The Femme Fatal
True Crime - Femme Fatale Style
The Femme Fatal tells the stories of women who commit crimes, blending true crime, pop culture, and astrology to explore power, obsession, and the darker side of femininity.
The Femme Fatal
The Bitch of Buchenwald: Isla Koch
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In this episode of The Femme Fatale, we step inside the gates of Buchenwald to tell the story of Ilse Koch, wife of the camp commandant, convicted war criminal, and one of the most mythologized women of the 20th century. We explore her crimes, her trial, and the international outrage that followed. Then we break down a pop culture legacy that is stranger than fiction, and dive into the astrology.
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Welcome to the Femme Fatal, a true crime podcast with an astrology twist. I'm your host, Stacy Dotson. Each week I'll be joined by a guest host because this femme fatal prefers not to work alone. Hey, welcome back to the femme fatal. And today I'm joined again with my good friend Tracy. You may remember her from the Eileen Woros episode. And uh who are we talking about today, Tracy? Guten Morgen, Stacy! Guten Morgen, Tracy.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna talk about Ilse Koch, the bitch of Buchenwald. We're gonna go back to Nazi Germany, late 1930s, 1940s, into the 12 eras of the Third Reich. In those 12 years, approximately 12 million people were murdered, not by random wartime crossfire, not by aerial bombings, not by urban battle chaos, but by systems deliberately built for imprisonment, torture, forced labor, execution, and mass killing. When most people think about the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, the image of a woman usually does not come to mind. But there is one woman whose name permanently became tied to the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp in East Central Germany, where more than 56,000 prisoners died. That woman was Ilsa Koch. Ilsa was often described as a red-haired, green-eyed boxam woman. Isn't that a great word? It is. Buxam is a great word. She would later become known in popular media as I previously stated, the Bitch of Buchenwald. Her story became infamous for allegations of extreme cruelty, shocking post-war trials, and lingering questions involving evidence, propaganda, and historical truth. Which honestly makes her a far more complicated figure than many people realize, and one that has totally always fascinated me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, she's an you know eccentric, horrible individual.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Yes. A monster.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00A monster, for sure.
SPEAKER_01So Ilse Koch was born Ilsa Kohler on September 22nd, 1906, in Dresden. After graduating high school, she worked in a bookstore and later as a secretary. In May of 1932, she joined the Nazi Party. And that was prior to Hitler taking power in 1933. So she was in it before then. Oh yeah. Okay. She was she was in it. And at that time, women made up about 7.5% of the party, so such a small amount. In 1936, Ilse became employed as a secretary within the Nazi party and was assigned to her first concentration camp. Let's see, Zachsenhausen. Zachenhausen. It was there that she met Carl Otto Koch, an ambitious and rising SS officer. So just for any listeners that aren't familiar with who the SS was, right? It's short for Schutzstaffel. It essentially translates to protection squadron. And it's what began as Hitler's personal security force.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Do you happen to know how many concentration camps there were? You said her first concentration camp.
SPEAKER_01This was a concentration camp, more like a work camp, not the ones that would later become death camps. A lot of them were literally like this concentration camp didn't have a gas chamber. It wasn't It wasn't Auschwitz.
SPEAKER_00Um listen to this. More than 44,000 camps. But again, they were labor camps, transit camps, and then the extermination camps.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And then the SS was basically oversaw all of those camps, right? I mean, that became one of their duties. So Ilse and Carl married on May 25th, 1937, in an SS pagan ceremony, and together they would have two children. Just one month after they were married, Carl was transferred to the newly opened Buchenwald concentration camp and was made commandant, placing him in charge of the camp's operations, prisoner labor systems, punishments, and internal structure. Because of Carl's position, Ilso wasn't just living near the concentration camp. She was actually inside of it. So it's important to note that the way that these camps were structured, it's not like they lived off the property, like they were there.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, looking into it, it seems like these camps they had, you know, where they were keeping the prisoners, but they also had housing, like houses on the property, correct?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. There's even that like that prison that closed. Did you ever go out to that prison in Sugarland that closed down?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I never went, but I know which one you're talking about. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It was cool. Yeah. So we did a photo shoot out there one time. We like broke in and got into it. And on the property, they had housing. So it was like, I I imagine, like in my mind, like that it was like similar to that where like you you had a little like cluster of homes off to the side, and then like you would literally walk like a few hundred feet to the prison. So I'm assuming it was like that kind of structure. In my mind, I've been there. So the allegations, right? Let's talk about the allegations. From the time Ilse arrived at Buchenwald with her husband, stories began to circulate about her presence and daily life there. It seemed to start for her with visibility, right? Not her visibility, but the visibility of things on prisoners. So tattoos, scars, birthmarks, any visible marks that made prisoners stand out in a system built to a race identity. In survivor accounts, um, the visibility sometimes meant people were noticed, separated, or treated differently once they were inside the camp. So as the stories go, right, she would be out there when the prisoners were being brought in. And say, like, for instance, someone had a birthmark on their face. If she saw that, she would ask them to be separated. She would ask the guards to separate to that person. And again, as the allegations say that in situations like that, those people that she picked out disappeared. She wanted everybody uniform. Yeah, but there was another reason. Okay, we'll get there. Yeah, yeah. So she's described as present also during all of the punishments and, like I said, the selections of prisoners. Not observing from a distance, but like literally there. There were accounts that describe prisoners being beaten or killed after allegedly looking at her in ways that were conceived as disrespectful or maybe like lustful. Other claims describe her moving through the camp and reporting prisoners for real or imagined infractions, triggering punishment carried out by SS guards, which she would watch.
SPEAKER_00So she was a little voyeuristic. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01So, but then the allegations further escalate, and here's where the birthmarks and different scars maybe came tied in, is when objects were removed from her camp residence after the allies um liberated the camp. Yeah. Lampshades, book covers, and other items allegedly made from human skin. And these are the ones that had the either tattooed skin or scars or, you know, any kind of a large mole. So that was her thing. So gross. So in 1941, things at Buchenwald were already starting to crack internally. Carl, Ilse's husband and the Commandant, was removed from Buchenvault in 1941. This was following SS investigations into corruption, theft, misuse of camp property and resources, and abuse of authority within the camp system. So it's important to be clear here, right? Carl wasn't being removed or investigated because there was any care about the prisoners or the brutality happening. He was being removed because there was corruption within their own system. So during the same investigation, obviously Ilsa was also taken into SS custody, but she was not formally charged. And so she was basically like let go. Yeah. She obviously then had to move from Buchenwald. She left the camp environment with her children and returned to life outside the camp while her husband's case continued within the SS system. So between 1941 and 1945, she is no longer actively living at the site, but the camp is still operating. Then in 1945, ironically enough, Carl is brought back to Buchenwald and executed there by a Nazi firing squad. Oh, he was executed at the camp where she had been, where they had lived, and where he had supposedly, you know, uh was was doing corrupt things, right? So that was April 5th, 1945. So on April 11th, 1945, so just a few days later, Buchenwald is liberated by Allied forces. Just a few days later. Okay. Just a few days later, right? And then that's when the Nazi camp systems begin to collapse. So then Nazi Germany officially surrendered on May 8th, 1945. And then shortly thereafter, investigations expand to all people connected to concentration camp operations and administration, which means Ilsa. Ilsa was on their list. So she was found and taken into custody in June of 1945. She'd been living outside of Munich. So again, 1945. So in January 1946, Ilsa is formally charged with war crimes tied to her time at Buchanvault, including the allegations of prisoner abuse and involvement in mistreatment inside the camp. In 1947, she is tried by a U.S. military tribunal at Dachau, one of the early Allied war crimes courts established in the American occupation zone after World War II. The case centers on her alleged involvement. She is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. By a US court. US court, right. However, in 1949, again, U.S. military decided to review the case as part of a broader reassessment of early war crime convictions, particularly cases where parts of the evidence were based heavily on testimony, right? Which is basically almost all of hers. So they then decide they basically overturn the ruling. So she set free. She's set free. She's released. She's released. Well, actually, it's like reduced, right? And she's released. They commuted her sentence. Yeah. And she's been there, what, three years? So she was in custody like three years. Then, after like major public backlash and continued investigation into the Nazi era crimes, West German authorities reopened the case. So thought she was good, but now she's not. Right. So now she's re-arrested in 1950. And this time she's brought before a civilian court in the newly formed West German legal system, independently prosecuting wartime atrocities outside of Allied military tribunals. So, and then in January 1951, she is convicted again and sentenced to life imprisonment. And that ruling ultimately stands. So she remained in prison in ICOC, a women's prison in West Germany, until she hanged herself on September 1st, 1967.
SPEAKER_00It's weird. Like these people can inflict this torture on people, but when they feel like they're being tortured, they just end it. Oh yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So just another case of that. Unless we've got a situation where she really didn't hang herself and somebody just got in there and removed her.
SPEAKER_00Like Jeffrey Epstein.
SPEAKER_01You never know, right? She was Jeffrey Epstein. You never know. There's still that speculation that Hitler didn't commit suicide. Oh yeah, that's right. There is. Right? Remember? Maybe she is still alive and well in Argentina.
SPEAKER_00Who knows?
SPEAKER_01That's where they all go. The Nazi war criminals that went to Argentina. So crazy, right? So, and the thing is, like, there are definitely, you know, the artifacts, the lamp shades, and a lot of that. That's what I was about to ask. Yeah. What about that? Yeah, even though she wasn't living in the house whenever they found it, those were the things that she said, like there were allegations that she supposedly commissioned all of those. So when she left, she had decorated because remember, they had taken over the camp when it was first built. She and her husband were the first family there. She decorated. Oh, okay. The items, they had to leave everything behind when he was arrested and she was forced to leave. So everything stayed as is. So when the Allies liberated the king, everything within that home were tied to her and Carl.
SPEAKER_00I just had a thought that I hadn't thought of yet, but it's like, so you when we use the word commissioned when you said she commissioned those, she made the Jewish workers make that stuff, right? Absolutely. Oh my god. Can you imagine that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, some of the testimony came from people that supposedly had to make those items.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_01Right? Can you imagine? And they had to do it or risk the right.
SPEAKER_00I mean, a lot of people did a lot of things just because, you know, the alternative, right, was torture or death. Yeah. Wow. Oh, she was a lot. Okay, so it's pop culture time, and I have to say Ilse Coch has a pop culture footprint that is genuinely wild for someone who's not exactly a household name. So what I want to start with is what's current. Because she actually just showed up on Netflix in Monster, the Ed Gain story. Have you seen that? Yes. You did? Okay. So it came out in 2024, and Ilsa Koch is a character, and she's played by Vicky Cripps. And the show draws a direct line between Cock and Ed Gain, the Wisconsin serial killer. And like Ilse, he had this morbid obsession with fashioning objects out of human skin. And the show frames it as Gyne having been influenced by media coverage of her trial. And it's not historically accurate. Gyne had a lot of hallucinations when he was in the psychiatric hospital, and that was probably one of them. But the connection made great TV, and Vicky Kripes is phenomenal. So that one is absolutely worth watching. And since you watched it, I'm gonna sidebar, not relevant to this, but they also recreate the famous Buffalo Bill Dance from Silence of the Lambs in the show. I thought that was awesome.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So what did you think of it? So Gain, there was, you know, whenever they did arrest him, they did find artifacts in his house made out of human skin. So, you know, like definitely there was some like truth in the Netflix series. I know that he had been also like a World War II history fanatic. I like that they picked her out, Ilsa specifically. I don't know how much of that is true, but it's definitely was pretty awesome. I liked the way they did that.
SPEAKER_00I read an article with the creator of the series, and he said that they didn't find anything historically accurate on their connection with her specifically.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But he was obsessed with World War II history, so his hobby was, you know, making things out of skin. So obviously he uh probably was a little bit fascinated with her too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I do like that she showed up though. I thought that was awesome. The only thing that bugged me was um his voice.
SPEAKER_00In real life, he was soft-spoken like that, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he was, but that was a little like extreme, and then I didn't like the fact that he had a girlfriend because there's nothing to like historically show that he had the girlfriend.
SPEAKER_00In real life, he'd asked, he'd known someone growing up, from what I understand, and he asked her to marry him, and she said no. So they just took liberties with all of that.
SPEAKER_01No, I know, and you can kind of be like that was what was happening in his head. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Kind of looking at that, but yeah, it was just like well, that's what I think a lot of like Ilse Cook stuff was when he was at that time, he was in the mental hospital, right? And so he was hallucinating conversations and stuff like that. So, anyway, Jax from uh Sons of Anarchy played him. Yeah, yes. Okay, so here let's go to this one. Now, if we go back to 1975, and this is where it gets wild, there's a grindhouse exploitation film called Ilsa Shewoof of the SS. And the character Ilsa is loosely, and I'm using that word loosely, based on Ilse Cock and starred Diane Thorne, and it was immediately controversial. Now, do you remember the film critics Siskel and Ebert? Yes, of course. Okay, so Gene Siskel actually called it the most degenerate picture he had ever seen play downtown. It's got graphic violence, torture, very explicit content, and it was a massive financial success. It became a staple of Grindhouse and Drive-in theaters, and it spawned three sequels. Three. And then I found it on Plex, and we watched it the other night, and I had to stop and start because it's just like getting through it was tough because it's such poor taste to take one of the most tragic things that's ever happened in our history and sexualize it. So, you know, needless to say, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I don't think I'm gonna try to find the other three. Have you watched it yet? I haven't. It's on Plex and it's uh pretty, yeah. I mean, maybe you should watch it just to understand.
SPEAKER_01I wanted to, I just like I didn't think to look for it for Plex, and I was like, I don't know where to find it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'll put it on my list.
SPEAKER_01Okay. We can talk about it. Yes.
SPEAKER_00Now, okay, for the listeners who want something more serious, there are two documentaries I found, and unfortunately, I didn't have the time to watch them. So I'm just gonna read some stuff I found on it. But the first is The Bitch of Butchenwald from 2010, directed by Jerry Miller. And it puts her whole career in the context of Nazi Germany, uh, her trial, her releases, the re-imprisonment. It's thorough, it doesn't exploit any of you know the stuff that really she kind of gets exploited for. So it's definitely more on the serious side. It's a documentary. And then the second I read about is an episode from the series Most Evil Men and Women in Our History from 2002, and it's heavily survivor testimony based. Nice. I really want to watch that. It's 45 minutes long, and it's if you want to go deeper after you watch the other documentary, this is the one that with the survivor testimony. And then there's a book, The Beasts of Book and Wald, full title. This title's great. Carl and Ilsa Cock Human Skin Lampshades and the War Crimes Trial of the Century. That's the full title of the Whoa. Oh. So it's part of uh the Book and Wald trilogy, and it's probably the most comprehensive modern book specifically on her. And it covers the trial, the lampshade mythology, the legal battles. If you want the full story from start to finish, it's the one to read. I haven't read it yet, but I would be interested in that. Totally. Yes. And then one more thing I wanted to mention, because it's fascinating to me, is Woody Guthrie, the American folk legend, wrote a song called Ilse Coq in the late 1940s. Wait, that was the title of the song? Her name was the title of the song. And so he wrote it in the late 1940s while he was living in Brooklyn, and he was deeply shaken by the Holocaust. And when the U.S. military briefly commuted her sentence, he was furious and he put that fury into lyrics. The song references the international outrage directly with the lines of old Isla Coq was jailed, old Isla Kok went free. And now his writing during that period was heavily influenced by his second wife, Marjorie, and her mother. And her mother was a Yiddish poet named Alyssa Greenblatt. So there was a deep Jewish connection running through everything he was creating at the time. He recorded a demo at home, but those lyrics just sat in the Woody Guthrie archives for decades. And then in the early 2000s, his daughter Nora invited a klezmere group called the Klesmatics to set those forgotten lyrics to music. And the result ended up on their 2006 album Wonder Wheel, which won a Grammy. So Ilsa Cock ended up to be immortalized in a Grammy-winning klezmere record. Did you say the Clasmatics?
SPEAKER_01The Clasmatics. Not to be confused with the Plasmatics.
SPEAKER_00Not to be confused with the Plasmatics.
SPEAKER_01I need to know what the Clasmatics look like.
SPEAKER_00I mean we should. Maybe we should like cover some of their songs.
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_00I'm surprised you have a song about Eileen. You need one about Ilsa. Maybe you can just cover that song. I can just yeah, cover Guthrie's song. Yeah. Do that. Okay, so I'm so excited. I can't wait to get into the astrology. You ready? Yeah. Woo! So, first, quick foundation. When most people think about astrology, they think about, you know, their sun sign, their basic, like I'm a Taurus, you're a Sagittarius, right? That's the sign the sun was in on the day you were born. But a full birth chart is so much more than that. Every planet, the moon, Mars, Venus, Saturn, all of them, they were somewhere in the sky when you were born. And each one tells a different part of your story. To get the full picture, you need the date, the place, and the exact time of birth. And we actually have all three for her. Pulled from her real birth certificate. Yes. So we can do her whole chart if we wanted, but I mean, you know, that would be a really long podcast. So we're just gonna do some main parts, okay? With each sign, I've touched on this in an episode before, but each sign has 30 degrees. So like your Sagittarius has 30 degrees, my Taurus has 30 degrees. And if you look at it sort of like a ruler, zero degrees is the very beginning of the sign, and like 29 degrees is the very end. And where your planet falls on that ruler matters because the closer to the end of the sign, the more that planet has fully absorbed everything that sign has to offer, for better or for worse, right? Now, with that in mind, let's get into it. So Isla Koch was born September 22nd, 1906, at 1045 at night in Dresden, Germany. Her son, her core identity is Virgo. And specifically, it's 28 degrees Virgo, which means she's at the very end of Virgo, right on the edge of Libra, and it matters because Virgo is a sign obsessed with order and systems and the physical body. Virgo rules health and medicine and the act of categorizing things. Whoa. I know. And this is God, this is good. I read this to Greg last night, so yeah. I just got chills. So these are people who want to analyze, dissect, and organize and view the body as something that needs to be studied and managed. And at 28 degrees, she had absorbed all of that to the extreme. So now her moon, your moon sign is different from your sun sign. While your sun is your core identity, your moon is your inner emotional world. It's how you feel things, what you need to feel safe, what's going on underneath, the surface that most people never see. And Ilsa's moon was in or is in Scorpio, was in Scorpio. She's no longer with us. So maybe. Maybe. Maybe she's in Argentina. So they say. Yeah. So Scorpio moon is, and I don't say this lightly, like one of the most emotionally intense placements in the zodiac. So Scorpio moon people feel everything at maximum volume. Scorpio's a water sign. And most of the water signs are emotionally intense. And to have a moon in a water sign, think about the moon's effects on the tides and apply that to your emotions. So Scorpio moons, they are drawn to power, to darkness, to what other people consider taboo or forbidden. They have an almost magnetic pull towards the hidden and transgressive. They need to possess and to control things. And it doesn't operate quietly or gently ever. So we already have a Virgo sun that wants to organize and categorize the body, and a Scorpio moon underneath that that is drawn to darkness and power and transgression. Things that I can do now because I have the time. So we're going to get a little deeper, right? And here is where I want to introduce the concept of a square. In astrology, when two planets are about 90 degrees apart from each other in the chart, picture a clock. And the two planets are sitting at positions that would make a right angle. And that's called a square. And a square means tension. It means that these two energies are fighting each other. They don't cooperate. They don't flow. They push against each other constantly. So her Virgo sun and her Scorpio moon are in a square. And the Virgo wants order and cleanliness and control, but the Scorpio moon wants intensity and transgression and possession. And so they are at war with each other inside her all the time with no resolution. Now, where her moon is sitting in the chart, this is where houses come in. So again, go back to a clock. There are 12 houses on the clock, and each one governs a different area of life. The first house is the self, the seventh is relationships, the tenth is career and public legacy. And her Scorpio moon is sitting in the fifth house, which is the house of pleasure, self-expression, and performance. Whoa. I know, right? It's where we play, it's where we show off, it's where we act out who we are. So her deep, dark, intense Scorpio emotional world isn't just sitting quietly inside of her. It's in the house of performance and expression. It wants an audience, it acts out and it gets pleasure from those actions. Wow. Okay. And so this is where I'm so excited. Because I've never been able to talk about the rising sign before. I never had a time of birth for any of the people we've covered, right? And so your rising sign is also called your ascendant. And it's the sign that was coming up over the horizon at the exact moment you were born. And it's your mask. It's the first impression you make, it's the energy you lead with, and what the world sees before it gets to know you. So you need an exact birth time to calculate this. And that's why that birth certificate matters so much. And her rising sign is cancer. Cancer rising projects warmth, domestic, and nurturing energy. It is the gracious hostess, the woman who makes her home feel welcoming, who wants everyone around her to feel taken care of. And she literally demanded that the prisoners who worked at her house call her Ein Gondai Freud. And that is German for gracious lady. That is her cancer rising doing exactly what it does: performing warmth as an identity. I think this is what allowed her to host parties at Villa Cook and genuinely feel like a respectable woman of the house. Her Mars is in Sagittarius. Mars is the planet of action, how you assert yourself, how you fight, what drives you to move. In Sagittarius, Mars acts on ideology. It doesn't act from cold calculated logic. It acts for a cause, for a belief system, and she believed she was supporting the Third Reich. Absolutely. She felt like this was her duty. And so I always say it, the chart doesn't make anyone do anything. Think of astrology like the weather, not the destiny. But there are people walking around right now with Scorpio moons who are extraordinary, transformative, and deeply empathetic humans. So what the chart does is show us the energies at play, and in her case, those energies in one of the most evil environments in modern history, surrounded by an ideology that gave all of it permission, those energies expressed in the darkest way they possibly could. The Virgo sun catalogued and organized, the Scorpio moon craved the darkness and needed to possess it. The Cancer Rising performed the warmth and the grace, and the Mars and Sagittarius made it all feel righteous. So that was the astrology. Had a birth time. Yeah, that is so cool. Wow, that was pretty intense. Thanks for joining me this Sunday morning-ish. Yes. Thanks for having me. Ald wieder sein, Stacy. Yes, I should have looked up more German words before this. What's no bueno in German? Nein Gut. Nein gut, is that what it is?
SPEAKER_01I mean, no is nein. Gut is gut. Nein gut. Nein gut. Not sure if that's how they use it, but we will. We're just gonna use it.
SPEAKER_00We're gonna use it that way. Because Ilsa was nein gut. She was nein gut for sure. But yeah, like that's such an interesting story, and I'll be honest, I didn't know anything about her. When you texted me like a week ago, you were like, I'm gonna do this, and I had to look her up, and I was like, I've been wanting to do something to do with wars, or you know, like focus on some people during wartime. Okay, I'll link to a bunch of stuff in the description. So thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. Bye. The Femme Fatal, created and hosted by Stacy Dotson, produced by Mark Williams, music by Marsha Yingling, Chad Chang, and Greg Loicano.