Special Guest Blogger: Ilse Koch

My school reports notes that i was a polite and happy child so you may be wondering how i ended up being known as The Bitch of Buchenwald and prosecuted for war crimes, well are you sitting comfortably? Then i shall begin.
My childhood was completely unremarkable and i began working as a bookkeeping clerk at a time when Germany’s economy was struggling to rebuild itself after World War I, and i and many of my friends joined the Nazi Party as Hitler’s ideology sounded attractive to Germans as the country faced hardship after losing the Great War and it felt like the Nazi Party would restore and perhaps even bolster the fraught economy.
As well as owning a snazzy swastika armband, i met and married Karl Otto Koch who was the Commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany.
Being a dutiful wife i jumped at the opportunity to become involved in my husband’s work, and over the next few years gained a reputation for being one of the most feared Nazis at Buchenwald.
One of my first orders of business was to use money donated (some may say stolen) from prisoners to construct an indoor sports arena where i could ride my horses.
I even often rode outside the arena and into the camp itself so the prisoners could see what their money had bought although some seemed less than enthused which upset me but whipping them to within an inch of their life soon cheered me up again.
At Buchenwald the Prisoners sweated and toiled until breaking point, hell, at the end of most days we worked them so hard they wished they were dead but as a woman i was tasked with cajoling the children into the gas chamber but i was able to select which adults i wanted gassed and i chose the ones with the nicest tattoo's but they didn't die for nothing. I skinned them to retrieve the tattooed parts of their bodies before being incinerated, and made pretty lampshades from them.
Such was our success at Buchewald the Nazi's wanted our help elsewhere because killing people is way harder than it looks. Most of them completely refuse to stand still and let you gas them into oblivion which is totally unreasonable so my husband was transferred to Lublin to establish the Majdanek concentration camp but i remained at Buchenwald until we were both arrested by the SS for skimming profits from the camp that should have gone to the SS.
My husband was sentenced to death and shot by firing squad but i was acquitted for lack of evidence but i was then arrested by the Americans at the end of the War and charged with participating in a criminal plan for aiding, abetting and participating in the murders at Buchenwald.
I was released after 4 years and then rearrested by the German authorities and charged with incitement to murder, incitement of attempted murder and committing grievous bodily harm and again sentenced to life imprisonment.
As for what i did next, not many people are able to make the transition from the famously difficult war criminal circuit all the way to national treasure so i hanged herself with my bed-sheets.