Ilse Koch (née Köhler; 22 September 1906 – 1 September 1967) was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald (from 1937 to 1941) and Majdanek (from 1941 to 1943). She was one of the first prominent Nazis to be tried by the US military.
After the trial was remitted under worldwide media attention, survivor accounts of her actions resulted in other authors describing her abuse of prisoners as sadistic, and the image of her as "the concentration camp murderess" was current in post-war German society. She was accused of taking souvenirs from the skin of murdered inmates with distinctive tattoos. She was known as "The Witch of Buchenwald" ("Die Hexe von Buchenwald") by the inmates because of her alleged cruelty and lasciviousness toward prisoners. She is also called in English "The Beast of Buchenwald", "The Bitch of Buchenwald", "Queen of Buchenwald", "Red Witch of Buchenwald", and the "Butcher Widow".
Read more about Ilse Koch: Early Life, War Crimes, Imprisonment and Death, In Popular Culture
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“He builds a big town with his mouth, but not even a fly’s nest with his hands.”
—Estonian. Trans. by Ilse Lehiste (1993)