The Commandant's Wife

Horror films that feature gory vampires, serial killers and macabre satanic cults attract throngs of fans to watch such movies. But we don't have to go to the cinema for real nightmares and terror. They are an intrinsic facet of daily life, a veritable part and parcel of our history. Take for example the story of Ilse Koch. She was a real life serial killer, a bloodthirsty vampire of unspeakable horrors. Mrs. Koch was also the wife of the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald and became notorious as the ‘Beast of Buchenwald'. Many people cannot believe that the satanic horror stories attributed to her are true. However, she was convicted for sadistic crimes after the war and sentenced twice for life imprisonment, first by an American military tribunal and later by a German court. Working as a bookkeeping clerk, Ilse Koch joined the Nazi Party in 1932. Four years later she became an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Here she met SS major Karl Otto Koch, who was the lager commandant. Advanced to the rank of colonel, the commandant was transferred to Buchenwald in 1937 and Ilse accompanied him. In 1941 he was appointed to head the Majdanek death camp near Lublin and the couple moved to Poland. The commandant's wife had a fancy taste for decorative tattoos. She took particular interest in the indelible patterns engraved into the skin of prisoners. If she liked the designs, she selected the inmates to be killed so that their skins could be made into lampshades. She used the tattooed human lampshades in her house for their atmospheric lighting effects. Newspapers around the world reported the repulsive crimes of Ilse Koch, including a New York Times article published in 1948. Mind you, pieces of tattooed skin from Buchenwald inmates are in the possession of the United States National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., and the museum is an integral part of the Smithsonian Institution. A few weeks before the end of World War II, General Eisenhower visited Ohrdorf, which was a satellite lager of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Situated about forty miles west of Berlin, American forces liberated the camps in April 1945. Shocked by the piles of decaying human bodies and starving survivors, Eisenhower invited politicians and journalists to document the horrors of Nazi brutality. He wanted for the whole world to see the evidence that the atrocities perpetrated by the Third Reich were undeniable facts, and not, as some claimed, only Allied war propaganda. Many years later, an American president made an emotional tour of Buchenwald. It was Friday, June 6,2009, and accompanied by German Chancellor Angela Marker, as well as concentration camp survivors, President Barack Obama confronted the heinous terror memorialized in Buchenwald. 'To this day there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened', he said. But the camps are 'the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history'. Buchenwald teaches us many compelling lessons, the President pointed out. For, we have the duty to be ever vigilant and fight the spread of evil. Buchenwald obliges us to stand up for justice and to extend a helping hand to the weak and the oppressed. Yet this terrible place also serves as a stark reminder that 'we have to guard against cruelty in ourselves'.