Ilse Koch, a symbol of barbarism in the Third Reich, spent almost 24 years in prison, even as Nazi perpetrators who committed far greater crimes during the Holocaust received relatively light sentences or often escaped prosecution altogether.

The wife of Karl Koch, the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, she acquired notoriety for allegedly having ordered the murder of tattooed inmates so as to collect their skins for the production of lampshades.

This widely circulated but “unsubstantiated” story epitomizing Nazi savagery turned Koch into a household name, writes Tomaz Jardim in Ilse Koch On Trial (Harvard University Press). Yet this sensational atrocity commonly attributed to her was, as he contends, “apocryphal or unproven.”

Jardim, a professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, argues that “gender norms and expectations” shaped Koch’s image and her moral and criminal culpability.

Deplored for her violation of female norms, she was cast as the antithesis of German womanhood and was seen as a lightning rod for the popular condemnation of Nazi crimes, notwithstanding the fact that she never held an official position in the Nazi hierarchy.

In postwar West Germany, she was put on trial twice, first in 1947 in Dachau and then again in 1950 in Augsburg. These high-profile trials provided the political leadership with the opportunity to show resoluteness in dealing forcefully with the remnants of Nazism and to distance themselves from the 12-year Nazi........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)