Ilse Koch on Trial

Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald”

Tomaz Jardim

$61.95

Hardback

In stock
Ready to ship

QTY:

English

Harvard Uni.Press Academi
15 June 2023

Biography: general; History; European history; The Holocaust; War crimes; Legal history

"An authoritative reassessment of one of the Third Reich's most notorious war criminals, whose alleged sexual barbarism made her a convenient scapegoat and obscured the true nature of Nazi terror.

On September 1, 1967, one of the Third Reich's most infamous figures hanged herself in her cell after nearly twenty-four years in prison. Known as the ""Bitch of Buchenwald,"" Ilse Koch was singularly notorious, having been accused of owning lampshades fabricated from skins of murdered camp inmates and engaging in ""bestial"" sexual behavior. These allegations fueled a public fascination that turned Koch into a household name and the foremost symbol of Nazi savagery. Her subsequent prosecution resulted in a scandal that prompted US Senate hearings and even the intervention of President Truman.

Yet the most sensational atrocities attributed to Koch were apocryphal or unproven. In this authoritative reappraisal, Tomaz Jardim shows that, while Koch was guilty of heinous crimes, she also became a scapegoat for postwar Germans eager to distance themselves from the Nazi past. The popular condemnation of Koch-and the particularly perverse crimes attributed to her by prosecutors, the media, and the public at large-diverted attention from the far more consequential but less sensational complicity of millions of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich's crimes.

Ilse Koch on Trial reveals how gendered perceptions of violence and culpability drove Koch's zealous prosecution at a time when male Nazi perpetrators responsible for greater crimes often escaped punishment or received lighter sentences. Both in the international press and during her three criminal trials, Koch was condemned for her violation of accepted gender norms and ""good womanly behavior."" Koch's ""sexual barbarism,"" though treated as an emblem of the Third Reich's depravity, ultimately obscured the bureaucratized terror of the Nazi state and hampered understanding of the Holocaust."

By: Tomaz Jardim
Imprint: Harvard Uni.Press Academi
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780674249189
ISBN 10: 0674249186
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 15 June 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Tomaz Jardim is the author of The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany, winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. A former fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he is Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Reviews for Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald”

Fascinating and highly original. Deploying a number of previously neglected sources, Jardim not only explores Koch's life and trials, but also raises intriguing questions about how guilt can ever be established when all but the most circumstantial evidence is absent. A high-caliber contribution.--Elizabeth Borgwardt, author of A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights In a stroke of genius, Jardim shows how the figure of Ilse Koch--popularly depicted as a bad wife, a worse mother, and a sexually threatening woman--helped frame the Holocaust as being, fundamentally, about psychological perversion and deviation from the gendered norms of civilization. In so doing, he makes the role of gender in postwar Nazi trials not only legible, but inescapable.--Devin O. Pendas, author of Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945-1950 The definitive portrait of Ilse Koch, whose caricature as a sadistic nymphomaniac has for too long dominated representations of Nazi female perpetrators. In Jardim's judicious hands, Koch's story reveals much about the Nazi system, postwar justice, and the sexism that permeated both, while firmly establishing Koch's guilt and paranoid antisemitism.--Wendy Lower, author of Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields