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Ilse Koch

‘The Witch of Buchenwald’, ‘Frau Lampshade’.

Wife of Concentration Camp Commandant, Chief Female Warden

Born 1906, Committed suicide in prison at the age of 61

The wife of Karl-Otto Koch, Commandant of the Nazi concentration camps Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Majdanek, took full advantage of her spouse’s station to dole out her own particular brand of sadism as a warden.

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According to the camp inmates, Frau Koch would beat people she saw with a whip and sic a sheepdog on them as she strolled through the camp. She was accused of ordering the killing of prisoners with distinctive tattoos so that she could make lampshades, gloves, and book bindings from pieces of their skin.

In 1941, Ilse Koch became the senior warden among the female guards.

In 1943, the Kochs were arrested by the SS. Two years later, her husband was sentenced to death for the murder of his personal physician and executed in Munich.

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