Latest / Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood / 204. The Bitch of Buchenwald - Ilse Koch

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204. The Bitch of Buchenwald - Ilse Koch · Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood

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Speaker 1: Hello, delicious friends, and welcome to Who Did What Now?
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Speaker 1: The history podcast that is not your history class with me,
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Speaker 1: your host Katie Charlewood history harlote, and we are of
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Speaker 1: books now. I just want to say right off the bat,
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Speaker 1: if I sound different today, if I sound a bit
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Speaker 1: weeld to normal, it's because I had minor dental surgery
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Speaker 1: and I'm recovering from that. So if I sound a
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Speaker 1: little bit weird or like I've got something in my mouth,
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Speaker 1: it's just because my jaw is swollen, so like half
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Speaker 1: of my face is very tender and very soft and
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Speaker 1: very swollen to touch and to move, and there's a
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Speaker 1: consistent taste of metal in my mouth, which is good
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Speaker 1: because it means that I'm definitely getting enough iron, so
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Speaker 1: that's something right. So I've been I've been struggling with
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Speaker 1: this for lateral weeks and we finally got sordid. But
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Speaker 1: now I'm in the recovery period and I kind of
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Speaker 1: look like I've got a gold stop all stuck on
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Speaker 1: my cheek. But it's fine, it's fine. I think it
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Speaker 1: adds too much arm, frankly better there's there's a lot
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Speaker 1: going on. That being said, I was I was a
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Speaker 1: the dentist and they were like, so they put the
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Speaker 1: numbing agent in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And they're like, hey,
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Speaker 1: so this is gonna last like two hours before it
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Speaker 1: starts wearing off, so like it might be three because
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Speaker 1: some people have that it's supposed to last two hours.
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Speaker 1: Prayer to tell why when I was walking home because
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Speaker 1: of course I was, and they worked with there like
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Speaker 1: you're gonna be full of a drenaline. By the way,
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Speaker 1: You're gonna be full of adrenaline. I'm like, it's fine,
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Speaker 1: I'm walking home, do worry about it? Well, I was
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Speaker 1: like telling them more like k yeah, so and a
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Speaker 1: lot of thumbs up. I was like, yeah, oh the
2:00
Speaker 1: macaton I know from watching Mister Tumbles finally coming into use.
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Speaker 1: So I was like walking home. So within twenty minutes
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Speaker 1: of me leaving, I was like, oh, it's starting away off,
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Speaker 1: Like I can move my mouth. It's uncomfortable and I'm
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Speaker 1: in pain, but I can do it. And I was like, oh, oh,
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Speaker 1: why why is this happening? Because like last time I
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Speaker 1: went to the dentist, like for any kind of extraction
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Speaker 1: of any kind, they actually had to put so much
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Speaker 1: numbing agent in that I couldn't blink, like there was
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Speaker 1: just so much in me because the only way I
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Speaker 1: could not feel it like I could like I could
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Speaker 1: wink people, which was fun because after I left the appointment,
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Speaker 1: like many many years ago, people thought I was just
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Speaker 1: like winking at them when all I was trying to
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Speaker 1: do was blink. So that was fun for everybody involved.
2:52
Speaker 1: But yeah, our housekeeping, housekeeping, lots of information coming. Let
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Speaker 1: me just get this out at the beginning of this
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Speaker 1: episode because I was here last week. So Day Night Shade,
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Speaker 1: the true crime slash poison podcast that I coosed with
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Speaker 1: my dear friend Jay, is returning for season two in September,
3:11
Speaker 1: and season two is subtitled is It Something I Ate?
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Speaker 1: So I think you're really going to enjoy this season.
3:19
Speaker 1: I think it's it's still a bit more traditional in
3:23
Speaker 1: the sort of the poisoning sense, and I think I
3:25
Speaker 1: think you're going to enjoy it if you like poisons.
3:31
Speaker 1: So the Oops I'm In tour, which is the podcast tour,
3:35
Speaker 1: starts in November. It is ambitious. Why do I do
3:40
Speaker 1: this to myself? So there are several countries, there are
3:44
Speaker 1: three continents involved, and then there's the book, which my
3:47
Speaker 1: dear God, my editor and publisher have been ridiculously patient
3:52
Speaker 1: with so stuff is happening with that, and I am
3:55
Speaker 1: excited to share this with you once I have the information,
3:58
Speaker 1: and I am legally allowed to do so. But I
4:01
Speaker 1: know what you are thinking. You're thinking, Katie, please quite
4:04
Speaker 1: your jibber jabber in fact me, in fact you, I will,
4:08
Speaker 1: But first we've got to get our source on. Our
4:11
Speaker 1: sources are also cook on trial making The Bitch of
4:16
Speaker 1: Buchnvald by Tomas Jardin, War Crimes and Trials, A historical
4:26
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia from eighteen fifty to the present by Livy Massimiliano.
4:31
Speaker 1: The Buknvolved Report by David A. Hackett. Women as Wartime
4:37
Speaker 1: Rapists Beyond Sensation and Stereotyping by Laura Elizabeth Seiberg. Before
4:44
Speaker 1: Auschwitz The Formation of the Nazi concentration Camps by Nicholas
4:48
Speaker 1: Faxman and Christian ghostcol The Holocaust, Religion and the Politics
4:54
Speaker 1: of Collective Memory by Ronald J. Berger. The Witch of
5:00
Speaker 1: Book Involved The Fall of ILSA Coke by Arthur Lee Smith.
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Speaker 1: We also have articles from the Chicago Daily Tribune, The
5:10
Speaker 1: New York Times, The Guardian, and of course we have
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Speaker 1: our old favorites biography dot com and history dot com.
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Speaker 1: Now I owse it incomfortably good, then let's begin. Today's
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Speaker 1: episode is about a woman who was highly requested during
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Speaker 1: my series on the Nazi concentration camp system from August
5:37
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five. So it has been a wee whales
5:41
Speaker 1: since I've been able to get around to it. The
5:45
Speaker 1: notorious Ilsa Coke, the bitch of book involved. Now you
5:50
Speaker 1: may be thinking, my, what an interesting use of English
5:54
Speaker 1: alliteration from a country whose first language is German. But
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Speaker 1: we'll get to that. Was born Marguerite Ilsa Kohler on
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Speaker 1: the twenty second of September nineteen oh six in Dresden, Germany.
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Speaker 1: She was born to May Kohler, a laborer, and Anna Kobich,
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Speaker 1: a housewife. She was one of three children and the
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Speaker 1: only girl to the couple. It was a typical lower
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Speaker 1: middle class Protestant household. Now I did try and look
6:26
Speaker 1: up what flavor of Protestant it was, because you know,
6:29
Speaker 1: there's a few, but it's not actually written down anywhere. Now, Yep,
6:36
Speaker 1: the historical record just happens to be sparse on this subject. However,
6:41
Speaker 1: since most of the population were Lutheran under the state
6:45
Speaker 1: Church of Saxony. I'm gonna go with that. So primary
6:51
Speaker 1: elementary school was compulsory in Germany from ages six to fourteen,
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Speaker 1: so Ilsa attended the Vogue Schura and a lower secondary school,
7:01
Speaker 1: so she learned the basics, reading, writing, arithmetic, and of
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Speaker 1: course the patriotic history of the German Empire. Normal stuff.
7:10
Speaker 1: She later went on to a trade school to become
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Speaker 1: as secretary. So that's her early life, and that is
7:18
Speaker 1: as much as we have. The thing about women from
7:22
Speaker 1: the past is we tend to have very little information
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Speaker 1: about them, even when they become notorious afterwards, because usually
7:30
Speaker 1: when someone becomes infamous, people go digging into the past.
7:34
Speaker 1: But it just shows you how little information there was
7:36
Speaker 1: about her, like that, this is the best we've got.
7:41
Speaker 1: So she's working as a secretary during a time where
7:44
Speaker 1: you really want to have a job. See, it's inter
7:47
Speaker 1: war Germany. I mean they don't know it's interwar. They
7:50
Speaker 1: know one war's ended, the Great War, which would then
7:53
Speaker 1: become World War One. Now you might think that World
7:58
Speaker 1: War one was named World War one because of World
8:01
Speaker 1: War Two, and it's not. It's because they wanted to
8:05
Speaker 1: show just how grand and and all encompassing and massive
8:10
Speaker 1: it was because it was called the Great War, but
8:15
Speaker 1: it wasn't the only war that was called the Great War,
8:19
Speaker 1: because the Boer War was also called the Great War,
8:23
Speaker 1: and that was still in living memory for quite a
8:25
Speaker 1: lot of people, and so they needed to rename it
8:27
Speaker 1: to just show just how huge it was. Because in
8:34
Speaker 1: the First World War you had this combination of older
8:37
Speaker 1: military techniques combining with newer technology, so you have all
8:43
Speaker 1: of this happening, and so you have just death on
8:48
Speaker 1: a huge scale. The amount of people who died, and
8:51
Speaker 1: the First World War was larger than all of the
8:55
Speaker 1: wars previous. Like, that's just how big it was. But yeah,
9:01
Speaker 1: into ward Germany and the people are struggling from the
9:05
Speaker 1: ramifications of the defeat of the First World War, and
9:10
Speaker 1: of course the depression triggered by the American banks collapsing. Effectively,
9:14
Speaker 1: it was a turbulent time, both economically and politically. I
9:19
Speaker 1: guess we should sort of slip into some context. The
9:24
Speaker 1: thing that you need to remember is that the Second
9:26
Speaker 1: World War was inevitable, like it was always going to happen.
9:31
Speaker 1: There was all because of the Treaty of Versailles. It
9:35
Speaker 1: was going to happen. That is not to say that
9:37
Speaker 1: buckets and buckets of war crimes would have happened, or
9:40
Speaker 1: that Germany would have industrialized murder necessarily. But thanks to
9:45
Speaker 1: the treaty signed in the Hall of Mirrors, war was
9:48
Speaker 1: absolutely going to happen. Germany was the instigator. Their ruler
9:54
Speaker 1: Kaiserville on the second ran off just buggered off, became
9:57
Speaker 1: a gardener, right, he renounced, he legged it. So the
10:03
Speaker 1: nation had lost its territories, including the Rhine Land and
10:07
Speaker 1: like alsals Lorraine, places like that, yes, where the Keish
10:11
Speaker 1: is from. And the Alsatian dog which became a German
10:16
Speaker 1: shepherd and now it's back to being an Alsatian. It
10:18
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that the same dog. So sidebar. So you
10:23
Speaker 1: have these territories that are gone, including all of the
10:27
Speaker 1: territories that were once part of the German Empire, and
10:30
Speaker 1: they get divvied amongst all the other European empires like Belgium, France,
10:35
Speaker 1: blah blah blah bah bah, England. They're all just going
10:38
Speaker 1: to go, how can we take and so they get
10:42
Speaker 1: so the military was stripped down to ensure they couldn't
10:44
Speaker 1: fight again, and there was a massive fuck off bill
10:49
Speaker 1: The reparations were a major condition of Germany's surrender, so effectively,
10:56
Speaker 1: the Three of us I says to Germany, you started
10:59
Speaker 1: the war, You're to blame. Everything's your fault. You gotta
11:02
Speaker 1: pay to rebuild our country, and you're gotta pay all
11:06
Speaker 1: this bill, and you're not allowed to have a military,
11:10
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to be in these particular zones, these
11:13
Speaker 1: demilitarized zones, and you lose all of this money that
11:17
Speaker 1: you were getting from your empire. Sucks to be you, buddy,
11:21
Speaker 1: because they just wanted to like really hammer home, you
11:25
Speaker 1: know this, making an example of Germany to be like,
11:29
Speaker 1: no noney, the other guys start their shit right. So
11:34
Speaker 1: after the First World War, because of everything, Germany was
11:40
Speaker 1: reliant on American banks to boost the economy. So when
11:44
Speaker 1: the crash happened, there was a knock on effect to
11:47
Speaker 1: Germany and it suffered. The mark had fallen so low,
11:51
Speaker 1: like to give you an example, that people were bringing
11:54
Speaker 1: wheelbarrows full of money in like down the street in
11:58
Speaker 1: order to buy a loaf of bread. On top of this,
12:01
Speaker 1: there was this massive shame on the country because many
12:04
Speaker 1: people believed that Germany could have and would have won
12:07
Speaker 1: the war. If they had not surrendered when they did,
12:10
Speaker 1: because they were only forty three miles from Paris when
12:14
Speaker 1: they surrendered. So you've got this massive shame. People feel
12:18
Speaker 1: that they are fitting the bill for other countries, which
12:20
Speaker 1: I mean they were, but that's what the reparations of
12:24
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty two billion gold marks were for. Also,
12:29
Speaker 1: the issue with these reparations is that they were so
12:32
Speaker 1: huge the Germany would not have paid the debt until
12:36
Speaker 1: twenty ten. Now there is the possibility they would have
12:39
Speaker 1: paid it back a little bit sooner, a little bit
12:42
Speaker 1: sooner if they hadn't instigated the Second World War, but
12:45
Speaker 1: it still would have taken them like sixty seventy years
12:47
Speaker 1: to pay off instead of ninety two because it wasn't
12:51
Speaker 1: paid off until twenty ten. So people were struggling and
12:56
Speaker 1: poor people were desperate for change. They wanted respect, they
13:00
Speaker 1: wanted somebody to blame, and they saw the Nazi Party
13:06
Speaker 1: as a viable option. Now, see the NDASP. You might
13:15
Speaker 1: hear people say like, oh, it's the National Socialist Workers' Party,
13:19
Speaker 1: like that's the name of it. It was obviously socialist. Yeah,
13:24
Speaker 1: I hate to break it to you, except no, I don't.
13:26
Speaker 1: I love to break it to you because I like
13:28
Speaker 1: being correct. Is that the evil fascist group lied to
13:34
Speaker 1: the population by pretending to support workers' rights and push
13:37
Speaker 1: socialist ideals, when in fact it was an evil fascist
13:41
Speaker 1: group who would take power, remove rights and lest we
13:44
Speaker 1: forget industrialize Madda. The Nazi Party told the population that
13:51
Speaker 1: true Germans were perfection, perfection, the Aryan race, who were
13:56
Speaker 1: superior to all others, people who have been embarrassed and
14:01
Speaker 1: stood on and so the stuff that Nazis are spouting
14:05
Speaker 1: sounds pretty good to them. You deserve better, you deserve
14:08
Speaker 1: a better life. These are the people that are stopping
14:11
Speaker 1: you from having that better life. What where have we
14:14
Speaker 1: heard that before? So the party is gaining popularity and
14:21
Speaker 1: Ilsa joins in nineteen thirty two. Now context, Hitler comes
14:26
Speaker 1: into power in January thirty three, and the first concentration
14:29
Speaker 1: camp is opened in March nineteen thirty three. So Hitler
14:34
Speaker 1: is empower in January. First concentration camp has opened in March,
14:37
Speaker 1: almost like this was already in the plans. Didn't just
14:40
Speaker 1: come from nowhere. It's almost as if they didn't planning
14:43
Speaker 1: it like for a while. So the local ess detachment,
14:48
Speaker 1: that is the showed staffle they have social arrangements. So
14:55
Speaker 1: with the Nazi Party as well, like women make up
14:58
Speaker 1: seven and a half percent of it, and some really
15:02
Speaker 1: bought what they were selling. Now I'm convinced how we
15:05
Speaker 1: have all that some like we're just looking for husbands,
15:08
Speaker 1: because if you remember the social expectations of the time
15:11
Speaker 1: for women, it was to grow up, get married, have children,
15:15
Speaker 1: keep house. And so these social gatherings with the SS
15:20
Speaker 1: for a lot of women would have been a good
15:22
Speaker 1: way to meet a husband. And the way that THEESS
15:26
Speaker 1: was portrayed as well is that you were perfection. You're
15:32
Speaker 1: a perfect arian specimen. And to join the SS and
15:36
Speaker 1: to be involved in in the camps and to be
15:39
Speaker 1: a guard or an officer like you were getting like promoted.
15:45
Speaker 1: It was a very prestigious job, was very well respected,
15:49
Speaker 1: and you had all these benefits and perks. And so
15:51
Speaker 1: that's kind of cushet when you're thinking people who have
15:54
Speaker 1: been struggling with poverty, you know, for half or most
15:57
Speaker 1: of their life, you know. So at one of these gatherings,
16:03
Speaker 1: Yosa meets carl Otto Coke, and that's in nineteen thirty four.
16:09
Speaker 1: He is an up and coming ESSs officer who was
16:11
Speaker 1: nine years her senior and was a divorced criminal. Karl
16:16
Speaker 1: had fought in the First World War as part of
16:17
Speaker 1: the Imperial German Army on the Western Front, but he
16:21
Speaker 1: was captured by the British in nineteen sixteen and held
16:24
Speaker 1: as a prisoner of war until nineteen so after the
16:29
Speaker 1: First World War when he gets home, when after he's released,
16:33
Speaker 1: he worked as an insurance agent, an authorized signatory, and
16:38
Speaker 1: a thief. At one point he becomes a police informant.
16:41
Speaker 1: But it's kind of muggy as to win. But he's
16:44
Speaker 1: got a criminal passed. But the Nazis they're like, oh,
16:48
Speaker 1: you did something to the old Empire. You're fine. They
16:52
Speaker 1: just kind of look over it or not look over it,
16:55
Speaker 1: like Brussia under the rog They're like, it's fine. So
17:00
Speaker 1: Carl had married Kate Muller in nineteen twenty four, so
17:04
Speaker 1: they had one son together, Manfred. Manfred had issues, so
17:11
Speaker 1: their marriage ended in nineteen thirty one. Some say it's
17:15
Speaker 1: because of his infidelity, others say it's because he was
17:18
Speaker 1: arrested in nineteen thirty and got served a year long
17:21
Speaker 1: sentence for embezzlement and forgery. AnyWho, the semi years divorced
17:27
Speaker 1: Carl John's the Nazi Party and thes Remember when I
17:31
Speaker 1: said he was up and coming, well, he really was
17:35
Speaker 1: moving up the ranks. He had been in the Saxeenburg
17:40
Speaker 1: concentration camp and then briefly in charge of like the
17:42
Speaker 1: Estelvegan concentration camp guard unit. He was in charge of
17:46
Speaker 1: the preventative custody camp in Liechtenberg. There was a system,
17:53
Speaker 1: a whole camp system, and there was a preventative custody camp.
18:00
Speaker 1: He was an adjutant at Dhaka. He was at Columbia House,
18:04
Speaker 1: not the one who did the CDs. So Columbia House
18:08
Speaker 1: is one of those camps that lasted for a short time,
18:11
Speaker 1: like some of the camps were like military prisons that
18:14
Speaker 1: got converted, like Saxon Housen as far as I remember,
18:19
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty seven created a punishment block because it
18:24
Speaker 1: never had a punishment block, and then it created a
18:26
Speaker 1: punishment block where like you would have like poles, like
18:30
Speaker 1: wooden poles where people were like tagged to and whipped
18:34
Speaker 1: like before Saxon Housen. Right before he even gets there,
18:42
Speaker 1: Carl Otto Cooke is really showing just how sadistic he is.
18:47
Speaker 1: Like there was very much an other ring of the
18:50
Speaker 1: prisoners anyway. But he really really took it to new levels,
18:54
Speaker 1: Like he would get them to crawl into dog cages
18:56
Speaker 1: and bark and eat out of balls on the ground,
18:59
Speaker 1: and he would, you know, have hot tar poured onto
19:06
Speaker 1: the bodies of the insulent. Now, his cruelty was respected
19:13
Speaker 1: and revered and it really pushed him up those ranks.
19:17
Speaker 1: It was like, well, yeah, you're doing the thing you're
19:20
Speaker 1: supposed to it. But yeah, somewhere in between all of this,
19:25
Speaker 1: he meets Ilsa and the details of their courtship are muggy,
19:30
Speaker 1: but she's full on drinking the flavory at this point.
19:33
Speaker 1: And more timeline context. The war starts in nineteen thirty
19:38
Speaker 1: five and she gets a job as a secretary into
19:42
Speaker 1: Nazi Party. In nineteen thirty six, carl Otto Kok was
19:47
Speaker 1: posted as the commandant at Saxon Housing concentration camp, which
19:51
Speaker 1: is near Berlin in thirty six. See the Nazi concentration
19:57
Speaker 1: camp system was run by the ESSs or is mainly
20:01
Speaker 1: run by the ESSs. There was a couple by the essay,
20:03
Speaker 1: but they got taken over in time, so he also
20:07
Speaker 1: followed him there and they requested to marry from the
20:10
Speaker 1: ESSs Office of Racial and Settlement Affairs. Anyone who wanted
20:15
Speaker 1: to get married in the Third Reich had to put
20:17
Speaker 1: in a request and be investigated for fitness for marriage,
20:21
Speaker 1: which is bureaucratic eugenics, checking to make sure both parties
20:27
Speaker 1: had arian purity before they could wed. Now i've I
20:31
Speaker 1: actually said bar I actually saw one of these. A
20:35
Speaker 1: friend of mine whose grandparents are Polish had sent me
20:40
Speaker 1: like photos of like the like the approval. Like I
20:46
Speaker 1: want to say, it's kind of like a bicklit and
20:48
Speaker 1: it has you know, like your approval of being able
20:51
Speaker 1: to get married in it. And it was like it's
20:54
Speaker 1: it's I don't want to say it's elaborate, but it
20:58
Speaker 1: kind of is elaborate. And again I don't speak I
21:02
Speaker 1: don't actually speak German, so like they were translating it
21:05
Speaker 1: for me because it was in like at least part
21:07
Speaker 1: of it was in German and they speak like eight languages,
21:10
Speaker 1: and so I was like, oh, wow, this is intense.
21:14
Speaker 1: But it was like they would tell me the story
21:16
Speaker 1: of like they walked into their childhood bedroom and it
21:18
Speaker 1: was just sitting there, but it's got like a massive
21:21
Speaker 1: spastica on the front, and so they were just like, Mama,
21:26
Speaker 1: what is this? And then they ended up sending me
21:29
Speaker 1: a bunch of pictures and I was like, wow, that's
21:32
Speaker 1: a that's something to have. So they married on the
21:37
Speaker 1: twenty fifth of May nineteen thirty seven in a Pagan
21:41
Speaker 1: SSS ceremony, and in July Carl was transferred to Bochnvold.
21:46
Speaker 1: He was made commandant of the newly opened camp, overseeing
21:50
Speaker 1: the whole internal structure, camp operations, prisoner labor systems, punishments, etc. Now,
21:58
Speaker 1: I know in previous episodes, if you go back and
22:01
Speaker 1: you listen to the previous Nazi concentration camp system from
22:06
Speaker 1: August twenty twenty five, I have discussed how it's a
22:09
Speaker 1: whole complex they could say complexes. It's not just like
22:14
Speaker 1: one like Barricker building with a fence around it, you know,
22:18
Speaker 1: or a wall. So the complex is in order to
22:24
Speaker 1: keep close to the action. The commandant's house and the
22:28
Speaker 1: house of the officers. If they were staying in the complex,
22:32
Speaker 1: they were in the grounds, they were inside the camp.
22:37
Speaker 1: So yes, Carl and Ilsa Cooke lived in a three
22:41
Speaker 1: story villa on the concentration camp grounds. By September, Elsa
22:46
Speaker 1: was pregnant. Their son Artwin was born in June the
22:48
Speaker 1: following year, followed by a daughter, Gisella, in April the
22:54
Speaker 1: year after, and then in nineteen forty their daughter Goodlun
22:59
Speaker 1: was born. Now what's weird about this is that with
23:04
Speaker 1: Goodland the timeline is spotty because it could be October
23:08
Speaker 1: or it could be December. But either way, Goudland died
23:12
Speaker 1: in February in nineteen forty one from pneumonia. So Carl
23:18
Speaker 1: is the ss staden Flora at Book Involved, He's moved
23:23
Speaker 1: up from being a non criminal to the head haunto
23:26
Speaker 1: at a concentration camp and wielding buckets and buckets of power.
23:32
Speaker 1: And Book Involved was a new camp, one of the
23:35
Speaker 1: largest Nazi concentration camps with over fifty thousand known deaths. Now,
23:40
Speaker 1: the camp did not have gas chambers. It was not
23:43
Speaker 1: an extermination camp. It was a slave labor camp. And
23:48
Speaker 1: if you were healthy or skilled, Book Involved might have
23:52
Speaker 1: been a safer option for you because people like survival
23:56
Speaker 1: rates of Book Involved, like for some it was years,
24:00
Speaker 1: whereas the life expectancy of places like Auschwitz was three
24:03
Speaker 1: to four months. When Yes, Bukenvold was built, they had
24:09
Speaker 1: their villa and on the front gate was a sign,
24:13
Speaker 1: a wrought iron slogan jadem das sign which translates to
24:20
Speaker 1: each what is his or to each his own, basically saying,
24:25
Speaker 1: you know, whatever you get, you know it's for you.
24:33
Speaker 1: You receive the fate or the treatment that you deserve.
24:37
Speaker 1: And that was very much the thinking of Ilsa and
24:42
Speaker 1: Carl Koch book involved was mostly a slave labor camp
24:52
Speaker 1: which was there to make things that the Third Reich
24:55
Speaker 1: really needed. Like a lot of businesses and a lot
24:58
Speaker 1: of companies would you to lies the camps for slave labor.
25:03
Speaker 1: There were some that were making armaments, others were building
25:05
Speaker 1: things for Semens or IBM like it was happening. So
25:13
Speaker 1: it's not a life really that many would want to extend,
25:16
Speaker 1: I assume, but it was a likelihood of a higher
25:22
Speaker 1: chance of survival. And that's only if you know, you
25:26
Speaker 1: didn't take anyone's fancy. So Ilsa, she's at the concentration camp,
25:32
Speaker 1: and she is there, you know, she gets pregnant pretty
25:38
Speaker 1: sharpish actually, And the whole point of being you know,
25:42
Speaker 1: the perfect house fow the perfect German woman is you're
25:47
Speaker 1: supposed to be like super loyal to your husband, have
25:51
Speaker 1: your babies do all your housework, like you're running the
25:56
Speaker 1: household as the wife of an ESS officer, but you
26:00
Speaker 1: expected to do things like cooking or cleaning or the
26:04
Speaker 1: other stuff that the typical flow would be doing, like
26:06
Speaker 1: the typical life. And so she's just kind of like
26:11
Speaker 1: I want to say, bored because she's got like servants
26:16
Speaker 1: and slaves doing all of this stuff for her. So
26:21
Speaker 1: she never did any of the housework and basically had
26:26
Speaker 1: all these people to take care of everything that she
26:29
Speaker 1: needed in the house. So they used to call her
26:33
Speaker 1: like a Jina dugunfral which like I say that they
26:40
Speaker 1: called her. She made them call her that to basically
26:43
Speaker 1: give her this title of nobility and authority. And so
26:50
Speaker 1: she's got the house, she has the people working in it,
26:53
Speaker 1: and so she's bored. And what she does with a
26:58
Speaker 1: board person who has a lot of power, she gets
27:01
Speaker 1: people to do things for her. One of them is
27:04
Speaker 1: build a massive fuck off sports arena where she could
27:09
Speaker 1: practice horseback riding. Like there's like a horse enclosure like
27:16
Speaker 1: behind the villa, and so she would you know, ride
27:19
Speaker 1: about it. But like people died building it, and she's like,
27:22
Speaker 1: oh well, so she would do that and then she
27:25
Speaker 1: would sort of ride her horse throughout the camp. Like
27:30
Speaker 1: it costs over two hundred thousand reix marks to build,
27:36
Speaker 1: which I think today is at least like over a
27:40
Speaker 1: million to build this again enclosure. And the thing is
27:47
Speaker 1: she built this with money that was being you know,
27:52
Speaker 1: sent for the camp. So this is this is part
27:57
Speaker 1: of it. Right. So when you become like a of
28:00
Speaker 1: the ESSs when they brought you know, prisoners in and
28:02
Speaker 1: they took all her valuables and stuff, you got first DIBs.
28:05
Speaker 1: There was like a certain amount of privilege of oh,
28:08
Speaker 1: you can take this for a home to your wife,
28:11
Speaker 1: or you can take this. You know, these golden teeth
28:13
Speaker 1: would be melted down, and like you had first DIBs
28:16
Speaker 1: on a lot of stuff. So there was like like
28:19
Speaker 1: a I don't want to say an unwritten rule, but
28:21
Speaker 1: there was like a little bit of you can take
28:23
Speaker 1: a week bit for you like that is the perks
28:24
Speaker 1: of your job. But you're supposed to take a minimal amount,
28:29
Speaker 1: Like you're not supposed to take many, many things and
28:33
Speaker 1: to steal from the Reich, because that's like a big
28:35
Speaker 1: no no. Unfortunately, I say unfortunately, but that is what
28:40
Speaker 1: Elsa and Carl were doing, and we will come back
28:42
Speaker 1: to that. So she's got a horse riding enclosure and
28:46
Speaker 1: she's like, that's fine, but how much horse riding was
28:49
Speaker 1: she actually doing. I'm sorry, Like, I'm gonna bring this
28:51
Speaker 1: up for a week second, because when we talk about
28:53
Speaker 1: Ylsa Coke, what I've noticed is people rarely like bring
28:59
Speaker 1: into consideration the fact that she's pregnant most of the
29:03
Speaker 1: time that she's at the camp. So pregnancy lasts typically
29:10
Speaker 1: closer to ten months than it does to nine. So
29:13
Speaker 1: she has kids in like thirty eight, thirty nine, and
29:19
Speaker 1: forty like that means that for quite a lot of
29:22
Speaker 1: those years she was pregnant. Now I'm not excusing anything
29:26
Speaker 1: she did, and I'm not trying to like justify it,
29:28
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying, like she would have been limited
29:33
Speaker 1: in what she could do in those periods of time
29:39
Speaker 1: because she's not going to climb up on a horse
29:41
Speaker 1: when she's eight months pregnant, like the belly would get
29:43
Speaker 1: in the way, you know what I mean. It's just
29:47
Speaker 1: something to consider. But when she was reading a horse,
29:52
Speaker 1: you know, trotting around, she was going around the camp
29:58
Speaker 1: like she would like just trot, canter whatever, not gallup.
30:04
Speaker 1: I feel like gallup is too heavy. You can't see
30:06
Speaker 1: people if you're galloping. And she would just like go
30:11
Speaker 1: around the camp. And there was like a rule that
30:14
Speaker 1: if you looked at the commandant's wife, you could get shot, right,
30:20
Speaker 1: And so she decided to have some fun with this,
30:25
Speaker 1: and by fun I mean be an extremely cruel, fucking
30:28
Speaker 1: bitch because she would dress provocatively. She would wear things
30:33
Speaker 1: that were low caught, she would show off her cleavage
30:36
Speaker 1: and wear tight clothes. Now I'm gonna assume that the
30:39
Speaker 1: tight clothes were specifically when she wasn't very pregnant. Now
30:45
Speaker 1: I'm assuming the cleavage could easily be shown at any point,
30:48
Speaker 1: because pregnant, say, the bibs they just grow. So like,
30:55
Speaker 1: these are people, these are men. It's a lot of
30:57
Speaker 1: men in these camps. And if they looked at her,
30:59
Speaker 1: and they're looking at her her body, she would just
31:03
Speaker 1: go off and get them shot. Now, most of the
31:07
Speaker 1: wives of like officers and things like that, they weren't
31:11
Speaker 1: in the camps necessarily. They might live sort of outside
31:15
Speaker 1: the camp, or they might live, you know, nearby, but
31:18
Speaker 1: they weren't involved in the day to day running, and
31:20
Speaker 1: they weren't involved in things that were happening in the
31:22
Speaker 1: camps because they were home being you know, wives and
31:25
Speaker 1: mothers in running households. But Ilsa loved being involved, like
31:30
Speaker 1: she would, you know, be involved in inspections, like there
31:36
Speaker 1: was a roll call was the thing they did to
31:38
Speaker 1: break prisoner morale. They did it in Raveinsbrook, they did
31:43
Speaker 1: it in Book Involved, they did it in like most camps.
31:46
Speaker 1: It was just part of what they did. And they
31:48
Speaker 1: would have roll calls that sometimes would last hours and
31:52
Speaker 1: if somebody collapsed, they would get shot, you know, And
31:56
Speaker 1: so she would be involved in the roll calls and
31:59
Speaker 1: that's when A the time. She would dress provocatively, especially
32:03
Speaker 1: if there were younger men there, because like you have
32:09
Speaker 1: this woman she's like, I mean, I'm not going to
32:14
Speaker 1: be like what was she wearing, but like she really
32:18
Speaker 1: thought she was hot stuff, Like she thought that she was,
32:22
Speaker 1: you know, perfection, because like she's the Arian perfection, that's
32:26
Speaker 1: what she's been told she is. And so she's out
32:29
Speaker 1: flotting all your bits and getting people to aglar goodies,
32:32
Speaker 1: and when they did, she'd have them shot. Like she
32:37
Speaker 1: actually found it very provocative. And I mean that in
32:42
Speaker 1: every sense of the word. So like there are stories
32:45
Speaker 1: there are stories, and we don't have entire justification for this,
32:49
Speaker 1: but they have been reported enough that it's worth considering
32:55
Speaker 1: as something that may have happened. So there are stories
32:59
Speaker 1: that were her husband was away doing other things that
33:03
Speaker 1: she would have soldiers brought to her and have them
33:06
Speaker 1: like stand in a row, have them undress, and then
33:10
Speaker 1: she would inspect them, right, and she would just enjoy
33:14
Speaker 1: the view. And there's this other tale which I do
33:18
Speaker 1: think is bollocks and I think it's sensationalist for for
33:22
Speaker 1: the papers at the time, and it's that Ilsa again
33:26
Speaker 1: when her husband was away, would just like lay in
33:30
Speaker 1: her garden in lingerie and if the prisoners, you know,
33:37
Speaker 1: got excited, if a guy got on erection, effectively, she
33:40
Speaker 1: would have them beaten or shot, you know. And it's like, really,
33:47
Speaker 1: in public, we think she was doing this. Now I
33:53
Speaker 1: understand that they're like there was all these rumors of
33:55
Speaker 1: like Nazi orgies in the house and that they Carl
33:58
Speaker 1: and her hadn't open marriage and all those kind of things,
34:00
Speaker 1: and it's like maybe maybe, but also the laundrye like
34:07
Speaker 1: swaming around in laundry does feel a bit much, especially
34:11
Speaker 1: when you consider she was pregnant for quite a lot
34:16
Speaker 1: of this time. Like, I don't know, it feels like
34:20
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that if it did happen, it
34:22
Speaker 1: happened like briefly. It just feels weird in this context
34:28
Speaker 1: to me. What I do believe is is that she
34:32
Speaker 1: demanded the teenage boys that young boys were working in
34:35
Speaker 1: her household, and they would bring her breakfast in bed
34:39
Speaker 1: and she would like be there in her her negligee
34:42
Speaker 1: and her her silky nightgown. Now that that seems more
34:46
Speaker 1: realistic to me, and she would like threaten them that
34:50
Speaker 1: if they looked at her, if they got excited, that
34:52
Speaker 1: she would kill them. And I think it's that power
34:55
Speaker 1: play that she really really enjoyed. And you've got these
34:59
Speaker 1: boys who have just through puberty who may never have
35:01
Speaker 1: you know, seen a woman before properly, and she's just like, oh,
35:06
Speaker 1: don't mind me, I'm just lounging on my super soft
35:09
Speaker 1: bed and my silken night dress. And I think it's
35:13
Speaker 1: just this whole like power play for her. So like
35:21
Speaker 1: there are like reports of these servants who were like
35:24
Speaker 1: fifteen sixteen at the time, who are working for her,
35:27
Speaker 1: and they've you know, they survived the camp and they
35:30
Speaker 1: have their tails about it, and that's where a lot
35:32
Speaker 1: of this information comes from. And sometimes, like I mean,
35:36
Speaker 1: she's a sexual statist, right, and sometimes she would like
35:39
Speaker 1: flip the switch and she would give these boys things
35:41
Speaker 1: like boiled potatoes to take with them back to their barracks,
35:46
Speaker 1: and like these people are severely underfit, which like she
35:51
Speaker 1: really like reveled in this. She loved having this power
35:55
Speaker 1: of watching these people weather and fucking die like they're
36:00
Speaker 1: there is no there's no discounting, like there's no there's
36:03
Speaker 1: no coming back in the fact that she was a
36:04
Speaker 1: fucking monster. The question is just how much of a
36:08
Speaker 1: monster was she? Right, so Ilsa and Carl again big
36:19
Speaker 1: theories of open relationship, right, that they were both kind
36:24
Speaker 1: of stupid everybody they wanted, So there's there was Appartently,
36:30
Speaker 1: she was having many, many affairs. One of the doctors
36:35
Speaker 1: at the camp, doctor Valdemar, one of the deputy commandants,
36:39
Speaker 1: Helman Flossin, and she was also at doctor Haven's home
36:45
Speaker 1: quite a lot. Now doctor Haven, he was one of
36:49
Speaker 1: the dudes running the very terrible experiments, and like she
36:56
Speaker 1: would spend the night with these men when her husband
36:59
Speaker 1: was a home. Now I don't. I don't know if
37:05
Speaker 1: this is like her just out you know, shagging however
37:08
Speaker 1: she wants to shag, or whether it was more of
37:12
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stay with like a man because it's a man,
37:15
Speaker 1: I'm easier protected because if she's running around like the camp,
37:22
Speaker 1: there's always guards. Like she's never really alone with prisoners
37:26
Speaker 1: per se, apart from like the teenage boys in the bedroom,
37:29
Speaker 1: and there was like a big like power discrepancy there,
37:33
Speaker 1: Like there was a big difference in between those two.
37:36
Speaker 1: But yeah, possible orgies of the camp, lots of lots
37:41
Speaker 1: of shagging amongst like the SS and stuff like that.
37:45
Speaker 1: Not with the prisoners because like again they were seen
37:48
Speaker 1: as other, they were seen as less than so you
37:49
Speaker 1: wouldn't do that. She just liked having She just liked
37:55
Speaker 1: toying with people and destroying them. And so back of
38:00
Speaker 1: doctor hove In for a second. So doctors at the
38:01
Speaker 1: camp were like they were doing experiments there. They were
38:04
Speaker 1: poisoning people with different chemicals to see if they could
38:08
Speaker 1: like somehow create an antidote. But like, yeah, that's how
38:15
Speaker 1: that works. They injected like gay men with just a
38:20
Speaker 1: concoction of chemicals to trees. They could like cure them
38:24
Speaker 1: of being homosexuals. And effectively this didn't work. It just
38:29
Speaker 1: ended up killing them. But of course, when you're doing
38:33
Speaker 1: these experiments on people, you are collecting things like organs
38:38
Speaker 1: and whatnot, and this will be a recovering theme. We'll
38:42
Speaker 1: come back to that. So also she's bored of, you know,
38:47
Speaker 1: tempting all the men and having them shot in the head,
38:50
Speaker 1: and so she decides that she wants to watch these
38:53
Speaker 1: experiments take place and this is going to be her
38:57
Speaker 1: new hobby. So well, one day, she's riding her horse
39:02
Speaker 1: through the camp, which is what she loved to do.
39:06
Speaker 1: And so because like she did, she loved to ride
39:08
Speaker 1: through and beat people and whip them with a horsewhip
39:11
Speaker 1: and get other people to beat them and shoot them
39:14
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff. So she actually added
39:18
Speaker 1: razor blades to her whip. I don't know if you
39:19
Speaker 1: know this, because she was like, ah, this will cause
39:22
Speaker 1: more pain, because if you have a whip that has
39:25
Speaker 1: any kind of blade in it, because of the force
39:29
Speaker 1: in which it cuts, it will dig into the skin
39:32
Speaker 1: and then tear skin from it. Like there were certain
39:35
Speaker 1: whips that existed like this. She just maguivered her own
39:39
Speaker 1: or got someone to mcguiver it for her. So she
39:45
Speaker 1: noticed as she was riding through the camps that prisoners had,
39:49
Speaker 1: you know, tattoos, birthmarks, all this kind of stuff. And
39:55
Speaker 1: so she goes to doctor Eric Wagner because she thinks,
40:00
Speaker 1: what if these tattoos were related to criminal behavior? What
40:05
Speaker 1: if that what if that's a connection, we should experiment
40:08
Speaker 1: on these men. And he's like yeah, absolutely. So he's like,
40:19
Speaker 1: which is wild because technically you're supposed to get like
40:22
Speaker 1: approval from the Nazi party before you do any kind
40:24
Speaker 1: of experiment. Which is well when you think about Mengele,
40:29
Speaker 1: because doctor Joseph macgeley, like all of the other scientists
40:33
Speaker 1: thought he was a crack pot, but they approved his
40:37
Speaker 1: like shit to do just because they were like, yeah,
40:42
Speaker 1: let's see what happens, just like they did it for
40:45
Speaker 1: shits and giggles, I swear of fuck right, But they
40:48
Speaker 1: didn't get approval, like it was against protocol, and he
40:52
Speaker 1: did it anyway. So she would go through the crowd,
40:55
Speaker 1: she would stop men that she noticed had tattoos, force
40:58
Speaker 1: him to strip down. She did examine their tattoos, and
41:04
Speaker 1: then she would have them killed so that she could
41:08
Speaker 1: allegedly keep the skin with the tattoo on it, like
41:12
Speaker 1: it's a little bit egging. But and this is where
41:18
Speaker 1: the story of the lamp shade made out of human
41:22
Speaker 1: skin comes from. Now, they did find collections of like
41:27
Speaker 1: skin samples with tattoos on them, surprisingly not as many
41:30
Speaker 1: as one would expect, but it was like they were skinned,
41:34
Speaker 1: the skin was tanned into leather and then bound into
41:38
Speaker 1: like books and turned into lamp shades, and partly prisoners
41:44
Speaker 1: made them into things. Now, just too many people were tattooed,
41:50
Speaker 1: is the first question. The second part of this is
41:54
Speaker 1: it wasn't just tattooed people. Now, this is something I
41:57
Speaker 1: want to bring up because we hear the lampshade store
42:00
Speaker 1: all the time. Now we know that this kind of
42:02
Speaker 1: thing did happen. You know, she was probably involved in
42:05
Speaker 1: some of it. But it was people with identifying marks
42:12
Speaker 1: on their body that were collected. So it wasn't just tattoos.
42:16
Speaker 1: It was people with birthmarks, scars, anything truly distinguishable. It's
42:25
Speaker 1: almost as if like they were being removed from the
42:28
Speaker 1: population so that things could be done to them and
42:31
Speaker 1: then they could be like gotten rid of. Now that's
42:34
Speaker 1: just my little old tent fhile hat theory. But so
42:38
Speaker 1: here is something that comes up quite a lot, and
42:41
Speaker 1: I want to talk about how it's ridiculous a little bit,
42:44
Speaker 1: because it is rumored that she used body parts around
42:50
Speaker 1: her home, using thumbs as light switches, and she had
42:55
Speaker 1: a handbag that was made out of human skin, and
42:58
Speaker 1: the way she would show off to other SSS officers
43:02
Speaker 1: and their wives, and that she had a bunch of
43:05
Speaker 1: Jewish prisoners turn these into gifts and give them two people.
43:10
Speaker 1: If so many were made, why didn't they survive? And also,
43:15
Speaker 1: nobody is using a thumb as a light switch. It's
43:18
Speaker 1: not going to survive. Like that's that's wild. Now, her
43:25
Speaker 1: being excited about experimentation, her having the power of selecting
43:29
Speaker 1: people for experiments, abs of fucking look like like she's
43:33
Speaker 1: definitely involved in that, but like she's she's at it,
43:38
Speaker 1: like she's here doing shit. But like, if someone's already
43:42
Speaker 1: a monster, you don't really need to add to that.
43:45
Speaker 1: She's already doing many, many terrible things. So she would
43:55
Speaker 1: actually convince her husband who kill her and pre like
44:01
Speaker 1: she would be like, throw this man off a wall
44:03
Speaker 1: and do this, and he would because it's Carlo OTTOKK
44:07
Speaker 1: of course, he's going to do some bad shit. So
44:12
Speaker 1: there's this muggy story of a group of prisoners and
44:22
Speaker 1: Ilsa ordered some of them and some of the guards
44:26
Speaker 1: to go fetch water from a well that was nearby
44:29
Speaker 1: the camp, and then she claimed that they'd been trying
44:32
Speaker 1: to escape and had them shot. Now, at some point
44:40
Speaker 1: doing this, right, Carlotto Coke contracts syphilis. So he orders
44:50
Speaker 1: the execution of the orderly who gives him his diagnosis,
44:53
Speaker 1: as well as the other two men who would actually
44:55
Speaker 1: help treat him, because he's trying to cover up the
44:58
Speaker 1: fact that he has syphilis, which means either he is cheating,
45:02
Speaker 1: his wife is cheating, or something in between. And that
45:04
Speaker 1: they're doing all this horrible stuff because it's super embarrassing
45:07
Speaker 1: and socially would have destroyed them, you know, because they're
45:10
Speaker 1: not being good perfect arians, you know what I mean. Right.
45:14
Speaker 1: And so one of the SS guards that's part of
45:17
Speaker 1: this group which is helping these prisoners escape, which is
45:20
Speaker 1: go to the well for water, was one of the
45:22
Speaker 1: guys who treated like Carl for syphilis, and so they
45:28
Speaker 1: didn't want to know us knowing this was happening. So
45:30
Speaker 1: basically they have these they have these unaccount deaths like
45:36
Speaker 1: these are weird things that happened. So in nineteen forty two,
45:42
Speaker 1: Ilsa and Carl were taken to court for misappropriating the
45:46
Speaker 1: funds of booken voldcamp, for their over the top methods
45:50
Speaker 1: of torturing, and also for the killing of the three
45:56
Speaker 1: prisoners that the Nazi said that these were unauthorized killings. Right,
46:02
Speaker 1: So for whatever reason, like these three prisoners and because
46:07
Speaker 1: one of the guards involved, right, we're involved in this
46:12
Speaker 1: this sephilous situation. They were like, that's an unauthorized kill.
46:17
Speaker 1: You cannot be doing that. And so like these deaths
46:22
Speaker 1: triggered the investigation into what was happening at book involved, Right,
46:26
Speaker 1: so that's what's happening. So misappropriating funds, stealing from the
46:34
Speaker 1: SS was a huge deal, and it's interesting that it
46:39
Speaker 1: took the Nazis as long to figure it out. But
46:43
Speaker 1: like he gets charged with embezzlement because he kept far
46:48
Speaker 1: too many of the things. He pilveled too much from
46:51
Speaker 1: the prisoners, Like you're supposed like you can collect like
46:55
Speaker 1: one or two things, like you get like a little
46:57
Speaker 1: bit and then you send the rest off to the
46:59
Speaker 1: SS for them to do whatever they will. With it now.
47:04
Speaker 1: I feel like when someone is a known thief and
47:06
Speaker 1: embezz law, putting him in a situation where he can
47:10
Speaker 1: steal and embezzl. Probably not the smartsmouth guys, but whatever.
47:16
Speaker 1: So then when they start investigating other things, like the experiments,
47:18
Speaker 1: they're like, these weren't approved, which is the issue, not
47:21
Speaker 1: the fact that they were doing really creepy, dodgy experiments
47:24
Speaker 1: on people. And so they have three charges against them
47:30
Speaker 1: disobeing orders by doing like ex random experiments, keeping things
47:34
Speaker 1: from the ESSs, and for embezzling and was appropriating funds,
47:38
Speaker 1: and then the three murders. So the experiments of the
47:45
Speaker 1: Nazi Party wanted to be conducted were to help the
47:51
Speaker 1: Nazi Party in some way, like either approving that iron
47:54
Speaker 1: race was superior, or to help them survive like certain things.
48:00
Speaker 1: Basically to link upgrade the arians. Really, so it's supposed
48:08
Speaker 1: to like help justify like the genocide that they're planning twitter,
48:11
Speaker 1: but that's not what the experiments that were happening at
48:16
Speaker 1: the camp. So they go to court and they're trying
48:21
Speaker 1: to prove that ILSA's behind the scenes like pulling all
48:24
Speaker 1: these strings, but they don't have any solid proof, So
48:29
Speaker 1: it basically means like like sure she's a manipulada of
48:31
Speaker 1: sure she's doing these things, but we can't actually prove anything.
48:36
Speaker 1: And so they're like, well and she's like I was
48:38
Speaker 1: at home with the children. And they're like, okay, well,
48:41
Speaker 1: clearly he's responsible. And so they're removed from book and
48:46
Speaker 1: volved and replaced by Clem and Pridesta, and so they're
48:50
Speaker 1: thrown in jail awaiting their trail, but they wouldn't actually
48:53
Speaker 1: go to trail until nineteen forty four, So they spend
49:00
Speaker 1: two years in jail because they get charged in nineteen
49:03
Speaker 1: forty two, but they didn't go to trail until nineteen
49:06
Speaker 1: forty four, and the judge decided that it doesn't matter
49:10
Speaker 1: like what Elsa was doing, Carl was responsible because he
49:13
Speaker 1: was the commandant and decided how the funds were used
49:16
Speaker 1: and how the prisoners were killed. So like like in
49:22
Speaker 1: between this as well, like they had left Book involved,
49:27
Speaker 1: like they had gone to Meisenek, right, they had gone there,
49:30
Speaker 1: and he was there for a bit and that was
49:31
Speaker 1: when like I think they'd moved them to sort of
49:34
Speaker 1: do the investigation and like and then stuff was going
49:37
Speaker 1: missing at Maijenik as well, and so that's how that happened. So, yeah,
49:44
Speaker 1: she gets hit free and carl Otto Coke was sentenced
49:49
Speaker 1: to death and was shot to death by a firing squad,
49:53
Speaker 1: a Nazi firing squad, and so she's like, oh, well,
49:58
Speaker 1: that's sad, and so she just gets on with her life.
50:03
Speaker 1: So she goes back to Germany with her three children, no, sorry,
50:07
Speaker 1: her two children because obviously Gouln said, so she's got
50:09
Speaker 1: two kids at this point, and they go back to Germany.
50:14
Speaker 1: Then in nineteen forty five, Germany was invaded by the US.
50:19
Speaker 1: So the concentration camps that were on sort of the
50:23
Speaker 1: French side of the German side, you had sort of
50:25
Speaker 1: you know, the Brittan the Americans on that side, and
50:29
Speaker 1: then when you were on sort of the Eastern front,
50:32
Speaker 1: that was the camps that were liberated by the USSR,
50:35
Speaker 1: the Soviets. So they're in Germany, they're liberating camps and
50:43
Speaker 1: when they open Bouchenvolved, right when they get to Booknvolved, like,
50:51
Speaker 1: people start talking and they start talking about the Ilva
50:55
Speaker 1: hex of Bochenvold, right, the witch of Book Involved. They
50:58
Speaker 1: read witch like she called all these things. And on
51:03
Speaker 1: the eighth of April nineteen forty five, the book involved
51:10
Speaker 1: camp sent out in so Wes to the American military,
51:13
Speaker 1: so like it's libertatory on the eleventh of April nineteen
51:16
Speaker 1: forty five, Like the original plan was to blow it
51:20
Speaker 1: up with dynamite, kill everybody and cover up their tracks,
51:25
Speaker 1: like that was like the Nazi plan. But when like
51:30
Speaker 1: the coll went in, a prisoner answered the phone and
51:33
Speaker 1: was like, Oh, we don't actually need any explosives. We've
51:35
Speaker 1: got enough here, thanks, and so like the other side
51:40
Speaker 1: was like okay, cool Jena Wiries. So it wasn't blown up,
51:47
Speaker 1: so but what it was opened up. So when it
51:49
Speaker 1: opened up, the Americans invited the people of Weimar, which
51:53
Speaker 1: is the city which is around book involved, to come
51:55
Speaker 1: to the camp and see what was going on in
51:57
Speaker 1: front of them and that they'd been so with the
52:01
Speaker 1: Nazi party. And they saw eighty thousand people crammed into
52:06
Speaker 1: a space that was only meant for eight thousand. They
52:10
Speaker 1: saw the corpses laying in front of the crematorium. Women
52:15
Speaker 1: would like pass out like they'd faint because of the
52:18
Speaker 1: sight of the bodies, and soldiers like proper soldiers like
52:22
Speaker 1: the American soldiers they were freaking out when they discovered
52:26
Speaker 1: collections of human body parts like internal organs and all
52:30
Speaker 1: this stuff in display cases, which like, this is the
52:34
Speaker 1: least weird part for me in a place that's doing experiments,
52:37
Speaker 1: I expect weird shit and jars, right, I just feel
52:40
Speaker 1: like that's the least weird part of this. And so
52:46
Speaker 1: they found a few things covering human skin, and so
52:51
Speaker 1: as they go around, they're like, well, Elsa Coke is
52:54
Speaker 1: the one who picked out the prisoners with tattoos, and
52:58
Speaker 1: so her world comes crashing down pretty fucking sharpish when
53:03
Speaker 1: she was arrested for her crimes against humanity. So at
53:09
Speaker 1: our trial, she's like, those things they're good skin, But
53:16
Speaker 1: like here's the thing. They're like, oh, she had all
53:19
Speaker 1: this stuff. And then it's like, but she's moved two
53:21
Speaker 1: separate camps in the meantime, Like she left in like
53:26
Speaker 1: forty one, right, Like that's when she's gone, and this
53:30
Speaker 1: is now forty five, So this is three years on.
53:35
Speaker 1: But you remember, she is of the belief that she
53:37
Speaker 1: is a perfect human. She is a specimen. She is
53:40
Speaker 1: the best person in the world, and she has done
53:43
Speaker 1: nothing wrong, and so like, I love it, but these
53:50
Speaker 1: things have tooos did you chatt with the goats? But
53:54
Speaker 1: like her story isn't matching the stories of other people.
53:58
Speaker 1: Like Jewish listeners are testifying against her, like they were
54:04
Speaker 1: saying it was, you know, their job to you know,
54:07
Speaker 1: remove bodies and you know, cut the bodies up and
54:10
Speaker 1: do this kind of stuff. And there were like so
54:14
Speaker 1: many people testifying against her and that she had ordered
54:19
Speaker 1: many of these things to be made from human skin.
54:23
Speaker 1: Well there were orders to make things from human skin,
54:30
Speaker 1: not one person could prove the order came from ILSA specifically,
54:36
Speaker 1: which is like things were continued to be made out
54:39
Speaker 1: of human skin after nineteen forty one. So I kind
54:43
Speaker 1: of feel like maybe just maybe this one thing wasn't her.
54:51
Speaker 1: So because they only had testimony from witnesses, which is
54:56
Speaker 1: considered hearsay, they couldn't use that as proof to convict her.
55:01
Speaker 1: So like they can connect her for her a bunch
55:03
Speaker 1: of stuff, but she goes, but not for the whole
55:06
Speaker 1: lampshade thing. So what happens is INDI the book and
55:09
Speaker 1: Vault Trials, is that the story comes out about like
55:13
Speaker 1: the lamp shade skin and all this stuff, and it
55:15
Speaker 1: just goes nuclear, like it goes everywhere, like everyone is
55:20
Speaker 1: talking about it. It is a big fucking deal. It's everywhere, right,
55:25
Speaker 1: And so when this is happening, it's in all the newspapers,
55:29
Speaker 1: it's on the radio, everyone's talking about it, and so
55:34
Speaker 1: she is automatically associated with this. Now, again, she did
55:38
Speaker 1: some pretty fucking horrible stuff, but there isn't an exact
55:44
Speaker 1: like link to her, Like there's no like full on
55:48
Speaker 1: proof that it was her that did this. We don't
55:51
Speaker 1: have like the thumb switches. We don't have the skin handbag,
55:58
Speaker 1: like the stuff that they said she had. We don't
56:02
Speaker 1: have any of it. And if she was really proud
56:05
Speaker 1: to have it, it would have sort of transferred with
56:07
Speaker 1: her to places, you know, there would have been ways
56:10
Speaker 1: to move things for a rich as she was at
56:13
Speaker 1: that point. Women. So she's in prison anyway, right, she's
56:22
Speaker 1: in jail, And in nineteen forty seven, when she's in jail,
56:27
Speaker 1: she's pregnant again. It's it's wild. So nineteen forty seven,
56:35
Speaker 1: she's in prison and she's pregnant, and everyone's like it
56:39
Speaker 1: was an affair with a German prisoner. It might have been,
56:42
Speaker 1: but also she's pregnant in prison. Am I the only
56:47
Speaker 1: one who finds this really fucking weird. Like people are like, oh,
56:49
Speaker 1: she had a kid in president, and I'm like how,
56:52
Speaker 1: I mean, I know how, I know how, but also
56:56
Speaker 1: are we sure? Are we? Are we sure it was
57:00
Speaker 1: another inmate? I just feel like, you know, there's So
57:06
Speaker 1: she gives birth in prison to you, and so she
57:12
Speaker 1: has to give him away, and so he gets adopted
57:15
Speaker 1: and he only finds out that she's his mother like
57:20
Speaker 1: decades later. So she serves time in prison, she gives birth, like,
57:26
Speaker 1: she is sentenced to four years hard labor because they
57:29
Speaker 1: cannot prove that she gave these orders, right, there's no
57:33
Speaker 1: there's they literally have no proof, Okay, So she goes
57:37
Speaker 1: to jail, she goes for four years hard labor. Then
57:40
Speaker 1: when she's released, she is immediately put on trial again
57:44
Speaker 1: for her crimes a third time, and this time she's
57:47
Speaker 1: put on trial by West Germany. So you had like, so,
57:53
Speaker 1: so far she's been on trial by the Nazis, the
57:57
Speaker 1: American military, and also now Germany because obviously Germany is
58:01
Speaker 1: split East and West, and so West Germany is pushing
58:04
Speaker 1: for list right. Because she's the bitch of Bookenvoald, the
58:07
Speaker 1: beast of Bouchenvald, the red Witch Dan hicks On Bouchenvoald, right,
58:13
Speaker 1: and it is the German people. And it's here where
58:18
Speaker 1: she gets a life sentence. And here there is one
58:22
Speaker 1: key witness, Dr Morgan, and he testified in all of
58:26
Speaker 1: Elsa's trials, and he said Elsa was a whore who
58:31
Speaker 1: rode horseback and sexy underwear in front of the prisoners
58:34
Speaker 1: and then noted them down for punishment. The numbers of
58:37
Speaker 1: those who had looked at her she laying around in
58:41
Speaker 1: her garden in front of prisoners, simply primitive. But he's
58:47
Speaker 1: also like, she had not to do with the lamp shades,
58:49
Speaker 1: by the way, Like he's like, she was a whore,
58:53
Speaker 1: but she didn't have anything to do with the lamp shades.
58:56
Speaker 1: He's like, that wasn't her, But she was a massive slut.
59:00
Speaker 1: Now is it not uncomfortable to ride a horse in
59:04
Speaker 1: just underwear? I'm sorry, Like I'm sorry. I was at
59:07
Speaker 1: a pony once and it was the worst experience of
59:10
Speaker 1: my life. So but anyway, she gets convicted for life imprisonment.
59:17
Speaker 1: And so she's there and she has three children, two
59:21
Speaker 1: of which know of her existence, and one of whom
59:24
Speaker 1: does not yet so her oldest son, he sort of
59:28
Speaker 1: grows up and he's like realizing that the entire world
59:31
Speaker 1: hates his family and he doesn't know why. And he
59:34
Speaker 1: struggles with us growing up and ends up ending his
59:37
Speaker 1: own life. Their daughter, sorry, her daughter ends up growing up,
59:44
Speaker 1: getting married, changing her name and just being like bye, no,
59:47
Speaker 1: thank you, and goes off and lives her life. The
59:51
Speaker 1: third son you have, so he finds out who his
59:54
Speaker 1: mom is. He grows up and he's like, I need
59:56
Speaker 1: to hear this from the horse's mouth. So he goes
59:58
Speaker 1: and he starts visiting her like in the sixties, like
1:00:02
Speaker 1: he's visiting her in prison, and she's trying to say, like, listen,
1:00:07
Speaker 1: I did some stuff, but I didn't make things happen,
1:00:11
Speaker 1: like she's, you know, denying. I mean quite a lot
1:00:14
Speaker 1: of the stuff actually, But he slowly starts to believe
1:00:19
Speaker 1: her because he's like, Okay, some of this isn't adding
1:00:21
Speaker 1: up in this stuff doesn't make sense, and this stuff
1:00:22
Speaker 1: doesn't and so she's like, you need to get me
1:00:27
Speaker 1: out of here. You need to get like a lawyer.
1:00:28
Speaker 1: We need to try and work this out. But then
1:00:32
Speaker 1: like it becomes apparent to her, like she's not getting
1:00:34
Speaker 1: out of prison, even if they could somehow, you know,
1:00:39
Speaker 1: do some legal wizardry and get her out, like she'd
1:00:43
Speaker 1: be hunted, Like there's nothing for her in the outside
1:00:47
Speaker 1: world because she was involved in the murder of people,
1:00:53
Speaker 1: like she was a fucking monster, even if she wasn't,
1:00:56
Speaker 1: you know, selecting prisoners for their tattoos and turning them
1:00:59
Speaker 1: in fucking household appliances. Right, that's gotten nonehing to do
1:01:05
Speaker 1: with it, because if she's doing any of this, she's
1:01:08
Speaker 1: still perpetrated and benefited from this fucking crime. And that's
1:01:13
Speaker 1: the thing that people seem to forget. If you are involved,
1:01:15
Speaker 1: if you are benefiting from it, and you are doing
1:01:17
Speaker 1: fucking nothing about it, then you are part of the problem.
1:01:21
Speaker 1: You are part of this system that is fucking everything up.
1:01:26
Speaker 1: So it gets to the point where she's just like
1:01:28
Speaker 1: realizing that nothing can be done, Like and this is
1:01:31
Speaker 1: the first prisoner she prisoner, this is the first visitor
1:01:34
Speaker 1: she's had in fucking years, because how the fuck wants
1:01:37
Speaker 1: to go see else of coke? Right, And it gets
1:01:41
Speaker 1: the point where she's like, fuck this for kame soldiers,
1:01:43
Speaker 1: I just can't do this anymore. She realizes there's nothing
1:01:46
Speaker 1: for her out there. She's not only not getting out,
1:01:50
Speaker 1: but she's having delusions, like her mind is starting to go,
1:01:56
Speaker 1: and like she's convinced that camp survivors are coming for her,
1:02:02
Speaker 1: Like she's really getting paranoid. Things are are going to
1:02:08
Speaker 1: get worse for her and they're going to get her,
1:02:09
Speaker 1: and like she's finally being haunted by the ghost of
1:02:14
Speaker 1: her past. And so she writes a note to her son,
1:02:22
Speaker 1: Yew there is no other way. Death for me is
1:02:26
Speaker 1: a release. And so on the first of September nineteen
1:02:32
Speaker 1: sixty seven, at the Aishach Women's Prison, Ilsa Coke hanged
1:02:40
Speaker 1: herself with a bedshade at the age of sixty. Over
1:02:46
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty thousand people pass through the gates
1:02:48
Speaker 1: of book involved, including political prisoners, prisoners of war, Freemasons,
1:02:56
Speaker 1: and quote deviants. Over fifty six thousand people died in
1:03:02
Speaker 1: this camp, and Elsa she was involved in this because
1:03:06
Speaker 1: she got pleasure from watching these people die. Now, Ilsa
1:03:10
Speaker 1: Coke may not have had lamp shades made out of skin,
1:03:14
Speaker 1: but she was, by all accounts a really fucking terrible,
1:03:20
Speaker 1: horrible person. She was a monster, and you don't need
1:03:24
Speaker 1: to add horrors to that. To prove it. I never
1:03:30
Speaker 1: talked about the names. Actually, so her name it starts
1:03:33
Speaker 1: off as it's a hex of book involves, like the
1:03:34
Speaker 1: witch of book and volved. And then this goes to
1:03:37
Speaker 1: like the papers in there, just like she's a witch,
1:03:39
Speaker 1: but then she's a beast and then over time it
1:03:42
Speaker 1: becomes the bitch of book involved because alliteration. But yeah,
1:03:48
Speaker 1: that is the story of the Bitch of Book and Vold.
1:03:55
Speaker 1: So I guess it is recommendation time. So for watching
1:04:02
Speaker 1: the new season of ted Lasso. Everyone deserves to have
1:04:07
Speaker 1: some optimism and whimsay in their life after this. For lessening,
1:04:14
Speaker 1: you know, what I've been listening to a lot recently
1:04:17
Speaker 1: is Newfound Glory's version of Accidentally and Love. I don't
1:04:22
Speaker 1: I think I like it better than the original. I
1:04:24
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe I have good problems. I don't know,
1:04:26
Speaker 1: but I'm enjoying it. But for reading Harlem Shuffle by
1:04:33
Speaker 1: Colson Whitehead. Those are my recommendations for this week, and yeah,
1:04:40
Speaker 1: more information coming soon. Love you all, And my goodness,
1:04:43
Speaker 1: my face hurts so much. And with that I shall
1:04:47
Speaker 1: say goodbye adios. Au revoir of my friends. Bubby