A re-trial of Ilse Koch, notorious German war criminal who has been charged with ordering inmates of the Nazi camp in Buchenwald murdered in order to use their tattooed skins for lampshades and book covers, will begin on April 22 before the central court in Karlsruhe, it was reported here today.
The sadistic “mistress of Buchenwald camp” was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947, but her sentence was later reduced by Gen. Lucius D. Clay, then American military commander in Germany, to four years. The commutation of sentence aroused public indignation in the United States and led to a Senatorial investigation.
At the end of her four-year term in an American military prison, in October 1949, Ilse Koch was turned over to German authorities who re-arrested her to face another trial for her war crimes- this time by a German court. She has been charged on five major counts, one of which is the shooting of 24 Jewish prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1941, when she was the wife of the commandant of the camp. The German court last year sentenced her to life imprisonment, but she appealed for a review of the sentence.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
