Margarete Ilse Koch (; 22 September 1906 – 1 September 1967) was a German war criminal who committed atrocities while her husband Karl-Otto Koch was the commandant at Buchenwald. Though Ilse Koch had no official position in Nazi Germany, she became one of the most infamous Nazi figures at the war's end and was referred to as the "Kommandeuse of Buchenwald".
Because of the egregiousness of her alleged actions, including that she had selected Jewish prisoners for death in order to fashion lampshades from human skin and other items from it, her 1947 U.S. military commission court trial at Dachau received worldwide media attention, as did the testimony of survivors who ascribed sadistic and perverse acts of violence to Koch—giving rise to the image of her as "the concentration camp murderess".
However, the most serious of these allegations was found to be without proof in two different legal processes, one conducted by an American military commission court at Dachau in 1947, and another by the West German Judiciary at Augsburg in 1950–1951. the "Queen of Buchenwald", the "Red Witch of Buchenwald", "Butcher Widow", and "The Bitch of Buchenwald".
She committed suicide by hanging at Aichach women's prison During this period, Germany had not yet recovered from defeat in World War I and proved both economically and politically turbulent. In 1932, Koch joined the Nazi Party.
thumb|Buchenwald 16 April 1945. Collection of prisoners' internal organs and two human heads (upper left) and also examples of tattooed skins (foreground)
thumb|Buchenwald 16 April 1945. Collection of prisoners' internal organs. Photo taken by Jules Rouard, [[military volunteer incorporated to the 1st American Army, 16ème Bataillon de Fusiliers]]
In 1936, she followed Koch to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he had been posted as Commandant. They requested permission to marry from the SS Office of Racial and Settlement Affairs, which investigated their "fitness for marriage". This was determined according to racial criteria and Ilse provided evidence of her Aryan ancestry.
In July 1937, Karl gave up his post at Sachsenhausen in order to establish and take command of Buchenwald. Karl and Ilse had two daughters and one son, This crime, however, has been said to be apocryphal. While various objects fashioned from human skins were discovered in Buchenwald's pathology department at liberation, their connection to Koch was tenuous, given that she had not been at the camp since the summer of 1943. The more likely culprit was SS doctor Erich Wagner, who wrote a dissertation while serving at Buchenwald on the purported link he saw between habitual criminality and the practice of tattooing one's skin. When Karl's friend, SS chief Heinrich Himmler heard of Karl's arrest, however, he ordered him released. Karl was nonetheless relieved of his duties at Buchenwald, and sent instead to command Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. Ilse Koch continued to live in the SS settlement at Buchenwald in Karl's absence. However, on 24 August 1943, both Karl and Ilse were arrested following a renewed investigation led by SS judge Konrad Morgen. Morgen's indictment, issued 17 August 1944, formally charged Karl Koch with the "embezzlement and concealing of funds and goods in an amount of at least 200,000 RM," and the "premeditated murder" of three inmatesostensibly to prevent them from giving evidence to the SS investigatory commission. Ilse was charged with the "habitual receiving of stolen goods, and taking for her benefit at least 25,000 RM". While Ilse Koch was acquitted at the subsequent SS trial in December 1944, Karl was found guilty, sentenced to death, and ultimately executed at Buchenwald only days prior to its liberation. Following the trial, Ilse Koch was releasedhaving spent sixteen months in the Gestapo prison in Weimarand moved with her two children into a small flat in Ludwigsburg. She was arrested by American occupation authorities in Ludwigsburg on 30 June 1945, after being recognized on the street by a former inmate of Buchenwald.
Trial before the U.S. Military Commission Court at Dachau
thumb|Ilse Koch at the U.S. Military Tribunal in [[Dachau, Bavaria|Dachau, 1947]]
thumb|Koch being sentenced to life in prison on 14 August 1947
Following her arrest by American occupation authorities, Koch was chosen to stand trial alongside 30 other defendants accused of having committed war crimes at Buchenwald. The defendants would be tried by an American military court at Dachau in 1947 and be prosecuted by Lieutenant Colonel William Denson for the single charge of "participating in a common design to commit war crimes." According to this expansive charge, the prosecution was not required to show that Koch or any of her codefendants had committed any specific act of violence or atrocity, but only that they had in some fashion aided and abetted the functioning of the murderous criminal enterprise that was Buchenwald. Denson described her during the trial as "no woman in the usual sense but a creature from some other tortured world." She avoided a probable death sentence since she was seven months pregnant with her fourth child at the time, by an unknown father. The War Crimes Review Board, a separate advisory body made up of military and civilian lawyers, conducted its own review, and similarly concluded that there was no reliable evidence that she had prisoners killed, "nor is there any evidence in this record of any kind that she at any time ever ordered any article made of human skin."
Upon receiving the reports of the War Crimes Review Board and his legal staff, and after reviewing the trial record himself, Judge Advocate Colonel J.L. Harbaugh noted, "I can't see anything on which we honestly can hold the accused. There is no question but that she was tried in the newspapers, and suffered both before and during her trial from her unique position as the only woman at the camp." Harbaugh labelled her sentence "excessive" and recommended that General Clay reduce her sentence to four years. Heeding the recommendations of the U.S. Army's judicial branch, Clay reduced the sentence on 8 June 1948, on the grounds that "there was no convincing evidence that she had selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins, or that she possessed any articles made of human skin".
However, Clay also suggested that Koch could be tried under West German law: "I hold no sympathy for Ilse Koch. She was a woman of depraved character and ill repute. She had done many things reprehensible and punishable, undoubtedly, under German law. We were not trying her for those things. We were trying her as a war criminal on specific charges."
The reduction of Koch's sentence to four years resulted in an uproar when it was made public on 16 September 1948, but Clay stood firm by his decision. Years later, Clay stated: