Every so often I like to zoom in on certain creepy topics and characters in history so we can appreciate the horror of humanity on a micro as well as macro scale, and today I decided to share with you the tale of one of the only Nazi women to be convicted of war crimes in the wake of World War II: Ilse Koch, the so-called Butcher Widow and Bitch of Buchenwald (one of the more brutal concentration camps in Nazi Germany). The case of Ilse Koch is interesting for a few reasons, the primary one being she was the wife of a concentration camp commandant, not the commandant herself – but her husband had already died by the time Allied forces liberated Buchenwald. Was Ilse truly the monster that ordered the flayings of tattooed prisoners so she could keep their inked skins as sick souvenirs? Or was she really just the wife of a Nazi who was prosecuted because her husband could not be? Let’s dip our toes in the last few years of World War II, and learn more about Ilse, her husband Karl-Otto, and the camp that they would run together which would see the torturous deaths of tens of thousands of prisoners – Buchenwald. Why examine the history of this particular concentration camp and this particular Nazi? Because Ilse Koch has rightly or wrongly gone down in history as one of the most cruel women to have existed, one with a penchant for creating lamp shades from the skins of prisoners, and regardless of whether or not she really did even half the things she’s accused of, her story is still at least a bit Creeptastic!

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