Random Female Concentration Camp Guard So Depraved Even The Nazis Arrested Her (12 items)

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  (#3) She Loved Taunting Prisoners Who Were About To Be Tortured Or Killed

  Above all else, Ilse Koch enjoyed seeing the prisoners suffer, both physically and emotionally. She would ride through the camp, taunting prisoners, and when one would dare to look up, she would brutally whip them with her riding crop. She would laugh at those who were being sent to gas chambers and her house was visible to the entire camp, as if always ominously looking down at them.

  When she was selecting prisoners to be taken away to have tattoos removed, she would take her time in the selection, drawing out the prisoners' terror. Perhaps most distressingly of all, Ilse took her most sadistic pleasure in knowing children were dying.

  Surviving prisoners later recalled that she had always seemed the most excited when children were about to be sent to the gas chambers. 
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  (#11) She Was Tried For War Crimes

  When the war concluded, the allies arrested Ilse. She was tried in 1947 for war crimes. This time a huge number of people came forward to the American Military court at Dachau. They testified to the tattoo collecting, the organ harvesting, the whippings, and even the orgies. This was enough for her to be found guilty at her first trial and sentenced to life in prison. Ilse had one last trick up her sleeve, though. She told the court she was expecting a child. 

  This came as a bit of a shock, not only because Ilse was 41 years old, but because she had been held in isolated confinement for much of the time. No one is entirely certain who the father was. It could have been her doctor friend, an American guard, or a fellow prisoner. Even so, it was not enough to sway the decision of the court, and she had her child while in prison.

   Her sentence was later reduced until she was put through a second trial where more testimony and physical evidence was presented. Thus solidifying her lifetime imprisonment. 
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  (#9) Even The Nazis Arrested Ilse And Her Husband

  Given what horrible people the Nazis were, it would make sense that anyone arrested for abuse of power by Nazis had to have been really horrendous people. In 1941, Ilse and Karl-Otto were investigated for cruelty and black market activities, including fraudulent use of money. Seeing as the Koch's had been doing both of those things, they were arrested in 1943 for embezzlement as well as cruelty. Dr. Hoven, Ilse's lover and assistant in collecting tattooed skin, was also arrested for mistreatment and murder.

  During the trial, Karl-Otto was found guilty of skimming money, as well as murder, and was sentenced to death. He was eventually executed. 
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  (#12) She Killed Herself, Possibly Haunted By Her Victims

  Ilse Koch's ending feels oddly fitting. At her second trial in 1950, she fainted often, and seemed agitated. Once in jail, she was visited by her son, who said she was often distressed. She appealed several times to get out of prison, but her pleas fell on justly deaf ears. She said that the prisoners she had once kept and tortured would come to her in her cell and beat and abuse her at night. These delusions grew stronger and one night Ilse Koch could take it no longer.

  She was found in 1967, at the age of 60, hung with her own bed sheets. Her death was ruled a suicide and she was buried in an unmarked, unattended grave at the prison cemetery. To this day, we do not know where she is buried, but can take heart that she is dead and gone, never to harm another person again.
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  (#4) She Made Household Items From Human Skin

  Ilse Koch is perhaps best known for her love of human skin and the horrifying arts and crafts projects she used it for. She had a hobby of collecting not only skin, but also things made from skin. After prisoners with tattoos - or any that she just didn't like that day - were killed, the SS guards would tan their skin and then store it. They would later turn it over to Ilse who supposedly used it to make book covers, gloves, and lampshades for herself and the other officers.

  She even took to making shrunken heads and skulls for display in her house. In her entire personal collection of ornamental human skin items, Ilsa had one item she was supposedly most proud of: a lady's handbag made. Ilse would happily carry the bag for officers and prisoners to see. Some accounts say it was made from tattooed skin.

  While many of these items have been noted by others, none of the skin lamps were ever recovered.
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  (#5) She Forced Prisoners To Do Harmful And Sexual Things To Each Other

  Whenever the fancy took her, Ilse enjoyed making the prisoners hurt one another. If she could not find a tattoo she particularly liked, she would sometimes make one of the prisoners tattoo another in a manner that pleased her. The tattooed prisoner would then be killed for their newly-inked skin.

  However, one of her other interests involved sexually taunting and torturing the inmates. She would go out of her way to wear very short skirts, very tight sweaters, and would behave sexually openly around starved and tortured male prisoners. She'd watch as they performed exhausting activities, or flaunt and prance around like a movie star.

   She would even, for her own amusement, force them to perform sexual acts on each other. This is one of the reasons the inmates began calling her the Witch (sometimes Bitch) of Buchenwald.

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