BAs early as 1944, Ruth Kempner and her husband Robert, one of the main prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials, pointed out the “serious problem” of SS women. In contrast to this early discussion, historical studies, according to the opening premise of Alexandra Przyrembel’s book “Im Bann des Bösen”, accepted SS wives and SS guards only hesitantly. The moral assessment that they were a “remarkably brutal and power-obsessed minority” made it difficult to differentiate between them. This is exactly what the present study would like to invite and at the same time not leave it at that.
In the first part “Peinigen” the author reconstructs the specifics of Ilse Koch’s perpetration as the wife of the commander of the Buchenwald concentration camp between 1937 and 1943. In the subsequent three parts “Confronting”, “Deciding” and “Denying” Przyrembel analyzes how Ilse Koch did became a symbol of National Socialist violence in the United States and the two post-war German societies and what effects this had on the conception of guilt and responsibility.
Koch, born Ilse Köhler in 1906 in a modest milieu in Dresden, joined the NSDAP in May 1932. Two years later, she met SS leader Karl Koch, and in the summer of 1937 the couple married on the grounds of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Karl Koch was commander from 1936. Przyrembel sees the marriage within the “elite order” of the SS as radicalization and a career step that made it possible for Ilse Koch to live a life of unprecedented prosperity, with fur coats, cars and forced labor in the castle-like commander’s villa of the SS leadership settlement.
Sentenced to life imprisonment
Although Ilse Koch, unlike SS guards in women’s concentration camps, did not hold an official position, she shaped everyday life in the camp. Koch asked for and passed on the number of prisoners in any situation, for example when they picked up a cigarette, allegedly looked at them themselves or worked too slowly, which resulted in the most cruel punishments by the SS guards.
In the outer areas of the camp, Koch personally struck out with a riding crop. Prisoners unanimously reported that it was vital for their survival not to attract Ilse Koch’s attention. Even within the prisoner community of the concentration camp, Koch had become a mythical figure, an omnipotent “evil”.[n] spirit of the camp”.
In August 1943, the Kochs were arrested for embezzling funds and charged by the SS judiciary. Karl was sentenced to death for corruption and the murder of prosecution witnesses and executed in Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945; Ilse was acquitted after 16 months in custody in Weimar and went to relatives in Ludwigsburg. There she was arrested by the American army in June 1945 as a suspected war criminal. In August 1947, the American military judiciary sentenced her to life imprisonment in the Dachau Buchenwald main trial.
How images of masculinity and femininity justified Koch’s guilt
Due to extensive media reporting, the image of a sadistic excess offender continued to take shape during this time, for which the allegation of possession of objects made of human skin was central. When the camp was liberated, the American army found three tattooed pieces of skin from medical crimes. Przyrembel reconstructs that the pathology department of the concentration camp had numerous tattooed skins, for which prisoners with tattoos were allegedly killed in a targeted manner, but that Ilse Koch, contrary to countless reports to the contrary, did not have any objects made of human skin “with a very high degree of probability”.
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