abuse women, it is just more emotional, sexual ( withholding sex as punishment ) as well as physical, yet men are ashamed to talk about it and it goes unreported.

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