BOOK: Tomaz Jardim, "Ilse Koch on Trial"

Tomaz Jardim: Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald”. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674249189. viii + 357 pp.

This book is an interesting biography of Ilse Koch, whose husband Karl was the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1937–41. She grew notorious for contributing to the abuse of the prisoners there, and for allegedly collecting lampshades made out of human skin; I was vaguely aware of this notoriety but didn't really know anything more about her, so I decided to pick up this book to learn more.

As the title of the book suggests, it is mostly interested in her trials, especially the ones after the war, so her life prior to that is dealt with relatively briefly. Indeed relatively little seems to be known about her early life (pp. 11–13), and as with many people who would later grow notorious in the Third Reich, there is nothing particularly remarkable in the background of either Ilse Koch or of her husband. Karl worked as an insurance salesman in the 1920s “and at times resorted to petty thievery and small-time embezzlement” (p. 14) — but then in the 1930s, he rose quickly through the ranks of the SS and, as commandant of Buchenwald, was remarkably brutal and remarkably corrupt even by the standards of Nazi concentration camp commandants (pp. 24–6). He embezzled money and valuables taken from the prisoners and used their slave labour for his own benefit (pp. 26, 59–60). The Kochs and their two children lived in a villa not far from the camp, from which prisoners were often sent to work in or around the house as servants.

The higher-ups didn't particularly mind Karl's reign of terror and arbitrary brutality against the prisoners (though technically much of that was against the rules as well); it was his corruption that eventually got him in trouble. A regional SS official named Josias zu Waldeck started investigating him for this in 1941; for some time, Koch was protected by Himmler, who was willing to overlook some corruption in an effective and loyal commandant (p. 41). But as the war started going badly, rooting out corruption came to be seen as more important than before, and Himmler's support for Koch faded. Both Kochs were arrested in August 1943 (p. 54), and after a lengthy investigation, their trial before an SS court began in September 1944 (p. 68). Besides his embezzlement, Karl was also charged with the unauthorized killing of prisoners, notably two who had treated him for “a case of syphilis he had acquired while in Norway” (p. 57). Ilse was charged with “habitual receiving of stolen goods” (p. 74) and thus being an accessory to her husband's embezzelement. She was found not guilty and was released, but Karl was sentenced to death and was executed at Buchenwald in April 1945, shortly before the Nazis abandoned the camp (p. 77).

After the war, rumours emerged that Ilse Koch used to select prisoners that had interesting tatoos so they would be killed and pieces of their skin preserved, or in some cases even made into lampshades. These objects were indeed exhibited (pp. 83–4), but there doesn't seem to have been anything more than rumour to connect them to Koch; nevertheless the press, both then and later, delighted in reporting on her supposed crimes in the most salacious and sensationalist terms (pp. 93, 141, 143, 289). More sober and more plausible accusations revolved around claims that she had, on a number of occasions, reported prisoners for real or imagined transgressions, thereby ensuring that they would get beaten and possibly killed by the SS guards. At any rate, Koch was arrested by the U.S. occupying authorities and included as a defendant at a trial before a “military commission court” (p. 95); the other thirty or so defendants were mostly SS officers who had served at Buchenwald (p. 91).

In terms of protecting the rights of the defendants, this court left much to be desired (pp. 95–100), but at the same time it was far from a full-blown kangaroo court either; Captain Lewis, the defense counsel appointed by the court (p. 104), seems to have done a vigorous and thorough job. In particular, he showed that many of the prosecution witnesses were unreliable and were only relaying hearsay. He challenged the prosecutor, Denson, to produce the infamous human-skin lampshade as evidence, but was told that “it had been turned over to judicial authorities at Nuremberg” where it could now “no longer be located. The lampshade had mysteriously disappeared, and it would never surface again.” (P. 124.) The witnesses' testimony “left little doubt that tattooed skins had had been collected at Buchenwald [. . .] but was insufficient to implicate Koch” (p. 112).

But the main argument of the prosecution was that the defendants had been “ ‘participating in a common design’ to commmit war crimes”, and that Buchenwald as a whole had been a sort of “criminal enterprise” such that everyone who supported its operations while knowing about their nature was guilty, regardless of what exactly he or she did or didn't do (p. 98). This was harder to defend against; Koch denied, strenously but implausibly, that she had had any idea as to what had been going on inside the camp — she had been just a busy housewife raising her children and not talking to her husband about his work. The route of her daily walks was carefully scrutinized with the aid of a map to demonstrate that she must have seen inside the camp through its barbed-wire fence on numerous occasions (pp. 134, 136).

In the event, the court found her guilty and sentenced her to life imprisonment. However, the proceedings of the court were “subject to a series of automatic reviews” (p. 146), going all the way up to General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the U.S.-occupied zone in Germany (the wikipedia tells us that his office had a funny acronym: OMGUS :))). The reviewers “found unequivocally that the most serious and shocking charges leveled at Ilse Koch were supported by scarcely more than rumor and hearsay” (p. 150) and, at their recommendation, Clay reduced Koch's sentence to four years (which meant she would go free in about a year, in October 1949).

This was received with howls of outrage in the American press, where most of the journalists as well as the general public evidently ignored the weakness of the evidence against her and simply assumed that even the most lurid rumours about her crimes were true (pp. 157–8). Protests were organized; Clay was heckled during a visit to the U.S. (p. 164); the folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a protest song (p. 166); and even the U.S. senate formed a committee to investigate how this could have happened and what could be done to prevent Koch's release. But they couldn't try her again for the same charges, and there was not enough evidence for fresh charges (p. 173).

Eventually they came up with one of those sleazy technicalities that lawyers are always so good at: her previous trial had been for war crimes, and the jurisdiction of the military commission court specifically excluded any crimes against German citizens. Consequently, she could still be tried in a German court, for regular non-war crimes such as (incitement to) murder or assault, perpetrated against German citizens. These things, after all, had in principle been against the law even under Nazi Germany (p. 192).

The German authorities gathered testimony from a large number of witnesses and even had a few people travel to America to talk to former prisoners who now lived there (pp. 207–10); despite all this effort, all the charges were for incitement to murder or attempted murder, from her habit of reporting prisoners for punishment, which, the prosecution argued, she must have known could get them killed (and in some instances had got them killed). Koch continued her strategy of simply denying everything, but it was clearly not working. The court found her guilty of some, though not all, of the charges, and sentenced her to life imprisonment again (p. 253).

She spent the rest of her life, some sixteen years, in prison. Her numerous appeals for clemency were all rejected, partly because the authorities expected such petitioners to say they are sorry for their crimes, while Koch insisted that she was simply innocent (p. 268); but partly the reasons for keeping her in prison were political: she was so notorious in the eyes of the international public that releasing her would make Germany look soft on Nazis (p. 281). Eventually she lost hope of ever regaining her freedom, and committed suicide in 1967.

*

An interesting recurring topic in this book is the observation that Ilse Koch was adversely affected by what the author, in line with modern-day woke terminology, refers to as “misogyny”: her cruelty and callousness towards the prisoners was greatly at odds with society's expectations that women should be kind and compassionate; and her licentiousness (reports of which, though exaggerated by the press, were not entirely without foundation; pp. 75–6) was at odds with the expectation that they should be chaste and modest. Moreover, she didn't even have the excuse of being part of a system and following orders; it was clear that she had been pursuing her crimes solely at her own whims. In the eyes of society (even more so in the mid-20th century than today) she looked like a greater aberration from social norms than, say, a typical (male) concentration camp guard (p. 281). “By virtue of her gender, the judges implied, Koch should be held to a higher standard of ethical and benevolent behavior in the concentration camps than was expected of her male counterparts.” (P. 257.)* It was easy and comfortable for the German public to observe that this monster still was, and must remain, in prison, and pat themselves on the back for not being soft on fascists, even if most of the other war criminals had been released long before.

[*Our author clearly disapproves of this double standard, and to be sure he is in a certain sense right in doing so; but this is something that has always bothered me a bit about the feminist movement — instead of trying to make the men as good as the women, they have always been content with making the women as bad as the men. True, that is equality of a sort, but it hardly strikes me as a change for the better.]

I think the author is on to something here; it is plainly obvious that she was treated unfairly. Every time that she reported some prisoner for punishment, there must have then been some SS guard who actually beat or killed that prisoner; this is a far worse thing to do than what she had done, and yet it was she and not he who became notorious to the general public, inspired a series of 1970s exploitation films and was the subject of campaigns against her release from prison and of exaggerated, sensationalized press reports that kept on portraying her as a sadistic pervert and repeating as fact the old rumours of her human skin collection — even in notices of her death (pp. 288–9) — although prosecutors had consistently failed to prove that she had had any connection with them.

Moreover, there are one or two other things that bother me a good deal about the court proceedings against her. One is the principle of “participating in a common design” (p. 98) that played such a large role in the various group trials against concentration camp staff and the like. It strikes me as an obvious unprincipled legal trick to make the prosecution's job easier; they knew they would have a hard time proving guilt on an individual basis, so they went for what is basically collective guilt where “the cook is as liable as the hangman” (p. 138); if you applied such a thing consistently throughout the legal system, society would simply collapse. If you declare Buchenwald a “criminal enterprise” (p. 98) — which, fair enough, it sort of was — what's preventing you from declaring the Third Reich as a whole to have been a criminal enterprise, and prosecuting everyone who ever paid taxes to it? Or even outside a war-crimes context, whenever a company breaks the law, you could prosecute all of its shareholders and all of its employees as sharing in the guilt — because, after all, one can hardly ‘participate in a common design’ more obviously and blatantly than by forming a company to do so.

The other thing that bothered me is that she was basically prosecuted twice for more or less the same crimes, purely on the basis of legal technicalities about the jurisdiction of the courts and about whether the victims were German citizens or not; and moreover that the outcome of these two trials was so different: four years in one case, life imprisonment in the other. Something must be very wrong and in a certain fundamental sense unjust about a legal system in which it is possible for the same actions to receive such very different punishments at two different trials. In any case, I think life imprisonment is a grotesquely excessive punishment for mere incitement to murder; but then, I wouldn't approve of life imprisonment even for actual murderers.

Another thing that bothered me is that Koch's third trial, by the postwar German authorities, relied on the use of the pre-Nazi criminal law (p. 192) in a situation where it was obviously not meant to be applied.* There is an interesting observation on pp. 64–5 that Nazi Germany was evolving into “a dual state, where the traditional legal order [. . .] remained largely intact” but “coexisted alongside the ‘prerogative state,’ by which arbitrary power was wielded by the regime [. . .] This duality guaranteed that irony and contradiction would be constant features of the Nazi legal order.” In other words, if, for example, some concentration camp guard arbitrarily killed a prisoner in 1940 or so, this was technically against the law on murder which was still on the books since the days of the German Empire or perhaps of the Weimar Republic; and it was technically even against the SS's own rules (as we can see by the fact that Karl Koch was charged with such murders in his own trial, pp. 70–1); and yet such killings were routinely taking place all the time in concentration camps all over Nazi Germany, with the complete knowledge and connivance of all the relevant authorities. There should, in my opinion, exist some sort of legal principle according to which, if some law or rule is flouted sufficiently widely, routinely, openly, and with not enough being done about it, then it should be held as no longer applying, or at least not applying in those particular circumstances, even if it is technically still on the books somewhere and hasn't been explicitly repealed yet. Otherwise you can get the ‘three felonies a day’ situation where a bunch of impractical laws remain in existence indefinitely, where it is then impossible to live a normal life without violating them all the time, and where the whole population then technically violates those laws all the time and never gets prosecuted for them — except when the authorities want to fuck someone over, in which case they can dust those old laws off and charge a person with violating them.

[*And this is evidently not a one-time occurrence but a common practice; we read on pp. 292–3 that as late as 2021, a 95-year-old former concentration camp secretary was charged with “aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases”.]

That being said, I do also disapprove of the way the Nazis built up their dual legal order, instead of simply modifying their existing laws to make sure that their oppresive practices would be openly legal. (It would, after all, have been trivial for them to do so, since the Reichstag would pass whatever legislation Hitler wanted, or he could even pass laws by himself under the Enabling Act.) But I suppose they thought this would make them look bad, or they actively preferred the confusion of the dual system as it afforded them better opportunities for arbitrary oppressive behaviour.

*

Anyway, this was an interesting and very readable book about a not-very-pleasant topic. It is written efficiently and not too long, so that I wasn't getting bored at any point; there's a decent amount of photographs as illustrations, and I particularly liked the fact that they are included at the relevant points of the text instead of being gathered into a separate section of plates in the middle of the book as is often the case. But most important of all, the book is very sober and well balanced; it doesn't try to exonerate Koch or believe her impossible protestations of complete innocence, but it does provide an important counterweight to the grotesquely exaggerated, sensationalized accounts of her that had prevailed in the popular press for such a long time. Even the devil is rarely quite as bad as he is made out to be.