KOCH, ILSA

born 1906?, Dresden, Ger. died Sept. 1/2, 1967, Aichach, W.Ger. byname Witch Of Buchenwald, German Hexe Von Buchenwald German wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp (193942), notorious for her perversion and cruelty, who collected lampshades, gloves, and book covers made from the tattooed human skin of dead inmates. A sometime librarian, she married in 1936 SS Col. Karl Koch, then commander of the Sachsenhausen camp. In 1939 he was transferred to Buchenwald, where she acquired the reputation of a sadist and nymphomaniac, beating prisoners with her riding crop and requiring them to participate in degenerate orgies. Her husband was relieved of command in 1942, and in 1945 he was convicted of corruption and graft and executed by the SS. In 1947 an Allied military tribunal tried and sentenced Ilsa Koch to hard labour for life, later commuted to four years' imprisonment on the grounds of insufficient evidence. (In prison, in 1947, she had a child, fathered by a prison guard.) In a subsequent trial (1949) before a West German court, she was sentenced anew to life imprisonment. In 1967, one night, she hanged herself with bedsheets tied to her prison bars.