This woman is considered one of the most cruel criminals of the Nazi era. Journalists covering the post-war trials of war criminals nicknamed her "Buchenwald's Bitch" and "Frau Abazhur". However, not all so simple.
Ilsa Köhler, a resident of Dresden, was eight years old when the First World War began. She was born in 1906 into an ordinary family, which lived in constrained life circumstances. These hardships brought up in the girl the understanding that life is a difficult thing. Ilsa's parents could not give a secure future, and all her life she had to rely only on herself.
In the surviving youthful photographs, Ilsa looks far from beautiful, but she had a high opinion of herself. To break out of the work environment, Ilsa entered the school of accountants at the age of fifteen, and then got a job as a clerk in the accounting department.
The time was hard, hungry and sad. It is not surprising that the emerging new party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, immediately liked Ilse. But ten years passed before Ilsa joined the ranks of the NSDAP.
It was 1932. A year later, her idol Hitler came to power, and a new life began. Ilse was already 26 years old. Party membership gave her the hope of finally entering into a decent marriage. Party comrades introduced her to the divorced loser Karl Otto Koch. Karl also came from the bottom of society, in the past he was a thief and a swindler, at one time he was used as an informer in the police, but thanks to the party he rose and began to climb the career ladder.
Ilsa liked Karl, Karl liked her, and in 1936 they got married. An ordinary life began, except that it took place against the backdrop of special German realities. Compatriots began to plant and even exterminate. Ilsa shared the party line in everything. And when Karl was appointed commandant of the German concentration camp Buchenwald, which was initially designed for disloyal Germans and Jews, she followed her husband.
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Life with Karl, however, did not work out. The "promising" party member actually turned out to be not only a sadist, but also a homosexual. The special inclinations of her husband, it seemed, should have annoyed Elsa, but she simply did not pay attention to it, and everyone lived the way he liked: Karl raped male prisoners, and she discovered in herself an amazing desire for power.
The prisoners feared Frau Ilsa, the Commandant, much more than the Commandant. She was an inventive woman. For the prisoners, Ilsa came up with a variety of difficulties: she could force them to scrub the camp yard with toothbrushes, she could personally whip with a whip, without which she would not go to the camp parade ground, she could order a young and handsome prisoner to be brought in for sexual entertainment. She liked to humiliate, she liked being afraid, she liked to instill a feeling of horror and attraction at the same time.
Survivors in Buchenwald told with a shudder that their witch got herself a white horse, on which she rode around the camp grounds and with a whip corrected the behavior of the unfortunate. Often she did not appear on horseback, but on foot and with a huge shepherd dog, which, with a sweet smile, she let go to tear the bodies of prisoners not only to injury, but also to complete death.
The prisoners did not evoke any pity from Mrs. Koch. For any violation that she considered significant, they were simply sent to die. Not without reason was it written on the Buchenwald gate: "To each his own." The prisoners received theirs, and Ilsa took hers. It was here, in Buchenwald, that she began several romances with the SS. Karl's husband also got his own.
Since 1938, when the planned liquidation of Jews began and they began to arrive and arrive at the camp, Karl began to extort money from the Jews. And, obviously, he succeeded in this business so much that the rumor about his enrichment in 1942 reached the Fuehrer's headquarters. Everything might have worked out if Karl had not ordered the murder of the doctor and the camp orderly, who knew Koch's terrible secret that he was a homosexual and a carrier of venereal diseases.
The investigation of the case was entrusted to the SS officer Georg Konrad Morgen. In 1943, Commandant Koch was arrested and ended up in prison. Mrs. Koch was also arrested. But if Karl was found guilty of both murders and conspiracy with a Jewish enemy, which instantly made him an enemy of the Reich, then Ilsa was released for lack of evidence. And she lived quietly at large until June 1945, when the Americans arrested her. Karl was less fortunate - a month before the fall of Berlin, he was shot in Munich.
Ilsa Koch was tried three times for the same crime. A crime that they could not prove, but for which she was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.
The peculiarities of Mrs. Koch's behavior in Buchenwald, against the background of the numerous crimes that swept the whole of Germany during the times of fascism, did not seem particularly grave: she humiliated the dignity of prisoners, forced them to work excessively, beat or ordered to beat them, sent to death, provoked sexual behavior. These were petty crimes.
After what was revealed at the Nuremberg trials, even the dogging and rape of men by a woman did not seem to be anything particularly serious. In any case, these tricks of Mrs. Koch did not pull on the death penalty.
However, there was a special point in which she was accused - stripping the skin of prisoners from the bodies and making souvenirs from it, including lampshades for lamps. Having got acquainted with these "works of art", journalists immediately called Ilsa "Frau Abazhur".
However, although witnesses willingly talked about leather and lampshades, there was no evidence. As there were none in that memorable 1943, when Morgen spent a whole month in Buchenwald, looking for damned lampshades. He, too, ten witnesses persistently insisted that they saw with their own eyes how the commandant forced the prisoners to strip naked and carefully examined the skin. If I saw tattoos, I immediately paid attention to them. And she poked the prisoner with a stack - they say, use this.
Others, it seems, even witnessed how the mistress personally ripped off the skin with the favorite brand from a living person. And she did it in the hospital with the help of the local doctor. And then they made lampshades from this leather. Three pieces, witnesses said, were seen in her house.
Morgen investigated the rumors. However, the lampshades made of human flesh turned out to be goatskin lampshades, and the issue of tattoos in the camp was dealt with by Dr. Kremer, the same one who was killed on the orders of Karl Koch.
The scientific work that Kremer carried out was associated with a combination of a criminal background and tattoos on the body. Obviously, the doctor added illustrative material to the research. True, here the witnesses swore that he did it only after death, that is, he ripped off the skin from the corpses. In 1943, Morgen left this accusation as hopeless.
In 1947, when the first post-war trial of Ilsa took place, Morgen acted as her protector. He knew what they would immediately accuse her of. And thanks to his efforts, this accusation was dismissed. Although the American judges tried very hard to convince Morgen to admit that there was evidence. But Morgen insisted that it was not. And leather souvenirs were made in Buchenwald not in a camp, but at a local factory, and not from human skin, but from goat, like those lampshades. The only trouble is that the factory was bombed even then. And there was no evidence.
As a result, Mrs. Koch was imprisoned for only a few years. This court decision caused a storm of rage, after which her case was transferred to a German court. There, she was sentenced to full life imprisonment, regardless of the lack of evidence.
In prison, Ilse managed to get pregnant and give birth to a son. A year later, the boy was taken away, and only at the age of 19 did he find out who his real mother was. The young man began to visit Ilsa. The last time he saw his mother was shortly before her birthday in 1967. But Ilsa did not live to see her birthday - she hanged herself. She was supposed to be 61 years old. After her death, the son disappeared, and no one else saw him.
Nikolay Kotomkin