Someone may remember a comic strip: "The Lampshade of the Thorn Flower", which is about a female demon in the concentration camp during the Second World War, and her name is Mrs. Haylinger.
This woman was beautiful and tall, but terrifying as the devil. This is because as a female guard in the concentration camp, she not only abused and beat the prisoners in the concentration camp, but also had a special interest, that is, to peel people's skins.
She would peel off human skins and make them into crafts such as gloves, purses, and of course lampshades for table lamps. Tattooed skin is her favorite, and the lampshade of the tattoo is one of her many collections. In the comic strip, this terrible woman is eventually arrested and arrested, but in reality, what kind of person is the prototype of this character, and what kind of life ending?
Mrs. Haylinger's prototype was named Ils Koch. Born on September 22, 1906 in Dresden, Germany, to a factory owner and a nurse to a mother, she lived in a harmonious family, though not very wealthy.
In such a family, Ils Koch grew up happily, and her teacher once described her as "a happy and polite child." As a child, like every child, she happily went to and from school every day, doing homework, and helping her parents with housework, when Ils Koch had a naïve sense of the world and dreamed of becoming an athlete when she grew up.
If her life continues to go on like this, I am afraid that she will not become the terrible demon who has lost her humanity, but unfortunately, the tragedy of the times has quietly enveloped the family.
After World War I, Germany fell into the Great Depression. The defeat of the world war left the German people poor and depressed, and hatred was breeding in a chaotic society.
At the age of 15, Ils Koch entered an accounting school, and after graduation she went to work as a bookkeeper, but this job made little money, and the burden of the family was on the shoulders of this young girl. Even more tragically, in the depressed economic environment at the time, she soon lost her job. At this time, a quiet argument emerged in society that everything was the fault of the Jews. It is the Jews who earn all the money, which is why everyone is so poor.
This kind of thinking grows in the minds of young people in Germany, who are incapable of judgment, tormented by poverty and hunger, and most likely to cling to false appearances. Ils Koch also came to believe that it was the Jews who made their lives worse, and then misfortune befell her. Her parents died one after another, Ils Koch lost everything she had, and her heart gradually became more extreme.
In 1932, she joined the Nazi Party, and although the Nazis were still on the rise and had not yet enveloped the country as they did later, by this time Ils Koch had already agreed with the Nazi theory that the Jews were a lowly people and should not exist, that it was the Jews who brought suffering and poverty to the world, and that she had to do everything in her power to kill the Jews.
It was also at this time that the young Ils Koch became acquainted with a young man, Karl Koch, a Nazi Party officer. Carl Koch liked Ils very much, and Ils, who had no relatives, gradually gave him his heart, and the two married, and Ils changed his surname to Koch. This terrible couple shares the same belief that they will get rid of all the Jews in the world.
Because both were loyal members of the Nazi Party and had joined the Nazi Party very early, Hitler had great trust in them. Karl Koch rose through the ranks and in the blink of an eye became the commander of the Exxenhausen concentration camp. Ills has been working with her husband to support his cause, while also working with him.
Two years later, buchenwald was established, the largest concentration camp in Germany. Karl Koch went to Buchenwald as commander, while Ils Koch also went to Buchenwald, where he also served as secretary and guard.
Inside the Buchenwald concentration camp, the story of cruelty begins. In this concentration camp, until the liberation of the concentration camp by the US military in 1945, more than 56,000 people were victimized, which can be called hell on earth. And the rulers of this hell are the Kochs.
After being sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, prisoners were required to perform manual labor throughout the day. Prisoners needed to build railroads, make machinery, carry stones, and so on. They work exhaustingly every day, but they don't get enough food and rest. In order to torture the prisoners, the guards would also ask the prisoners to sing while they were working, forcing them to look happy.
Ils Koch loved enslaving prisoners, especially the Jews. Every time prisoners were taken to a concentration camp, nude examinations were carried out, the purpose of which was to select people who were able to work. But the elderly, children, pregnant women, disabled people, etc., who are unable to work, will be ruthlessly thrown into the gas chambers or abused and killed.
Therefore, all prisoners will try to hide their flaws, hoping that they will appear to be able to work in order to survive. Older people will try to stand up their backs to make themselves look more erect; pregnant women will desperately put up their stomachs and pretend that they are not pregnant; small children will try to step on their feet to make themselves look like they have grown up. But how could these poor men's little disguises escape the eyes of the terrible Ils Koch? She liked to expose the disguise of these people and torture them.
Once, when she found a pregnant woman struggling to retract her stomach, she did not hesitate to kick the pregnant woman's stomach and throw the poor mother into the river and drown. In the end, both the mother and the child died.
She enjoyed watching these poor people kneeling on their knees begging for forgiveness and weeping bitterly, but she never sent a kind heart, because she preferred to arrest these people, kill them, or throw them into the gas chambers. Ils Koch also liked to beat prisoners with her whip, like an animal, and she would walk around the camp on horseback on her toes, smoking and violence when she saw people.
Even more because Ils Koch is the wife of the commander-in-chief, the doctors in charge of inspecting the prisoners treat her as a doctor in order to please her, and Ils Koch can check the prisoners' bodies at will, and can kill innocents indiscriminately, even if someone accidentally steps on her foot, or accidentally looks at her, he will be killed on the spot. Ils Koch was notorious, and people called her Buchenwald Beast, Buchenwald or Butcher's Widow behind her back.
The Kochs lived a heavenly happy life in the camp, enslaved and resourceful. The two of them loved to loot Jews' money, because most Jews were in business, often had a lot of savings, and their various ornaments were expensive. Every time the Kochs found a rich Jew, they would take all his possessions and kill the man.
In this way, their own property continued to accumulate and they lived a life of great luxury. The two built a large villa, and even built a special riding field for the two to entertain. Their families had servants, gardeners, etc., just like aristocratic families. The couple also secretly had love with each other behind each other's backs, and Carl Koch had countless lovers, and he once had to go to the hospital for excessive promiscuity and had to go to the hospital.
Ils Koch, on the other hand, did not care about her husband's misdeeds, and she had many lovers herself, even in the concentration camp, when she had an affair with two officers. The debauchery of these two demons is unimaginable. Ils Koch lived a life of joy she could not have imagined in her childhood, but gradually the ordinary abundance could no longer satisfy her, and she became infected with a terrible hobby of collecting human skins.
In concentration camps, killing people is easy. Ils Koch never saw the prisoners as people like her, who in her opinion might not even be compared to animals.
One day, Ils Koch suddenly discovered that a doctor would sneak away some male prisoners, who disappeared after being taken away. She immediately pressed the doctor, only to find that the doctor had peeled off the skins of the men and made them into various crafts. This surprised Ils Koch, but after a brief moment of surprise, she was immediately captivated by the uniqueness and "beauty" of the crafts.
Ils Koch gradually became fascinated, and she became obsessed with human skin crafts. Thus began the nightmare inside the camp. Ils Koch decided to make her own human skin crafts, and she often asked the prisoners to strip them all, look for people with beautiful tattoos, and call them out alone. Then these people will be taken away and will never appear again.
Rumors that the men had been released excited the prisoners who wanted to get out of trouble, so that every time Ils Koch came to pick someone, they would take the initiative to choose. But they never knew it, and this was the ruse of Ils Koch. For those who never appear again are not free, but eternally dead.
Ils Koch is fascinated by her demonic "artistic creations", which are deeply intoxicated by these beautiful spiny human skin purses, human skin gloves, and human skin lampshades. At this time, she believed that the lowly Jews were born in order to be made into crafts for her to admire, and this was their fate. And she is the one-of-a-kind artist, the true admirer of beauty.
Ils Koch's requirements for human skin products have increased, she is no longer limited to ordinary human skin, she wants crystal clear skin. So she stopped killing the prisoners and then skinning them, so that the skin was not transparent enough, and she began to peel people alive. For example, she would fix a prisoner on the bed and then ask the doctor to peel off the skin like this, and the pain would irritate the prisoner's nerves, and they would moan or cry loudly and cry, and constantly begged for forgiveness, but this did not impress Ils Koch. Not to mention, these were what she wanted to see.
Because it was said that the higher the adrenaline rush of people, the more transparent and beautiful the skin was peeled off, Ils Koch would even touch prisoners before they died, making them feel excited and frightened. In this way, one person after another died, and one terrible "work of art" after another was born- human skin gloves, human skin lampshades, human leather book covers, and so on. Later, Ils Koch even made a power switch with his big dried fingers and put it in his home for daily use. The horror of this woman has developed to unimaginable degrees.
God has eyes, and retribution has finally come to this terrible couple. But what came first was not a just trial, but an arrest within the Nazi Party.
In 1943, the SS arrested the Kochs for corruption and theft. The two were imprisoned, and in 1945, Carl Koch was executed. But Ils Koch escaped trial and survived. But a just verdict may be late, but it will never fail.
After the war, at the behest of various sources, Ils Koch was arrested and tried two years later on August 19, 1947. The military court for the American district in Germany sentenced her to death. But a ridiculous scene happened.
Ils Koch declared in court that she was 8 months pregnant and could not be executed. The news shocked everyone, for two years she had been held in close custody by the Americans, with only interrogators, most of them Jewish. But she didn't lie this time, she did get pregnant.
It was amazing, because would she be willing to have children with Jews? It is outrageous that a person who hates Jews and kills Jews can do such a thing in order to survive. When she was surviving, did she ever think about how the Jews she killed begged and hoped to survive? Two months later, she gave birth to the child and went on trial, this time focusing on whether she had made human skin crafts.
Ils Koch adamantly denies making human skin crafts, claiming that the lampshades are made of sheepskin. Lucius Clay, then commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in occupied territories, believed her and changed her life sentence to four years in prison.
Four years later, Ils Koch was released from prison. She changed her name and surname, and changed her appearance to live between countries. If she had continued like this, she would have escaped punishment and gone unpunished ever since. But Ils Koch enjoyed a life of wealth, how could he adapt to the life of ordinary people? So she secretly attended various banquets and continued to hang out. It may be that retribution will come sooner or later.
At a banquet, an old woman noticed that the pattern of the gloves on a woman's hand was very familiar, and when she looked closely, the pattern turned out to be a tattoo that she personally tattooed her son. It turned out that Ils Koch was even wearing his own human skin gloves to show off. The old woman was so grief-stricken and outraged that she immediately reported Ils Koch to the authorities. Coupled with numerous other reports, protests and international public opinion, the federal German authorities arrested Ils Koch.
The trial was attended by many survivors, proving that Ils Koch had indeed tortured prisoners and made human skin crafts. And that famous lampshade was tested, and it was indeed human skin. In this way, Ils Koch was arrested again, this time in prison for life. However, Ils Koch appealed against the verdict, but it was dismissed. This demon leader who has killed countless people has finally received the punishment he deserves.
After Ils Koch was imprisoned, none of her four children were doing well. Her eldest son could not bear that his mother was such a bloody demon, and in order to make up for his mother's fault, coupled with his own mental breakdown, he finally committed suicide.
Neither of her daughters wanted to be in contact with her anymore, and both changed their names and surnames, married in anonymity, and severed ties with Ils Koch.
Her youngest child, the one whose father she did not know who her father was, was first adopted and grew up to learn that her birth mother was Ils Koch, so she often visited her in prison.
Ils Koch adamantly denied in front of the children that she had done human skin crafts, saying that she had been framed and that she had done nothing wrong. The naïve child believes in his mother and looks for someone everywhere hoping to help his mother overturn the case, but the evidence is overwhelming, how can it be? In the end, he was unable to take his mother out of prison.
Ils Koch lost all hope, she grew older and more confused. She hallucinated and always saw a lot of tattooed Jewish men surrounding her, accusing her, beating her. She lived every day in the fear of hallucinations, fearing and fearing, often shouting and screaming, feeling terrible.
But who would pity her? This is just the fear of doing something wrong. Eventually, on September 1, 1967, Ils Koch hanged himself from a sheet in his cell, ending his life at the age of 61. The life of this terrible demon head came to an end. Interestingly, however, lampshades that have proved that she did make human skin products have been proved to be sheepskin in the modern era of the advancement of inspection methods. This is undoubtedly like a black humor. However, in addition to the lampshade, there are many other human skin products, and the evidence is overwhelming, and she still cannot exonerate herself. Her stories have also been made into many films and documentaries, such as The Women of Buchenwald, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, The Most Evil Men and Women in History, and so on.
Ils Koch is dead, but the sins she committed, the people she slaughtered, are forever preserved in history. It reminds us of the horrors of ultra-nationalism and the horrors of racial discrimination. False beliefs can turn people into devils, which tells us the importance of always being firm in a correct worldview. Never discriminate; never over-idolize someone, keep your own thinking no matter how right your words are; keep your humanity alive and don't let hatred fill your heart. Never put your hopes on war, peace is the best. Let's cherish a peaceful life together!