Ep. 35- The Trials of Ilse Koch with Tomaz Jardim

The wife of Nazi camp commandant Karl Koch, Ilse, became a lasting symbol of the evil and depravity of the Nazi state.  She was accused of a variety of crimes and underwent three trials, including one by the Nazis themselves.  However, there is more to the story.

In this episode, I talk with Tomaz Jardim about the real Ilse Koch and he unpacks the three trials as well as how the Ilse Koch ascended as the mythic epitome of Nazi evil.

Tomaz Jardim is a professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Jardim, Tomaz. Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald” (2024) 

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.024)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Whitman Bourne. And today we have a really, really interesting topic which sort of treads the line between myth and reality with someone who is certainly infamous in the history of the Holocaust. And that is Ilsaac, or the so-called Beast of Buchenwald or other more less appropriate words. And here we have to talk with us Thomas Jadine, who has written an amazing book.

I'm really teasing out sort of the truth of her existence, but also the ways in which various legal systems tried to come to terms with her and her and her gender. Right. And the way that she's treated as a woman and the way she became this sort of weird, evil poster child for the Nazis. So Tomas, welcome to the podcast.

Tomaz (00:55.554)
Thank you so much, it's great to be here.

Waitman Beorn (00:58.138)
can you tell us how you got interested in this topic? I mean, how did you decide to write a book about this particular person?

Tomaz (01:05.922)
I guess this book project actually grew out of my previous book project, which was a study of the trial of 61 personnel from Mauthausen concentration camp that took place before an American military court at Dachau. And while I was doing that research, and the American archives and the National Archives, is,

digging through all of that Dachau trial material and the hundreds and hundreds of trials that occurred under American auspices at Dachau, including the one at Mauthausen, I just kept on coming up to references to this Ilse Koch case. And it became clear to me that in sorting through the materials that were housed in the National Archives about the hundreds of trials that the United States had in fact launched against Nazi perpetrators, that there was clearly something unique.

And and and important that had occurred with the trial of Ilse Koch and I really didn't know what but I just kept on coming across interrogations I came across the fact that there had been a Senate investigation into the outcome of her trial and that seemed very intriguing and and unusual and so as I was completing the research on my Mauthausen book every once in a while when I'd find something particularly interesting on Ilse Koch I'd sort of make a little note in my mind sometimes that even

photocopy something or take a note about something and it remained this thing that I kind of shelved while I completed my Mauthausen book and then you know some years later when when when my first book was tied up I came back to it and I started thinking geez I should really go back and and and really figure out what this This other trial is all about because it seemed to me that while the trial the story that I told with the Mauthausen trial was kind of about how American military justice worked

in this series of trials called the Dachau Trials, but it seemed that this trial of Ilzacach would take this to a whole other level. was as it became this trial that kind of threatened to pull the entire American trial program down into controversy. it was just clear that it was immensely important. And I wanted to figure out why and what it was about that case that was just so controversial and had such long sort of...

Tomaz (03:24.487)
tentacles into all of the documentary records that I was exploring.

Waitman Beorn (03:29.488)
And what's also really interesting, of course, is that there are three trials that Elsacock goes through, right? And one of them is this SS trial during the war, during the period of the Third Reich. Can you tell us a little bit, can we start maybe going with a bit of a biography of who is this person? Because as you point out in the book, and our listeners might be familiar with her from this sort of mythical, you know, almost comic book villain,

Characterized characterization of her, but who is she actually and how would you sort of characterize her?

Tomaz (04:05.806)
Yeah, I'd say that the truth is, in fact, and this is this is obviously the great irony is that in actual fact, I'd say she was quite an inconsequential woman, certainly in the grand scheme of the Nazi state or even within the pantheon of of of of, you know, Nazi war criminals. She had no official position in the Nazi state, contrary to popular belief. But she sort of found herself at the scene of her crimes.

by virtue of her marriage to Karl Koch, who was the, the commandant of various concentration camps, and very much ascendant in the ranks, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Majdanek, and Ilse followed him, to those various posts and sort of established, you know, sort of the, the, what I think is often the, the, the life of a

Nazi elite family, know, very much living in, in the case of Buchenwald, living in the largest villa in the SS settlement, living lavishly off what turned out to be the, the graft and theft being perpetrated by her husband on a daily basis. And, and sort of reveling in that privilege, which involved, of course, also making use of slave labor at the camp. had domestic staff.

that were prisoners, had people working in the garden who were slave laborers, and she raised her children there. In fact, she was pregnant in 1938, 1939, 1940. So really throughout the period that her husband was commandant, she was definitely for the most part, in fact, occupied with her children. But of course, there are many reports of her involvement in camp.

crimes as well and these are of varying truth and veracity. It does appear that she took some interest in observing what was going on at the camp, often from horseback. There were many reports that she used to jot down the numbers of prisoners who she felt were not working hard enough and would hand those numbers off to the SS, whom would discipline them and obviously at times beat them and beat them very brutally.

Tomaz (06:27.683)
Was she, however, worthy of this title, Bitch of Buchenwald? I think this is where the fiction begins to take over the truth. I think the fact that she existed as really the only woman that most of the inmates would have ever seen, she sort of became the subject of rumor and speculation. People were aware that she was the Commandant's wife. She rode on horseback.

and stories really circulated very fast that she was somebody to be, you know, frightened of. And so at war's end we have all kinds of reports of brutal violence which she was accused of having instigated or in fact perpetrated herself. But in many cases the evidence for that was based largely on hearsay prisoners saying, well I never saw it myself but I used to hear that she used to do these awful things and in fact

as we will talk about, I'm sure a whole legend kind of grows from these allegations.

Waitman Beorn (07:32.096)
Well, and running through this whole thing is a weird sort of misogyny on just about the part of everybody involved in the story. You know, there's an idea that she's particularly awful because women can't be awful, they can't be evil, which is a weird kind of misogyny, but it's one that's sort of...

It's the women must be sort of by definition caring nurturers, you know, and therefore would never get involved. But then on the flip side, you know, she tries to use a sort of traditional view of femininity to sort of shield herself from accusations as well as her say, I was just a woman doing sort of very, very sort of stereotypically women things like household and child rearing and things like that. Right.

Tomaz (08:19.254)
Yeah, that's absolutely the case. And that thread, as you suggest, runs the entire way through her story. I mean, from her SS arrest in 1943 and trial in 1944, right through to her American trial, then the Senate hearings, then her West German trial. The common thread is this highly gendered view of...

And I think there's an outrage expressed in the fact that a woman may be exercising authority, that a woman may be perpetrating violence, that it simply doesn't find its parallel in the male perpetrators who are on trial, often with her in the same doc. And so we have prosecutor after prosecutor, again, from the SS prosecutor to the American prosecutor to the West German prosecutor, they're united in their condemnation of her as a woman. They make it clear.

that essentially she bears a dual guilt. Not only is she guilty for having committed statutory crimes, but she's guilty for violating gender norms that in their mind make what she did do all the more egregious and repulsive and worthy of punishment.

Waitman Beorn (09:31.582)
Yeah. And one thing that we'll probably come back to a little bit later, right? Is this is the way in which by painting her as this kind of, know, whether it's sadistic or like hypersexualized monster, she sort of serves this role as a way of actually for Germans to kind of distance themselves from sort of ordinary perpetrators, you know, because they can sort of say, well, she's she's this crazy monster person. And, you know, and let's let's it's easy for us to heap punishment on her because this is clearly

beyond the pale of expectations, but sort of that lets the rest of people sort of in some ways into sort of obscurity.

Tomaz (10:09.73)
For sure, that's unquestionably true. The focus on Koch, both in post-war Germany, but also in the United States, I think really diminishes early understandings of what Nazi criminality was all about. We have the elevation of people like Koch, or the focus on people like Koch, and this sort of gratuitous nature of the violence which is attributed to them, which becomes the kind of epitome of Nazism in the popular mind.

totally obscuring the fact that the Holocaust is very much about the bureaucratized, run-of-the-mill people who are essentially driving forward a system that has mass murder at its product. So it does. think this focus on the gratuitous crimes attributed to her totally warps early understandings of Nazism.

and holds her up as epitomizing Nazism when in fact she really is an exception to the rule.

Waitman Beorn (11:18.07)
And one of the things that's actually kind of interesting, and you probably, I mean, you certainly probably have experienced this and I too, as a Holocaust scholar, but maybe not for sort of all of our listeners. You know, I'm reading this, I'm reading about Ilsaacocke and I too had sort of this, I never looked into any, anywhere near the detail that you have. And I sort of also sort of said, yes, you probably did all these. And I was like, when I got done reading the book, and take this within the way it's intended.

My reaction was kind of like, she's not really that that bad in the grand scheme of, you know, what we know, particularly from people like Wendy Lowers book on Hitler's Furies, you know, the the the commandant of the wife that I came across or the wife's commandant that I came across, commandant's wife that I came across in my book. You know, these are actually really, really, you know, active murderous kinds of people. And in the grand scheme of things, know, Ilsa Cock actually seemed relatively.

normal in the sense of, suspect that she was indicative of a lot of commandant's wives or high ranking SS wives in the concentration camp system. So I was kind of surprised in some ways about how mundane her complicity, though obviously that is not to take away from the immorality of it and the fact that she was deeply complicit in the Nazi state. But it certainly

Tomaz (12:18.392)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (12:41.012)
rose to nowhere near the levels of sort of, that we sort of are more familiar with now, with the scholarship that's come out about, focused on women and the Third Reich.

Tomaz (12:53.506)
Absolutely. And I have to say part of my challenge with this book was, mean, you suggested even the way that you phrased your question that you needed to be careful that I understood, you know, the meaning and your intent in suggesting that she may not be quote unquote so bad. And this is very much a challenge I began with because it was immediately clear when you read the documentary record and the evidence that she is a nasty, deeply morally complicit

Waitman Beorn (13:02.708)
Yeah.

Tomaz (13:23.69)
woman, you know, woven into the sort of social fabric of the Nazi state. But, you know, in terms of actual criminal behavior, let alone these monstrous crimes of which she was accused, like murdering prisoners in order to collect their tattooed skins and make lampshades and things like this, the evidence is just not there. So I think that's absolutely true. I think that when we evaluate her

This is kind of the tension at the heart of the book. It's like she's so deeply morally flawed and just a deeply unpleasant woman in so many ways. But yet, the evidence doesn't stack up when it comes to the crimes for which she has become known historically. And so it left me to play this very careful game of pinpointing what indeed she was.

Waitman Beorn (14:02.698)
Yeah.

Tomaz (14:21.53)
responsible for without trying to kind of diminish her, what she was criminally responsible for, without trying to diminish diminish her moral responsibility in this in this most sort of brutal context in which she lived and and and worked.

Waitman Beorn (14:38.132)
And to be clear, without skipping towards the end, which we'll talk about this because it's one of my favorite, favorite parts of the book. You know, but, you know, she's deeply anti-Semitic and that that is sort of clearly proven in her own words. And she's, she remains completely, you know, unapologetic and defiant, you know, to the very end. like, as you point out, like she's, she's, she's definitely a Nazi. She's definitely, you know, a complicit person in the regime.

Tomaz (14:41.164)
you

Tomaz (14:51.938)
Yes.

Tomaz (14:59.448)
complete.

Waitman Beorn (15:08.218)
but she's probably more like your average Nazi woman complicit in the regime than she is like, you know, a crazed, a crazed sort of sadistic murderer. which I think is the interesting, the interesting tension that, that we have, you know, with, with her myth or sort of mythic, legacy, I suppose.

Tomaz (15:30.646)
Right, and this is true. And ultimately what happens with her is that her defense strategy is very much to lean on these domestic roles that she did play. But whether she did things beyond those domestic roles, you know, depends on the evidence. But she does herself no favors. I mean, you read the trial transcript, and while she denies these...

barbarous crimes which are attributed to her and for which there is very little evidence. She also denies things that are completely implausible for her to deny and infuriates the court in the process. So, I mean, you mentioned you say, well, she's clearly a Nazi. I mean, she is actually a Nazi by virtue of formal membership. And yet even there, she absolutely denies her Nazi party membership. She says I was never a party member.

So it's quite a dramatic moment in her West German trial when somebody pulls out the piece of paper and says, actually, we found it. This is your party number and everything. She denies everything. And at times, as I said, there are absurd dimensions to the degree to which she denies her role. mean, during her trial at Dachau, her US military trial, that is, the chief prosecutor, William Denson, is intent

simply on showing that she must have been aware to some degree of what was going on in the camp. And he tries to have her illustrate this by asking her, with a pointer stick, to show the route that she would walk from the villa where she lived, about 800 meters to her husband's office, which stood right at the main gates to Buchenwald. And to walk that 800 meter walk, you were walking

directly alongside the perimeter fence. The crematoria is right there in the foreground. And even there she says, I never looked in the can. And Denson said, you mean that you walked back and forth to your husband's office day in and day out and you're telling me you never saw an emaciated inmate, you never saw abuse. And she said, no, I didn't. She said, it just didn't interest me. So I never looked through the fence. And it's just absurd. mean, she just, she absolutely refuses to acknowledge any kind of-

Tomaz (17:54.29)
awareness of anything really untoward and the same thing goes for her West German trial. They're talking about emaciated prisoners, they're talking about beatings that occurred regularly, the fact that she was seen on horseback. And she doesn't concede things that she could have conceded. She could have easily said, you know, I saw terrible things, but it was out of our hands, or I saw other people, you know, beating people and it was terrible, but she doesn't. She just says, I saw nothing. Speak no evil, hear no evil.

you know, and it does not help her in the dock, because I think both, you know, the courts in each case get very frustrated with her absolute unwillingness to acknowledge anything beyond her own sense of victimization somehow that she's now sitting in court.

Waitman Beorn (18:39.264)
I mean, this is something that I thought was really, really interesting. And actually it sort of struck me because the the commandant's wife, so Liesl Wilhaus at Yanovskoye, it was just rang true with with what you've done. You know, she actually had shot people from the balcony of her house and was clearly deeply, deeply, deeply, criminal. But she said the same thing. She said, like, I never entered the camp. And of course, her her villa was like

literally in the middle of the camp. mean, it just it just it's mind blowing in the level of denial because like it was literally in the middle of the camp. And she said she had no idea what was going on in the camp. And of course, again, literally in the middle of it. And she said the same thing that now I think about it, that in terms of her defense, I was I was busy as a good German wife, you taking care of my kids and volunteering for the, you know.

the German Front Volunteer Societies and stuff like that. know, it just, it just completely and absurdly and stupidly unbelievable. You know, if you were more, if you were a more sort of astute person trying to get off of these charges, you know, there are things you could have said that, you know, that would have made it much more difficult for you to be, convicted if you weren't just sort of committed to this line that like, you're not going to give it up.

Tomaz (19:40.994)
Yeah.

Tomaz (20:05.218)
Yeah, exactly. mean, during her West German trial, there are two priests who testify against her back to back. And they're both talking about, you know, seeing bodies at the camp and the naceated inmates and the horror of it all. And the judge immediately turns to her because I think he's wonder if she he wonders if she has the nerve to kind of call them liars. And and she absolutely does. And the judge says,

So you're saying that these two priests are perjuring themselves from beginning to end and she says, yes, they are, yes. And even that the newspaper records that the audience is up in arms by this point saying this is ridiculous.

Waitman Beorn (20:46.954)
So before we move a little further, maybe we should talk about like, okay, what did she do? Let's lay out, you you've gone through all of the sort of evidence and the three trials, you know, and whether it's sort of legally a crime or not, what did she do? Like what actions can we lay at her feet? And then we can look at the ones that are sort of over and above that, because I think there's something interesting going on there as well.

Tomaz (21:09.186)
Uh-huh.

Tomaz (21:14.69)
Right, for sure. Well, if we talk about her three trials, at the SS trial, which came about because Carl, her commandant husband, was arrested for graft, but also for the murder of inmates, which was basically just about covering up evidence. The SS investigators came, they wanted to talk to these inmates who were in cahoots with Carl on the black market, and lo and behold, they found themselves dead very quickly.

Waitman Beorn (21:16.726)
you

Waitman Beorn (21:21.174)
.

Tomaz (21:41.71)
And so the SS actually charged Karl with the killing of these inmates, quite interestingly enough. And in that case, Ilse was charged basically for the receiving of stolen goods, that Karl was the main focus of that trial. He was enriching himself. He was siphoning off funds that were supposed to go to Berlin into his own coffers and making himself fantastically rich. And sure enough, Ilse's bank accounts began to grow very...

quickly at the time also, and she was wearing fur coats and all that kind of stuff. And ultimately, at the end of that trial, Carl was executed as a result of the charges being found valid against him. But Ilza was acquitted, though clearly she was involved in the receiving of these goods simply for her own pleasure. And you can in fact see her strolling down the main street in front of the

gates of Buchenwald wearing a long fur coat. She made no attempt to hide the sort of opulence that they began to live in. So that's the simplest of the answers. Then we move to the American military court at Dachau. Now there it's a little hard to untangle because there's 31 defendants on trial at the same time and they're all charged only with one crime, which is

to state it directly, participating in a common design to commit war crimes. So in that system, it's basically like conspiracy that the judge says, we've got 31 guys here. The criminal conspiracy is the camp itself. And if we can show that the purpose of the camp was to kill and to murder and to torture, then through the sort of principle, essentially a vicarious liability, any one of these defendants

if they were there, is guilty. So they would say, doesn't matter if you were the cook, doesn't matter if you were the hangman, you helped to, by your own little way, your own little job, to maintain this criminal enterprise, which was Wuchenwald, and as a result you are guilty and may be executed as such. So it's a bit funny trying to tease out evidence in these trials because even though the prosecutors do

Tomaz (23:59.114)
explore particular incidences of violence attributed to each of the inmates, they kind of have this great advantage, whereas if they get caught sort of with evidence that doesn't quite make sense, they turn to the judges and say, well, let's remember, it doesn't really matter if this person committed this crime or not, because they're still participating in the common design to commit war crimes. Now, in terms of tying Ilza to that common design during her trial at Dachau, much of the evidence was about her

Tomaz (24:31.723)
allegedly reporting prisoners for punishment, which does seem to have happened, though it did require a certain amount of conjecture. Ilza sees somebody, you know, working too slowly. She goes over to the SS man and whispers something in his ear, and later on that day at roll call, that particular person is called out from the roll call and beaten. And so the assumption is that this was on

basis of whatever it was that Ilze may have whispered in his ear. Pretty tricky to make that direct criminal connection and really what happens with Ilze's case at Dachau is that there is a lot of that and I think it generally builds a picture that she was in all likelihood involved in some sense around the camp sometimes pointing out people who she didn't like and saying you should go and see if this guy's working better and that they may then have gone and smacked the person around.

I would say in terms of crime that there was evidence for at Dachau, that's kind of the extent of it. The prosecution did, however, spend a lot of time trying to then tie her to this whole issue of the human skin lampshades, which is a whole topic unto itself that we can discuss. And that was shown to be pretty much without foundation at the trial and didn't get the prosecution very far.

Now nonetheless, as was the case with these Dachau trials, the judges found all the defendants guilty and sentenced Ilze to life in prison, not to death, alongside many of her co-defendants, in all likelihood because she had gotten pregnant in American custody and was now at this point very pregnant. Now the judges also didn't explain why their sentence was applied to each individual inmate, we don't really know.

but I would say that the sense is that she was involved in some ways, she was riding about on horseback, she was employing slave laborers in her household that she clearly abused, and that taken together, this was enough to link her to that so-called common design to commit war crimes at Buchenwald, and she was found guilty like the rest of her 30 co-defendants, spared the gallows. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (26:46.356)
I mean, and even then there's a misogynistic piece of this idea that we can't kill a woman, or we certainly can't kill a pregnant woman, or even kill her after she's had the baby. Again, is in its weird backwards way also kind of misogynistic.

Tomaz (27:09.514)
For sure, not to mention that the prosecutor throughout the trial spends about as much time asking her about her parenting and interviewing her sister about whether she was a good mother and whether she slept around and all this kind of stuff. And of course, these are questions that weren't asked of any of the other defendants. And I would have thought that at the time that the prosecutor would have thought it immaterial, certainly if the male soldiers were sleeping around. But for Ilza, this somehow was a key indication of her character.

killed.

Waitman Beorn (27:39.732)
Yeah. And this other piece that I think, I think it bears, it bears a bit of discussion, you know, not, not out of salaciousness or voyeurism or sort of gratuitous, you know, gruesomeness, but this idea of the human skin, the collecting of tattoos. I think it's, I think it's important because I think it stands in for something beyond, beyond what it is.

I remember when I was, I did the, the German historical Institute used to do a two week trip to Germany for graduate students, back in the day. And I did it. It was great. It was for, we learned paleography and went to all kinds of archives around Germany. And we went to Buchenwald. And I remember we went to the, to talk to, the archivist and she had like a filing cabinet or a, a, a wall, a metal wall cabinet and she opened it up and there were the shrunken heads.

from Buchenwald and the the the tat the tattoos, the human skin sort of stretched out, which I thought was really, really weird to sort of just have like in the or either to have sort of sitting there in the in the archivist room or even to show us because it's kind of like, why, why are you showing us this? Like your little cabinet of yeah, yeah, we saw them and we were kind of like, what's because it was weird. She was kind of like showing us her cabinet of curiosities or whatnot. Very weird.

Tomaz (28:57.346)
Yeah, wow, I never saw those when I was there.

Tomaz (29:02.988)
Yeah, as bizarre. Right, right.

Waitman Beorn (29:08.646)
but the, but the, and the epitome of this is, is this lampshade made of human skin, this idea of this lampshade made of human skin. And it's weird because there's something that it seems like it, this idea of making things out of human skin in the Holocaust is, is an idea that never dies. Cause I know that a while back, someone had found a book and there were a couple of years ago, someone found a book and they were curious whether or not it had been made of human skin. There was this whole thing about it.

Tomaz (29:16.098)
Mm-hmm.

Tomaz (29:32.526)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (29:38.078)
And I guess in a certain sense, Ilsa is like patient zero for this of like, you know, she is accused of both pointing out prisoners with tattoos that she liked that she would allegedly would like to have as keepsakes and having this this lamp, which, by the way, is missing. We don't know where it is or what the deal is with the lamp.

So can you talk a little bit about this? Because actually, I didn't know this, but the actual truth behind the tattoos is sort of equally awful and unrepresentative of sort of the depravity of the Nazi state. Just she's not really involved in it. But can you talk a little about both the sort of history, but also the sort of role this plays in the popular imagination and this focus on these sorts of things?

Tomaz (30:10.507)
Mm-hmm.

Tomaz (30:26.388)
for sure. mean the story of the lampshades and the human skins really was born at liberation. Once the Americans arrived

They invited a good number of people from the press to come and view the scenes of atrocity there because they really wanted to hit home and communicate just how horrible a scene that they found there was. But one thing that a team, in fact, I believe of prisoners did was set up a table and with American permission, certainly, they collected from the pathology lab various articles.

made from human remains and assembled them there. And you've mentioned some of them, there are human heads, shrunken human heads, there are portions of tattooed human skin, there are preserved human organs, and there is this lampshade purportedly made of human skin. And it is set up for the benefit of the press and the press files buy it and it is photographed and it is talked about. And of course, these...

Articles, for understandable reason, really sort of become icons of Nazi savagery, the idea that one would make gloves or book bindings out of the skin of human prisoners, I think just caught the imagination of the world as just such a deeply, deeply depraved practice. And I think the shrunken heads also, of course, there's this whole kind of

tribal symbolism of shrunken heads in the sense that this is this deeply uncivilized act that the Nazis were really into and it's barbaric and it's brutal and the difficulty for Ilze begins when rumors start to swirl that she had been the source of this that some had said that if you you know if you go into the commandant's house there is a lamp there and it appears to be made of human skin

Tomaz (32:31.694)
somebody who worked in her house said, well, there was a lamp that could have been parchment, could have been human skin. used to dust it every day and I never knew what it was. And gradually rumors begin to accumulate that in fact, the lamp and the human skin objects had been made for Ilza. Now it's important to point out all these objects were found in the pathology lab in 1945, in April of 1945 during the liberation.

Ilza had been arrested in August of 1943 and had not been back to Buchenwald since, had the contents of their house emptied and sent off to Czechoslovakia for reasons I won't bore you with. So where those objects actually would have been at Buchenwald is a bit mysterious and certainly helps to make the connection to Ilza much murkier. But essentially,

these objects were attributed to her by people in the pathology lab. There were people in the pathology who said, well, we really didn't know where those went, but some people claimed that it was for the commandant and that the commandant may have given them to Ilza. And the reality seems to have been, however, that all of the human skin articles, especially the tattooed human skin articles that were found in the pathology,

actually had their origins elsewhere. And that was that there was an SS doctor who worked in the pathology lab at Buchenwald, a guy named Erich Wagner, who actually was in the process of writing a dissertation, trying to establish some kind of absurd connection between the practice of tattooing one's skin and habitual criminality.

And so many of those who worked in the pathology directly while these skins were around said this actually had nothing to do with Ilzacach. This was Eric Wagner. He had this interest in tattoos. And they also said the prisoners weren't murdered for these. He would go searching around in the morgue. And if he saw a body that had a tattoo, he would ask us to remove it and it was done for him. So the connection between Ilzacach and these tattooed skins was very, very weak and based almost exclusively on

Tomaz (34:45.102)
rumor and hearsay. There was nobody, in fact, at any one of her trials who could directly testify to any connection between Ilse and these objects of human skin. They appear to have been this kind of weird curio collection of this SS doctor named Wagner that were kept following this bizarre doctoral research that he was engaged in. To the best of our

Waitman Beorn (35:12.47)
And so what role does the disease, I because on some way, on some levels, as you goes back to what we talked about earlier, you know, on some level, these things, while gruesome and awful are again, are sort of distracting from the mundane of and the normality of sort of Nazi crimes, you know, because they, they, as you point out throughout the book, you know, there are people on trial, you know, with her, around her.

Tomaz (35:32.482)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (35:42.696)
at the same time as her who are legitimately, you know, involved in mass murder, you know, physically hands on, you know, involved in mass murder. And and yet there is this focus on this again, this sort of cabinet of curiosities items, you know, that and tying her to them. How do you think those things are connected? Like why? What is the what is the allure of trying to tie her to to these items?

Tomaz (35:49.528)
Yes.

Tomaz (36:12.81)
Well, I think, I mean, A, I think there's no getting around the fact that people had a morbid curiosity in them. I just don't think we can ignore that fact. And I think that they became these kind of icons of atrocity. And I think Ilza was the perfect sort of person to attach them to in that she had been accused also of sexual deviance.

and this idea that she was a sexual deviant who was collecting human skins, I mean they were really just building her up into this this diabolical monster of a character that really is entirely unrepresentative, in fact, of what the horrors of Nazism and the concentration camps were. I mean this type of bizarre sexual behavior that she was again

on very flimsy evidence, largely rumored hearsay alleged to have practiced, has nothing to do with concentration camp crimes really. These tattooed articles of human skin, I mean, yes, they may have come from concentration camp victims, but again, it doesn't epitomize or get us any closer to understanding the horrors of Nazism and how hundreds upon hundreds of thousands were murdered in concentration camps and millions in extermination camps.

It's really a distraction. What's particularly interesting in Ilza's case is that in each of her major trials, we'll exclude the SS trial, but at the trial at Dachau, the prosecution comes out guns blazing about this human skin charge. And by the end of the trial, they virtually dropped it. They're just not even mentioning it anymore because they recognize that their case has entirely fallen apart.

And they say, well, yes, but you did seem to write down the numbers of these prisoners who were then flogged. So she should be found guilty. And the exact same thing happens in the West German trial. It's like they contemplate these charges. They talk about the human skins. They very quickly recognize that from a legal standpoint, there is nothing to base their case on. And they kind of disappear.

Tomaz (38:27.304)
weird sleight of hand that happens in all of this is that the diabolical charges disappear, but somehow Ilse remains the monstrous character on trial that everybody wants to see hang. And so there is this irony that at the end of her trial, her West German trial that sends her to prison for the rest of her life, she has been condemned and is still condemned in newspapers as the person who made human skinned lampshades even though the court

completely discounts that charge, but nonetheless, the newspapers report on her being sentenced to prison for all of these gruesome crimes. She winds up going off to prison and condemned as this greatest of all Nazi criminals when actually at her German trial, the most serious thing that she was convicted of was the incitement to murder.

Now, not that that's a minor crime, but this simply means, again, that she had jotted down the number of a prisoner who she did not believe was working hard enough. She went over and talked to an SS man and said, hey, look at that guy over there. And the SS man went over and allegedly beat that person, likely because of what Ilza had told him and died. Now that's a horrifying crime.

but in the pantheon of Nazi crimes and the types of crimes that as you've suggested that her co-defendants at Dachau for instance were accused of, it's nothing, let alone her husband. mean, the irony that everybody in the world, or not everybody in the world, but people who are interested in the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust all know who Ilse Koch is, can tell you about her crimes. Who knows who Karl Koch is? It's like her husband was the...

Waitman Beorn (40:16.31)
Right.

Tomaz (40:18.382)
The commandant of Buchenwald, the commandant of Majdanek, the commandant of Sachsenhausen, a person who, you know, individually oversaw and coordinated the killing of tens of thousands of people. And somehow he's forgotten and also not even, I think, thought of as so monstrous as his wife, who, what does she do? Well, allegedly she dresses maybe a little scantily. She rides around on a horse. you know, she, she, she,

Waitman Beorn (40:36.542)
Yep. Yep.

Tomaz (40:47.586)
perhaps exercises some authority over inmates by pointing them out to the Camp SS. And she looms large as one of the greatest sort of monsters in the history of this whole concentration camp story. So it's quite bizarre. And I think it does come down to gender.

Waitman Beorn (41:05.918)
It's really interesting because, you know, the, the, the Lindbergh trial of the, one that I'm most familiar with, you know, of these, perpetrators, predominantly from the Inoske camp, but also basically from the city of Lviv. You know, these are guys who are trying, who are being accused who have murder, you know, committing murder with their own hands kinds of things, you know, and they're getting like seven years. you know, and, Ilsa Kock gets life imprisonment twice.

And again, to be clear, don't think neither of us are suggesting that she's a great person, or even is really a victim. But just in terms of the logic of the prosecutorial sort of justice. And what's ironic, in a certain sense, we'll come back now, I guess, to the American trial first. But it seems like that actually the American trial was prosecuting under a

Tomaz (41:42.36)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (42:03.094)
formulation of Nazi crime that Germany has only just now arrived at, right? Because now they prosecute the guy from Auschwitz. And basically it was precisely on this idea, we can't prove that you actually did anything yourself, but you were part of this criminal complex and therefore guilty. But of course it takes, in case Germany, you know, a 50 year arc.

Tomaz (42:10.734)
Right. Yes.

Waitman Beorn (42:30.26)
to get there in the middle of which it says we're only going to convict you if you actually we can prove that you physically individually did something.

Tomaz (42:31.754)
Right.

Tomaz (42:35.69)
Right. And interestingly, they actually embrace these laws for exact opposite reasons. The United States embraces this approach because they have like initially 30,000 concentration camp perpetrators in custody, and they have to figure out how to process them galore, you know? And so this is about efficiency. And then of course, the German situation, the current German situation, exactly opposite. It's like we really have nobody left to prosecute so we can use this law.

Waitman Beorn (42:51.701)
Right.

Tomaz (43:04.344)
to reach out to the few people who we can still connect in some fashion to those mass crimes.

Waitman Beorn (43:10.09)
Yeah, so let's talk about the American trial. What are the challenges for the Americans trying to prosecute, well, first of all, all of the people in Buchenwald, but then also, and also, Koch? How did, because this trial is really interesting, you know, in sort of.

Tomaz (43:24.802)
Well, in some ways, you know, I mean, from a prosecutorial perspective, they didn't have a lot of challenges because the chief prosecutor, William Denson, who also prosecuted other major concentration camp trials at Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp trial proper, the Mauthausen trial, Buchenwald, et cetera, he essentially figured out a formula for dealing with these things. And he's incredibly

Successful so he knows that there's a few thousand people still in custody by 1945 when the trials are begin that are going to begin that they've All been connected to these concentration camps and he simply comes up with a prosecutorial strategy That basically says We're not going to try and get all the worst people at once. That's not the idea what we're going to try and get is a group of

defendants in the dock, somewhere between 30 and 60 of them at a time. We're going to figure out or choose people who represent every single aspect of the camp's functioning. Then we'll bring them to trial. We'll show through the expert witness of survivors and others what occurred at the camp, how the camp functioned, and then we'll simply turn to these guys in the dock and say, well, you formed this function, you formed this function, you were the cook, you were the chef.

You were the mechanic, you were the arrest bunker chief, and you've painted this holistic picture of what the camp looked like, and now you have a group of defendants in the dock who represent all those functions in the camp, and through this common design charge, you say, well, essentially, you're all guilty. And the panel of military judges, none of whom are...

judges in any sense that we would recognize. Only one of them has to have legal training. They're just senior military officers. They buy this time and again, and they convict usually 100 % of the defendants often to death. So the Mauthausen trial that I wrote about, 61 people on trial after a grand total of about 40 minutes of court time for each defendant, 58 of them are sentenced to death.

Tomaz (45:41.578)
and 49 ultimately are executed. So this is about a very rapid system of justice designed to net as many people as possible and march them off to the gallows as quickly as possible. So I'd say they actually had an immensely streamlined way of doing this. And as I said, also gathering evidence was not as difficult as it might otherwise be for criminal trials of the variety that we're used to because the rules of evidence were so lax.

hearsay evidence was officially permitted in court. The rule was that the court would hear any evidence, I think the wording is, of probative value to the reasonable man. So they take hearsay evidence. They will accept the evidence or the testimony of witnesses who are not present in court to be cross-examined. So this was really the prosecutor's

case to win in each case and they did William Denson left with a 100 % rate of conviction just about and with dozens and dozens of concentration camp perpetrators sent off to the gallows because of his efforts and the Buchenwald trial was just one of those trials in that in that series and Ilze fell within that model

Waitman Beorn (47:05.466)
There's a really interesting thing that happens then, you know, to move the story along a bit. Ilsa is sentenced to life imprisonment. And then later on, under the auspices of Lucius Clay, her sentence is commuted, which is interesting because Clay sort of does some really horrible things, I think, in terms of commuting some really bad people's sentences. But in this case,

Tomaz (47:23.04)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (47:33.084)
It seems like what happens is because there really aren't any lawyers involved in determining guilt in the actual trial, he then turns it over to some lawyers who then say, actually, there's not evidence to support this conviction, which then leaves to the part that I want to hear you talk about, which is a U.S. Senate hearing into Ilsaacocke.

Which is crazy in a certain sense, because, you know, I mean, like, you know, again, she's not really this important person in the actual sort of factual history of the Holocaust. But yet now, now there's a Senate hearing about this. So can you talk a little about about this? Because this is a really fascinating sort of element to it.

Tomaz (48:08.408)
Right.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, just to get, know, earlier, you were talking about the sentences meted out. So Koch is sentenced to life in prison. And of course, the Americans are sentencing all kinds of other people to life in prison. Einsatzgruppe, know, leaders and things like this. And as they are being released from prison in the 1950s, nobody's batting an eye. But this will not be the case with Ilze. So Ilze's case comes up for review.

And as you say, it goes through three, in fact, distinct levels of judicial review. It goes to the judge advocate for war crimes, his office. It goes to something called the War Crimes Review Board. And in each of these cases, the panels of lawyers who review her case are basically scratching their head. And they don't just say, well, there's some weaknesses in the case. I mean, the reports they write are scathing. They're like,

there is nothing here on which to hold this woman. This makes no sense. And this needs to be reversed. And Lucius Clay essentially says, well, I think we need to give her something for her part in this common design. And so they agree on commuting her sentence from life to four years. Now, what occurs at that point is that, you know, the announcement of her sentence in the United States had been, you know, eagerly awaited for her.

Trial back in the us was reported on more than the trial of any other perpetrators save for You know top top Nazis at nuremberg I counted for instance that about 97 articles came out on ilse koch In the weeks and months that followed the beginning of her trial. I mean the united states The was was following this keenly So what happens is there's you celebration ilse has been sentenced to life in prison and then it comes out that she has in fact had her sentence commuted to four years and there is

Tomaz (50:07.55)
absolute outrage in the United States. There is no understanding nor does it seem any deep desire to understand what the basis of this commutation is. And instead, you really have this mini scandal that plays out in the newspapers, in the media, in op-eds of people saying this is the woman who stripped people of their skins for their lampshades and now she's, you know,

Walking away and how do we have any self-respect as a nation and it really touches off a firestorm? I mean it reaches crazy cultural levels. I mean woody guthrie the great, you know pioneer of a protest song pens a song called ilza clock to lodge his protest there are street protests, you know, lucius clay responsible for the commutation of her sentence visits new york in like 1948 and 800 people show up and picket his

His speech, some of them are carrying lampshades and with signs that say, have you forgotten Ilsa Koch and why are you coddling Nazis and all this kind of stuff. I mean, it's a big deal. And it's such a big deal that essentially it reaches the halls of Washington. President Truman steps in and says he wants to understand what exactly all this is all going on about. And eventually a Republican Senator named Homer Ferguson.

I think who was partly interested in the case, but partly sees an opportunity to embarrass the democratic administration of Harry Truman, essentially calls for a Senate hearing. And lo and behold, we have then a Senate investigation into the Koch case where the judges are called to appear and to testify, the prosecutors, the witnesses, and this goes on for some time at the end of 1948. And you have the sort of

re-litigation of the case in some ways, though not with any kind of binding outcome. So what occurs at the end of those hearings? Well, essentially these senators write a report saying she shouldn't have been released. But however, she absolutely can't be tried again because this is the process of double jeopardy or this violates the principle of double jeopardy. Sorry, my child is banging at my door.

Tomaz (52:29.044)
and that our hands are sort of tied, but that we need to find a way to prosecute her nonetheless. And this sets off essentially a diplomatic process with the newly emergent independent West German state where the Americans begin leaning on the West Germans to say, know, at Dachau when we tried her,

The court did not have jurisdiction over German and Austrian nationals. So if you guys were to try her only for crimes against German and Austrian nationals, it would not violate the principle of double jeopardy where you can't be charged twice for the same crime. And the West German judiciary, I think eager to illustrate their independent and sort of anti-fascist credentials, then begin their whole own process.

of building a case against her and eventually bringing her to trial in West Germany in 1951.

Waitman Beorn (53:35.444)
And there's this really interesting moment before we get to the German trial in the, that you talk about in the book, you know, where, I have to say, you know, as a former army guy, was really proud of those army lawyers because the, senators keep trying to say, well, you know, couldn't you figure out a way to convict her of something else and couldn't you find a way? And they stuck their guns and they were, they said, no, evidence doesn't support this. but throughout there's this.

Tomaz (53:49.294)
Mm-hmm.

Tomaz (53:56.834)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (54:05.678)
They're trying to ask these questions like, wouldn't it be possible for Truman to step in and reverse the decision? You know, all these things that are based and the witnesses almost to a person with the exception of the former prosecutor sort of say, look, we can't claim to be a nation of laws and justice and allow people to just sort of step in and change something that is unpopular at the moment. So it's actually

Tomaz (54:12.215)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (54:32.078)
you know, it's kind of a heartening positive moment in sort of the idea of justice, you know, that comes out of the Senate hearings.

Tomaz (54:38.656)
It is, yeah. Yeah, one of the funny things, and the person who probably I think comes off worst is the chief prosecutor, William Denson, because he sort of changes his tune at these hearings. The whole time he says, well, he uses all of these very gender-laden descriptions of her as one of the most diabolical women ever to live and a person without a shred of female feeling and all this kind of stuff.

And in the process, he says, yes, she's one of the greatest monsters in history. And at the same time, he says, yeah, and this whole human skin lampshade thing, I never really thought that was really true anyway. It's not really something that we need to focus on here. And so again, you have this weird juxtaposition where he's trying to maintain the idea that he that she deserves to be sent to prison for life for being one of the most monstrous Nazis of all, while at the same time.

recognizing that the basis for that whole sort diabolical image of her is completely without evidence. So it's a, or fact for that matter. So it's a funny moment.

Waitman Beorn (55:45.558)
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's really interesting, sort of the way that this sort of is then shifted onto the German courts. And there's a really interesting interplay here between what will become, I suppose, East Germany and will become West Germany. And also the...

There's a fascinating sort of interplay that you pull out in the book in terms of survivors and politics and that, you know, there's a group of survivors who are communists and who actively work against the prosecution sort of up until the last minute. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of how that how those politics works out?

Tomaz (56:16.878)
Mm-hmm.

Tomaz (56:33.502)
Right, well there's a real jockeying between East and West Germany over who will then try Ilse Koch. I think both states want an opportunity to sort of show their anti-fascist credentials and in the process also label the other as as weak on the Nazi past. And so the VVN, which it is the Association of Communist

Tomaz (57:02.776)
former victims of Nazism, they actually, they're all associated, of course, with the East and they want her to be extradited to the East to be tried there. And so they essentially decide that they're gonna boycott the West German efforts, that they feel that the trial deserves to be held in Weimar, that Buchenwald falls within the Eastern sphere and that's where the trial should take place.

And they are concerned that she will get off with a slap on the wrist as many other Nazi perpetrators were getting at that point in time from the Western allies or from, or the Western back German judiciary at this point, Western judiciary. And so they essentially decide to try and sabotage the trial in a way by saying, you know, we have the evidence, but we are not going to participate and we are going to ask that no other

Buchenwald survivors participate in this trial, which you are trying to build a case for. Ultimately, happens is that wisely, I think over time, they recognize that they have to soften their stance. They recognize that this case is going ahead, that they have been able to draw together a dossier of evidence. They traveled to the United States to speak to other survivors there. They do build a case.

but it's not a particularly strong case. And I think the VVN start recognizing that this is not in their best interest, not to participate, that the case as it stands could fall apart without their participation. And as much as they would have liked the case to have occurred in Weimar, I think the sense is that they better jump behind this case and give it their full support.

less they wind up with nothing, no trial in Weimar and Ilzakoff free and back on the streets. And so they do eventually more or less come around.

Waitman Beorn (59:01.664)
And so what is the outcome then of this trial in Augsburg in the early 50s?

Tomaz (59:11.122)
The outcome is that the prosecutor begins with something like, and I can't remember the exact number, but something like 207 charges against Il-Zacocq. He drops like 175 of them right off the bat, including anything to do with human skins. In the lead up to the trial, he had really tried to be able to charge her directly with murder. And he chased down a lot of

witnesses who he felt might have been able to tie her herself to direct killing. There was one account that a number of people said that there had been a mass killing of Jews in the quarry and that some had seen her there. Somebody else suggested that she may have had a pistol and he desperately wants to be able to charge her with actual murder, but he ultimately can't. There's just no evidence that she ever participated in direct killing at the camp.

So the ultimate outcome of the trial is that she is found guilty of one count of instigating the murder of an inmate that is through reporting an inmate to an SS man who is then killed and then instigating attempted murder.

instigating beatings and then a few charges of sort of common assault. So at no point is she then found guilty of killing or extreme violence herself, but merely, I shouldn't say merely, obviously these are serious charges, but with the instigation of SS men to act violently against others. She nonetheless is then sentenced to life in prison.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:02.698)
there's an interesting moment, again, the book is full of these, like, sort of the, one of the preeminent survivors, Oigan Kogan, who writes, you know, one of the first in some ways histories of the Third Reich, and he was a survivor of Buchenwald, and he's kind of like one of these sort of survivors. And he sort of is like coerced to testify.

Tomaz (01:01:12.706)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:29.99)
by the, by the prosecutor, when he sort of says, like, I got nothing, I don't really have anything to sort of. To add to this, that's going to be helpful. And I'd really, I'd really rather not, and I'm busy and I'm not feeling well and all these sorts of things. And then the prosecutor forces him to come.

Tomaz (01:01:44.13)
Yes. Yeah, it's a very bizarre moment that I think they really feel like they need Kogan's kind of star power and his authority at Buchenwald and as a very effective chronicler of Buchenwald. But when it comes to Ilse Koch, he really says what most witnesses say, which is, I heard a lot of bad stuff, but I never saw it myself.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:45.948)
It's crazy. It's just like a really weird.

Tomaz (01:02:12.898)
And so in the end, it's true, he really adds virtually nothing to the trial or his testimony adds nothing. And to Kogan's credit, as you say, he told them that ahead of time. He says, I really don't have anything to add here about Ilzakach. I really can't say much. And yet they insistent on bringing him in and it doesn't, it really doesn't lend much to the outcome.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:35.316)
And so Ilsa is then is then convicted a second time and sentenced to life in prison. Can you talk a little about

about what happened next, because this is kind of the first of all, one of the parts of the book that I found really, really fascinating, because as we talked about before we started recording, I think one of the challenges or problems that a lot of us, I've done this as well, you know, we tell a story about the Holocaust, whether it's history of a concentration camp or the history of individuals. And oftentimes we go up to the part where they're prosecuted and convicted or they have their post-war outcome.

And then the story sort of ends, but you don't, you do a really good job, I think, of taking it actually all the way through her life, but through her time incarcerated. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of what happens next?

Tomaz (01:03:19.299)
Mm-hmm.

Tomaz (01:03:27.182)
Sure, I mean, by the time she began serving her sentence, I'd say she was, psychiatrically she had really slipped and even during her trial at Augsburg, she had some major psychiatric breakdowns. She was often not in court. She was institutionalized, et cetera. When she winds up in Eichach,

prison to serve out what will be 16 more years of her life before her suicide in 1967. She spends her time in part penning annual petitions for review and for clemency, which get her absolutely nowhere. In character, she offers no contrition whatsoever. She presents herself in her petitions as a victim.

And she in fact, I mean, she is also, I think, deeply mentally ill by this point in time. And so her petitions also begin to take on, you know, wacky dimensions. A few things, a few strange things happen to her while she is in prison. One thing that occurs is that the child that she bore from her

pregnancy while in American custody was taken from her at birth. But when he is something like 17, he discovers his mother's identity late in her life and begins to visit her and write letters. And this kind of rekindles her spirits because for, you know, for her first decade in there, I mean, she's quite confident that she deserves to get out, but that she's not going to get out that essentially there's a cabal of vengeful Jews she feels who are going to prevent this.

And so she's quite buoyed by the presence of her son, but that takes a sad turn when he starts asking her for money. And she really descends in her late, later years into a really sort of.

Tomaz (01:05:34.57)
really disturbing psychosis really. She begins to write letters to her daughter Gizela, to her son Artwin, and others that are are really unmoored from reality but nonetheless I think really shed light on her own perceptions. She never at any point in her trials expressed of course wisely any sort of antisemitism. She now begins to write copiously about Jews, the idea she's convinced that there are vengeful Jews who

the prison authorities are literally letting to come into her cell at night to rape her while she sleeps, so much so that she actually allegedly starts using her cutlery to, you I don't want to get too graphic here, but to insert cutlery into herself in order to prevent her rape at the hands of vengeful Jews. And this is actually reported, I saw this in the log of the,

of the prison authorities. She was in fact doing this. She then starts writing letters, convinced that she has married somebody in prison and she starts to talk about herself and this fictional lover named Brenhoff. She starts to write to her children bizarre things about warning them not to work for Jews and that they will try and impregnate them. It gets

truly bizarre. It's this truly diabolical, paranoid mess of kind of anti-Semitism and delusion. She's hearing things. She thinks that they have implanted a radio transmitter in her ear to communicate messages. I mean, she really falls apart as a person, but she's still lucid enough nonetheless, as I say, to continue to make these annual petitions for clemency with the help of a lawyer.

lawyer in the end who says, look, I think we need to change tack. We really need to be contrite here. See if we can get you some sympathy by writing that you recognize some of the things that you've done. And she is outraged even at the suggestion. And she continues to say that she remains the victim of authorities, that she's done absolutely nothing wrong, that she will be viewed as a victim and that she even has, you know, she says,

Tomaz (01:07:58.016)
one of these days the tables will turn and it might be you that are in prison and things like this. And ultimately she gets a final letter in 1967 from the state making it abundantly clear that her release is just not gonna happen, that it's not politically viable, that she's showing no remorse and that if there is no change in her character, there is no way to release her. And I think she takes that.

as a final sign that there is no way ahead for her. And so that night, she simply scrolls a few words on a piece of paper to her son, Uwe, something like, there is no other way death for me is a release, and hangs herself in her cell, bringing it into her saga.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:43.059)
And that's actually, you know, the, the, ending part is actually again, indicative of her kind of as a person, because as you point out that she gets this new attorney who sort of says, look, let's just try to at least kind of portray you as perhaps possibly, you know, a bit, regretful or, you know, apologetic. And not only does she disagree with that, but she literally writes a letter directly.

Tomaz (01:09:13.386)
Yeah, refuting it.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:13.486)
you know, to the to the Ministry of Justice that basically guarantees like torpedoes the whole thing and guarantees that she will have zero chance of it, you know, which is sort of like, you know, vintage vintage Ilsa Koch. And of course, her son then commits suicide at some point in the which is kind of another sort of tragic piece, because, course, you know, that person is not involved in any of this. But clearly, that was a difficult it's difficult to be the son of Ilsa Koch.

Tomaz (01:09:26.966)
Absolutely, absolutely.

also.

Tomaz (01:09:39.585)
Right.

Yes, exactly.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:43.271)
So as we sort of come to a close, can you try to tell us, know, why is this significant? What is the significance of sort of this entire Ilsaacocke story to our understanding of the Holocaust or Nazi perpetrators?

Tomaz (01:10:00.59)
Well, I think much of the importance of studying Ilzakach is not only separating the legend from the actual factual historical character, but accounting for the creation of the legend and what that tells us about how these characters, if we can talk about them as characters from the Holocaust, sort of emerge. And so I think...

Ilzacok's story is really a story about, I think that tells us so much more about

Tomaz (01:10:41.746)
know, contemporary perceptions of Nazi criminality at the time than it does about Ilse as a factual person. I think Ilse Koch's story tells us so much about people's need to scapegoat. I think it tells us so much about the German desire to sort of build up some kind of monstrous character that can then easily be attacked as the ultimate symbol of Nazism.

And in the process to make the sort of everyday complicity in the support of Nazism seem like nothing, you know, to be something that can be washed or swept under the carpet.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:26.134)
this is something that really, I think that, sorry to interrupt, but think this is something that the tattoos and the skin makes. It's such a great microcosm of this, right? Because what we're offered is the story of the tattoos on the human skin is this crazy, sadistic, perverted monster of a woman. You know, and how outrageous that is. Whereas the truth of it is really, it's a guy writing his PhD dissertation.

which is which is which is so I mean it's it's it's not any less horrible but it is so absolutely the norm in Nazi Germany and make that you know of like here's a guy who is a doctor he wants professional advancement he wants to get a PhD so he has that up his he has access to these human beings who doesn't care about and he can do whatever you want with them and so he he harvests their tattoos you know which is horrible

Tomaz (01:11:57.026)
Yeah.

Tomaz (01:12:06.966)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tomaz (01:12:20.686)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:25.751)
But it's the normal, it's a normal sort of Nazi life, whereas it's not this crazy woman running around getting off on collecting people's tattoos.

Tomaz (01:12:39.33)
For sure. I mean, I think one thing that her story really, you know, solidified for me was the fact that it really becomes clear that trials, and of course, a lot of us write about trials and write a lot about trials, really trials are not nearly as effective as I had thought in sort of creating durable historical narratives and dominant historical narratives of historically significant crimes. You know, it's like,

If you were to, well, as I have done in a way, if you are to understand Ilza Koch through the evidentiary record, assembled for these court cases, and read through the judgment, you would have a relatively accurate idea of who Ilza Koch was. But in this case, her many trials really didn't generate

the image of Ilzacach that we have come to know, like the main sort of repository of documentary evidence and the main venue where that evidence is kind of aired and made public actually has surprisingly small impact on the Ilzacach that we have continued to know as the bitch of Buchenwald in the history of the Holocaust. And so it's interesting to see where then that

that myth making comes from. And I think it is very much found in this case in the sort of public hysteria that follows the liberation of the camps, the honest and understandable outrage of everything that it has discovered there. But then this need to pin that outrage on a uniquely diabolical character rather than to kind of

step back and try to digest how hundreds of thousands of people and often relatively ordinary and forgettable people were in fact responsible for this machinery of destruction.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:53.748)
Yeah, I mean, and I also want to highlight something that I think you do really well, which is, again, it's run through this entire conversation. It's definitely front and center of the book. But there's also the gender piece of this, you know, and the fact that, you know, the press, because I've read, for example, lots of press reporting of the Inowska trial because it was really important and it was the second largest trial in German history. And everybody's in there. But nobody's talking about what they're wearing or whether they look like they're in shape or like, you know, but but repeatedly.

Tomaz (01:15:04.674)
So, yeah.

Tomaz (01:15:12.438)
Uh-huh.

Tomaz (01:15:19.18)
Exactly. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:23.316)
you know, these tropes come through of whether, whether she's attractive or not, and whether she's gained weight or lost weight, how much she might weigh and you know, what she's wearing and what her hair is like.

Tomaz (01:15:29.474)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even the shape of her breasts. I mean, this is like Newsweek talking about the shape of her breasts. You know, I mean, it's major. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:35.742)
Yeah. Yeah, you know, and that speaks, I think, to an even larger historical phenomenon, which is this idea of, you know, even just women, women criminality in general and sort of, you know, this sort of this sort of piece. But you'll for listeners, you really should pick this.

Tomaz (01:15:53.134)
Yeah, and there's this disturbing thing that you can't get away from in Ilza's case, which is people are repulsed by it and her exercise of violence and this whole allegation around human skins, but there's no question there also, or a segment of them are titillated by it. And that's inescapable, and nothing points to that more clearly than these sort of, well, than Ilza, She-Wolf of the SS, these pornographic cult films.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:20.95)
Mm-hmm.

Tomaz (01:16:23.032)
that are based on her stories that are like runaway successes. And in the most horrid taste, this is like a female dominatrix in a concentration camp who's an SS woman who is forcing people to sleep with them and then beating them and doing medical experiments on them. I mean, it's just the most horrible melange of violence and rape and everything. But...

It clearly titillated because it became as I write in the book a runaway success at the box office It spurred three sequels ill's the sea wolf. She wolf of the ss, you know, and I think that we have to also uncomfortable as as it is integrate that kind of fascination into our understanding of why her story Becomes what it is. You know, I think there's no question that people are outraged and disgusted but people are also

Kiddilated and fascinated and the press press plays into this I mean you I mean that the New York the Newsweek reportage for instance on her trial at Dachau that I quote where it talks about her prominent derriere and all this kind of stuff literally the reporting on the trial is a Is a centerfold in Newsweek that includes in the centerfold prisoners hanging from gallows and Ilza in a bathing suit, you know, and it's and it's

It's this intentional juxtaposition of sort of sexiness and atrocity and it's deeply disturbing and it helps to fuel this phenomenon and root it very much in gender and gendered perceptions of violence. And I think it's really at the base of the story and at the base of what happens to her in court, the basis of her convictions, the reason why her prosecution is pursued so zealously when Nazi perpetrators are

who crimes are a far greater magnitude, either aren't pursued or get off after a few years in prison. And here you have Ilze serving more time in prison than any other Nazi perpetrator, save for Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess. Quite remarkable.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:31.572)
Well, Thomas, we've taken up a lot of your time. Thank you so much. Could we close with, we always ask, what is one book that you'd recommend in the Holocaust that's been influential in your work or just in general?

Tomaz (01:18:47.402)
I think that answer would change from time to time, but right now in part because I just assigned a chunk of it to my students and had a discussion of it and it really worked. And it's always been a book that I just think is so incredibly constructed. And that is Into That Darkness by Gita Sareni. The story more or less of her interviews with Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.

And I just think it's a remarkable book in her approach to Stangl and the way that she, think so successfully, but gradually sort of permeates his consciousness and is able, sometimes it's frustrating, but ultimately is able to sort of get him to morally reckon with what.

He was responsible for Treblinka and the way that she then shores up that image of Stangel that she gets with him from him personally by also interviewing members of the Sonderkommando and the work Jews who knew Stangel at Treblinka and you know speaking of people who got off with slaps on the wrist, know senior SS man at Treblinka like Franz Sochemel and others who are

course, freemen in the 1960s or 1970s and getting their take and I just think it's a remarkable kind of journey into the Nazi conscience and one that I, it just really stayed with me and it stays with me to this day.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:30.292)
And also his wife, I should mention, which is a fascinating piece of that story. And speaking of Commandant's wives, you know, I mean, again, you Well, thank you so much. Again, to our listeners, if you have a chance, please give us a rating, leave us a comment. Those things are really helpful. And once again, Tomas, thank you so much for coming on and talking about it.

Tomaz (01:20:32.8)
and also his wife, absolutely. And the role his wife plays? Absolutely, absolutely.

Yes.

Tomaz (01:20:55.138)
You're most welcome. Thanks.