This documentary examines the life of Ilse Koch, one of the most notorious women associated with Nazi Germany’s concentration camp system. The wife of SS commandant Karl Otto Koch, she lived with her family in a villa overlooking Buchenwald, where prisoners endured forced labour, hunger and disease while the Koch household benefited from property taken from inmates. Former prisoners later described Ilse as capable of extraordinary cruelty despite the fact that she held no official position within the camp. The film traces Koch’s early life in Dresden, her decision to join the Nazi Party in 1932, her marriage to Karl Koch and the couple’s years at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. It also examines allegations concerning her treatment of prisoners and the enduring controversy surrounding tattooed human skin and objects discovered at Buchenwald after liberation. Although later courts found insufficient evidence to establish Koch’s personal responsibility for selecting tattooed prisoners, modern forensic examination has confirmed that at least one lampshade associated with Buchenwald was made from human skin. The documentary also follows the remarkable investigation of the Koch family by Nazi judge Georg Konrad Morgen and Ilse Koch’s complicated post-war legal history. Arrested by American authorities in 1945, she faced an American military court at Dachau and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After that sentence was controversially reduced, West German authorities brought a new case against her. In 1951, following testimony from hundreds of witnesses, she again received a life sentence. Through survivor testimony, court proceedings and the history of Buchenwald itself, this film explores how the commandant’s wife became one of the most infamous figures associated with the concentration camps and how fact, testimony and legend became intertwined around her name.
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