TOMAZ JARDIM PUBLISHES BOOK ON THE NOTORIOUS ILSE KOCH

May 01, 2023

History professor Dr Tomaz Jardim, who teaches courses on the world wars and the Holocaust, published a new book on one of the Third Reich’s most notorious war criminals. Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald” (Harvard University Press) tells the story of a German woman accused of committing a range of sadistic crimes against prisoners interned at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where her husband was the commandant. A series of high profile trials and inquiries brought global attention to Koch and the shocking accusations against her, and she became one of the leading symbols of Nazi depravity. When a US military tribunal’s review of her case resulted in a sharp reduction of her initial sentence – from life to four years –public outrage over this perceived leniency led to demonstrations, US Senate hearings, and a subsequent trial that sentenced her to life in prison, where she died by suicide in 1967.

Dr. Jardim’s book demonstrates that Koch was certainly guilty of heinous crimes, but that many of the grislier charges brought against her never were proven in court. He contends that Koch became a scapegoat for a German public seeking to downplay its own complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich, and that both American and German courts treated her more harshly than many male perpetrators who were responsible for more significant offences. Ilse Koch on Trial shows that revulsion over the idea that a woman could engage in the acts of depravity attributed to Koch clearly contributed to her infamy and the zealousness of her prosecution. As Dr. Jardim explains, “My research was driven by a desire to figure out how a relatively inconsequential woman without any rank or official position in the Nazi state somehow came to embody its most brutal excesses.”