Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947, but a year later American occupational authorities suddenly commuted her sentence to four years’ imprisonment, to the shock of the public worldwide. Having served a year, she had three years remaining on her sentence when public pressure resulted in her being tried again by West German authorities, who then sentenced her to life. Today, Ilse Koch has a legion of defenders—not all of whom are neo-Nazis or Holocaust deniers. Yes, you guessed it—some are feminists who portray Ilse as a victim of male inmates, who slandered Ilse Koch for her “trangression of gender stereotypes.”218

  I’m not joking!

  Background

  Ilse Koch was born Ilse Kohler Schnitzel, September 22, 1906, in Dresden. After graduating high school, she was employed in a bookstore and later worked as a secretary. She joined the Nazi Party relatively early—in May 1932. This placed her in a doubly exclusive category—joining before the seizure of power by Hitler in January 1933 and being one of a small minority of females who were members of the party. Only 7.8 percent of the Nazi Party at that time consisted of females.219 The Nazis did not anticipate any role for women in the Third Reich other than that of wife and mother of Aryan soldiers. Women in the German workplace outside of traditional female jobs like schoolteacher, nurse, shop clerk, or secretary were encouraged to return home and start a racially pure family.

  Ilse was employed as a secretary in the Nazi Party. As a trusted party member, she was eventually assigned to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin in 1936. It is important to note that first-generation concentration camps in Germany like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were not “death camps” per se. Unlike the second generation of “annihilation camps”—places like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, built in Poland, the only purpose of which was to kill the many arriving deportees as fast as possible, mostly Jews and Gypsies—first-generation concentration camps in Germany generally kept inmates alive in confinement for long periods of time. They were, indeed, brutal, and inmates were routinely shot, worked, and beaten to death, experimented upon, or killed just to make space. Nonetheless, the primary purpose of these camps was to confine political opponents. Fifty-six thousand victims died in Buchenwald in the ninety-three months it was in operation between its founding in 1937 and its liberation by the Allies in April 1945.220 Some 240,000 prisoners passed through the camp, and although some were killed later in other camps, many, probably most, survived: That’s a concentration camp. At the three annihilation camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, a total of 1.5 million were murdered in twenty-one months and only a few dozen are known to have survived, a big difference in the homicidal environment between the categories of camp. Ilse’s assignment to the Sachsenhausen camp in 1936 was akin to being assigned to an extremely brutal prison but not necessarily part of a killing function of the “Final Solution,” which did not get officially underway until the late autumn of 1941.221

  While working as a secretary in the office at Sachsenhausen, Ilse met Karl Otto Koch, the camp commandant. They were married in an SS pagan marriage ceremony and had two children. In 1937, Koch was transferred to the newly opened Buchenwald camp and he and Ilse moved into a new house inside the camp. It was in this house that American troops were said to have found the gruesome human-skin souvenirs.

  The Feminist Defense of Ilse Koch

  Ilse Koch was never an official functionary of the camp. She was the commandant’s wife. While that gave her a tremendous degree of authority, it was entirely unofficial. Here, according to one German historian, Alexandra Przyrembel, was the first key to the vehemence with which Ilse was prosecuted after the war and the sexually depraved nature of the crimes she was accused of. According to this historian’s feminist perspective, Ilse was prosecuted because she defied traditional gender roles and offended the male inmates’ patriarchal sensibilities by doing so. Przyrembel argues that Ilse as a woman impacted on the “male society of inmates.” She states:

  …Ilse Koch appeared—in the perception of inmates—to have penetrated the domain of power reserved for the male members of the SS or at most certain Kapos (inmates who supervised inmate labor). This interaction between the (apparent) confirmation and transgression of gender stereotypes is, in my opinion, the root of the ‘Ilse Koch phenomenon’ after 1945.222

  It appears that when it comes to women murderers, radical feminism has no bounds in its assertion that female serial killers are essentially a social construct of the oppressive and conspiring male patriarchy—even a patriarchy confined to a concentration camp. For radical feminism, Ilse Koch is as much a victim of the patriarchy as Aileen Wuornos.

  “…Kill Them in a More Decent Way.”

  But it is not as simple as all that. The Nazi hierarchy had actually already criminalized Ilse and her commandant husband during the war. SS commandant Karl Koch was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 on charges of financial corruption and the murder of two inmates to cover up his crimes. He was tried by an SS tribunal and sentenced to death. He was executed, ironically, in the Buchenwald concentration camp, by the SS in April 1945, just days before the camp’s liberation.

  Ilse was arrested two years before the war ended by the SS in August 1943, and also charged with corruption, but acquitted in her trial. (Although, as she complained to her American captors later, not before her sizable cash deposits were confiscated by the Third Reich in a type of forfeiture of criminal enterprise gains. The amount seized from her was 12,000 Reichsmarks—about $30,000 in today’s buying power.)

  It was during this internal 1943 SS investigation that allegations were first made that Ilse Koch made human lamp shades. This was an offense under the Nazi code of conduct, which insisted that killing be conducted with decorum or “decency.” Even the taking of photographs was a serious offense, despite the fact that thousands of perpetrators snapped pictures of themselves committing atrocities. SS men were tried and imprisoned if they were caught taking photographs of atrocities or if they killed Jews without orders or killed them for depraved personal motives.223 During one SS court-martial, an SS private testified that the SS defendant had killed children by holding them off the ground by the hair and shooting them. He testified, “After a while, I just could not watch this anymore and I told him to stop. What I meant was he should not lift the children up by the hair, he should kill them in a more decent way.”224

  The SS defendants ended up on trial because they were passing around photographs of the atrocities like trading cards while on leave in Germany. (Some sent photographs to their wives, girlfriends, and mothers.) SS Chief Himmler was very vocal on the issue of killing with decorum. When he addressed a gathering of his senior SS killers, he said, “Most of you know what it is like to see a hundred corpses laid out in a line, or five hundred or a thousand. To have stood fast through this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have stayed decent, has made us hard.”225

  In other words, when the tattoo skin artifacts were supposedly found in her former house at Buchenwald in 1945, Ilse had not been living in it for two years and had been thoroughly investigated for it back in 1943. If, indeed, she had such fetishized trophies in her home, the SS investigators would have confiscated and destroyed them, and Ilse would have been severely punished for the offense—especially since she was not even a member of the SS but a civilian wife of an SS offender.

  The Tattooed Skin Collection

  Despite holding the center-stage in allegations that she had murdered and “skinned” inmates for their tattoos for decorative purposes in her 1947 trial by a U.S. Military Tribunal, Ilse Koch was not specifically charged with those offenses. Ilse, like the other defendants, was indicted with participating in a “common design” to subject the inmates of Buchenwald to “killings, tortures, starvation, beatings, and other indignities.” Any association as perpetrator with the camp was sufficient for her conviction without a specific case necessarily proven.

  But the specimens of tattooed skin were not
a propaganda invention. They existed—and were indeed found in 1945, along with shrunken heads, perhaps at the house where Ilse once lived or perhaps in the camp pathology department. In fact, such samples were indeed being collected, but with official SS sanction! The culprit was an SS doctor, Erich Wagner, who had been writing a thesis on the link between criminality and the desire to be tattooed. Wagner photographed numerous inmates with tattoos and apparently—either upon their deaths or after ordering their deaths—detached pieces of their skin bearing the tattoos, and cured and saved them, not as decoration, but as academic specimens. According to historian Przyrembel, Ilse Koch did not attend the photographing and might not have even been aware of the existence of the tattoo project.226

  A photograph of a lamp shade—allegedly made of human skin and placed next to shrunken heads and samples of preserved tattooed skin—was entered into evidence at her trial, but the actual lamp shade itself apparently was misplaced. While forensic analysis definitively identified the skin samples as human, no test reports on the lamp shade were entered into evidence.

  Dr. Sitte, a Ph.D. in physics and a former inmate, was one of the star witnesses against Ilse Koch. He had been confined in Buchenwald from September 1939 until the liberation in April 1945. He stated that he had worked in the camp’s pathology department and that tattooed skin was stripped from the bodies of dead prisoners and “was often used to create lamp shades, knife cases, and similar items for the SS.” Sitte told the court that it was “common knowledge” that tattooed prisoners were taken away after Ilse Koch had selected their tattoos and they would be murdered and skinned for her.

  But under cross-examination, Sitte admitted that he had never himself personally seen any of the lamp shades allegedly made of human skin and that he had no personal knowledge of any prisoner who had been reported by Ilse Koch and was then killed so that his tattooed skin could be made into a lamp shade. He also admitted that the lamp shade that was on the display table in the photograph was not the lamp shade made from human skin that he was referring to, allegedly delivered to Koch. Later, in a 1948 letter to the New York Times after Ilse Koch’s sentence had been commuted, Sitte further admitted that:

  I began to work in that pathology department only after the Koch era (Koch had been arrested for embezzlement and corruption) and by this time the SS leaders had abandoned their custom of displaying objects adorned with the tanned skin of tattooed prisoners.227

  In his letter Sitte concluded, “This was not evidence against Ilse Koch, but against the SS officers in the camp, who killed prisoners for their tattooings.”

  But Sitte pleaded nevertheless against the reduction of Ilse Koch’s sentence: “Is justice to the victims of Ilse Koch and her kind so much less important than technical justice to this pack of murderers?”

  What was the “technical justice” at issue here? The U.S. Military Governor of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, explained his decision to commute Koch’s sentence. He stated that Koch “could not be proved guilty of the serious war crimes that had been initially cited against her by the evidence presented at her trial. Among the specific charges was that she had used tattooed human skin for lamp shades and other household articles.”228 The problem, according to Clay, was that U.S. Military Tribunal procedures allowed not only for hearsay evidence to be entered, but also for written affidavits without the defense being given opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses.

  In 1976 Lucius Clay recalled:

  We tried Ilse Koch…She was sentenced to life imprisonment, and I commuted it to three years. [She had already served one year.] And our press really didn’t like that. She had been destroyed by the fact that an enterprising reporter who first went into her house had given her the beautiful name, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” and he had found some white lampshades in there, which he wrote up as being made out of human flesh.

  Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.229

  None of this in any way mitigates Nazi atrocities nor the specific charge that inmates were murdered for the collection of their tattooed skins. Holocaust deniers make a big deal out of Clay’s assertion that the lamp shade turned out to be made of goat skin. (And that it was never determined in a test for the U.S. National Archives—where Ilse’s photo albums are today stored—from what “animal” the suede covering the albums was made.) But there was never any doubt that some mad scientist at Buchenwald had collected those human tattoo skin specimens and shrunken heads. The inmates were unaware of the purpose. They assumed they were acts of personal depravity and laid them squarely on the doorstep of Ilse Koch, whom they despised.

  While this may clear Ilse from those specific charges, it does not exonerate her as a member of the Nazi party, a corrupt commandant’s wife living on the grounds of a concentration camp, and committing other offenses. The other charges against her—that she exploited inmate labor for her own purposes, that she vindictively reported prisoners, resulting in their punishment and sometimes executions; and that she had inmates, who dared to glance at her punished or murdered for their “impudence” toward a German woman—are entirely plausible and very likely. They are, in fact, the very source of the inmates’ hatred for her—not her gender role transgressions. The senior SS staff had inmates working as servants, cooks, housekeepers, and gardeners at their homes. The SS wives set the degree of discipline for these slave domestics.

  To the end, Ilse raged against an imagined “Jewish conspiracy” that she claimed was behind her charges. Ilse was an old-time Nazi Party member and one can easily imagine her attitude toward Jews and communists and other “enemies of the state” confined in her husband’s camp. She deserved the life sentence she got, but her actual crimes made her more typical of other offenders, many of whom found their sentences commuted in the 1950s.

  The public outcry over the commutation of the Bitch of Buchenwald’s sentence to a mere four years, with one already served, led to Ilse Koch being tried a second time, this time by the newly reconstituted West German judiciary. The trial was very political. The cream of German establishment opposition to Hitler had been confined in Buchenwald and camps like it. The entire echelon of the huge Social Democratic Party and the German Communist Party had been thrown into concentration camps from 1933 to 1937. Many survived by forming powerful and rival underground resistance groups inside the camps. These groups remained unified and politically active after the war. They emerged in post-war Germany, determined to make up for the lost twelve years during which they had been outlawed and brutalized by the Nazi state. There was no way that a high-profile example of Nazi depravity like Ilse Koch was going to escape punishment. These powerful German camp survivor associations relentlessly lobbied and protested for a second trial of Ilse Koch. And in the end they got their wish.

  “Lamp Shade Ilse,” as she was dubbed in the press, was retried in Bavaria in December 1950. In 1952, she was sentenced to life imprisonment after it was proven that she had “contributed” to the specific death of one inmate. The issue of collecting tattooed skin samples was not as central in her last trial. She vehemently appealed her sentence, claiming to be innocent of all the charges, but in 1967 she gave up and committed suicide at the age of 61 by hanging herself in her cell.

  Ilse was an evil and awful human being and got the end she deserved. But as far as the extraordinary charges of using human skin as household decoration for which she became so notorious, Ilse Koch might have actually been innocent. The accusations are reminiscent of the myths around Elizabeth Báthory—of her bathing in victims’ blood. But as the classic John Ford western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance declares, when there is a choice between printing the truth or the legend, the legend always wins out. As repulsive as historian Przyrembel’s feminist argument might be—that Ilse Koch was railroaded on those specific charges because she offended patriarchal sensibilities of the camp inmates—it is a charge one cannot
completely dismiss as easily as one wishes. In one way or another, how we perceive and define female serial killers is often defined by social constructs and politics, including those of gender stereotyping.

  Irma Grese—the Beast of Belsen

  In real life, Irma Grese, nicknamed the “Beast of Belsen,” is the more authentic inspiration for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS than the camp housewife Ilse Koch. Grese was young, blonde, and beautiful, and she was part of the concentration camp system, employed as a female SS-Aufseherin—“supervisor” or matron. These were not members of the SS—females were not allowed to join—but paid female employees of the SS, auxiliary workers. She was only 22 years old when she was executed by the British occupational authorities for a series of brutal murders she committed while working in the concentration camp system.

  In many ways, Irma Grese is easier to explain. She was born into a family of four siblings on October 27, 1923, to Alfred and Berte Grese, farm workers in Mecklenburg in northern Germany. Very little if nothing is known of her childhood. Her mother committed suicide in 1936 when Irma was 13 years old. Her father, Alfred, vehemently hated the Nazis but wisely kept his opinion to himself. (Some sources claim he joined the Nazi Party in 1937.)

  Irma was 10 years old when the Nazis took power in Germany. She was educated in the Nazi school system, which ensured that she was indoctrinated at an early age in racial theory, which espoused the superiority of the German Aryans and the immanent threat from the “subhuman” Jews and “the Judeo-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy.” Irma was raised on colorful Dr. Seusslike children’s books with titles like “The Jew Is a Poisonous Mushroom” or “The Jew Is a Fox,” heavily illustrated with lurid color drawings of beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed German children chasing stereotypically ugly, dark-skinned, hook-nosed Jewish children out of the school and out of town.