Koch, Ilsa

▪ German war criminal

byname  Witch of Buchenwald  German  Hexe von Buchenwald 

born 1906?, Dresden, Germany

died September 1/2, 1967, Aichach, West Germany

      German wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp (1939–42), notorious for her perversion and cruelty.

      A sometime librarian, in 1936 Ilsa married SS Colonel 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. While in prison she gave birth to a child, who was fathered by a prison guard. In a subsequent trial (1949) before a West German court, she was sentenced anew to life imprisonment. In 1967 she hanged herself with bedsheets tied to her prison bars.

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