At the age of 26, she joined the NSDAP. In the party she met her future husband, Karl Koch, with whom she was matched by Heinrich Himmler himself. They married in 1936, and Karl Koch became commandant of a concentration camp. The camp was surrounded by a beech forest, so the new administrator suggested to Himmler that the camp be named Buchenwald (Beech Forest).
Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Koch took up residence in a specially built villa next to the camp. In such a setting, Ilse Koch gave birth to her first child. After that, she began to take a greater interest in the affairs of the camp. Wives of other SS men recalled that she enjoyed watching prisoners standing naked at punishment roll calls, which could last for hours. After the war, witnesses testified that she ordered roll call for tattooed prisoners. She ordered them to strip from the waist up. She looked closely at the tattoos, and those with the more interesting drawings were later killed on her orders.
Also at her urging, prisoners were beaten and tormented longer and harder than usual. Her persuasions were also to be succumbed to by her husband, whom she asked, for example, to throw prisoners off the cliff of the camp quarry. She also liked to walk around with her breasts bare, and if any prisoner looked at her, he was punished with a flogging at the best of times.
She liked to ride horses, and to satisfy this need, the commandant ordered that an indoor riding arena be built for her, in the middle of which mirrors were constructed so that Ilse could view herself in them. During this construction, 30 prisoners died of exhaustion. Horseback rides through the countryside were also not uncommon, and more than once she trampled prisoners during them. She was fond of animals, so she had a zoo built just outside the camp. It included bears, wolves and even monkeys.
Ilse and Karl Koch’s marriage was not a happy one – in the camp, the commandant’s wife got into numerous romances. In addition, Ilse Koch reported to the police that her husband was conducting illegal business, although at the same time she wrote to her husband’s immediate superior with assurances of his innocence. Karl Koch was transferred and became commandant of Majdanek, a death camp in eastern Poland, while Ilse Koch remained in Buchenwald. Eventually, both were put on trial for corruption, embezzlement and fraud. He was sentenced to death, while Ilse Koch was acquitted by the court. After the trial, Ilse went to live near Stuttgart in the spring of 1945.
Meanwhile, the Americans liberated the camp in April. The first testimonies of survivors caused a search to be launched for Ilse, and she was soon arrested.
She was imprisoned in Dachau, a temporary prison, where she awaited trial. In the meantime, she became pregnant, but refused to reveal who the child’s father was. Probably through her pregnancy, Ilse Koch wanted to avoid punishment in court.
The trial received a lot of media exposure. Ilse Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment on Aug. 14, 1947. The Cold War and the warming of relations between the US and West Germany led to a revision of the sentence, which was widely criticized. In 1948, she again faced trial, this time in Germany, which also sentenced Koch to life imprisonment.
In 1967, she committed suicide in prison.
