September 22, 1906 - Ilse Koch
Koch's case illustrates how wartime atrocity narratives can outpace the evidentiary record — and how difficult it becomes to separate documented cruelty from legend once the machinery of public outrage is in motion. She held no official rank at Buchenwald, yet her proximity to power and her reported conduct toward prisoners made her a focal point for postwar prosecution and international press attention alike. Two separate legal processes, American and West German, found the most extreme allegations against her unproven, though courts still found sufficient basis to imprison her. What her case leaves behind is a complicated picture: genuine harm on one side, and on the other, the way certain figures become vessels for broader horrors that may exceed what can actually be attributed to them.
From Wikipedia
Margarete Ilse Koch (née Köhler; 22 September 1906 – 1 September 1967) 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".
Because of the egregiousness of her alleged actions, including that she had selected Jewish prisoners for death in order to fashion lampshades from human skin and other items from it, her 1947 U.S. military commission court trial at Dachau received worldwide media attention, as did the testimony of survivors who ascribed sadistic and perverse acts of violence to Koch—giving rise to the image of her as "the concentration camp murderess".
However, the most serious of these allegations was found to be without proof in two different legal processes, one conducted by an American military commission court at Dachau in 1947, and another by the West German Judiciary at Augsburg in 1950–1951. Harold Kuhn and Richard Schneider, two U.S. Army lawyers tasked with conducting the official review of her conviction at Dachau, noted that "in spite of the extravagant statements made in the newspapers, the record contains little convincing evidence against the accused ... In regard to the widely publicised charges that she ordered inmates killed for their tattooed skin, the record is especially silent".
That the wild claims were dismissed as lacking evidence did little to sway public opinion. She was known as "The Witch of Buchenwald" (Die Hexe von Buchenwald) by the inmates of the camp because of her suspected cruelty and lasciviousness toward prisoners.
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