Ilse Koch Sentenced to Life

Date: January 15, 1951 • Location: Berlstedt, Germany

Ilse Koch, wife of Karl-Otto Koch, the Nazi commander of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court.

Margarete Ilse Koch 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".