The Commandant's Wife Poem by Paul Hartal

The Commandant's Wife



Horror films that feature gory vampires,
serial killers and macabre satanic cults
attract throngs of fans to watch such movies.

But we don't have to go to the cinema
for real nightmares and terror.
They are an intrinsic facet of daily life,
a veritable part and parcel of our history.

Take for example the story of Ilse Koch.
She was a real life serial killer,
a bloodthirsty vampire of unspeakable horrors.
Mrs. Koch was also the wife of the commandant
of the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald
and became notorious
as the ‘Beast of Buchenwald'.

Many people cannot believe
that the satanic horror stories
attributed to her are true.
However, she was convicted
for sadistic crimes after the war
and sentenced twice for life imprisonment,
first by an American military tribunal
and later by a German court.

Working as a bookkeeping clerk,
Ilse Koch joined the Nazi Party in 1932.
Four years later she became an SS guard
at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
near Berlin.

Here she met SS major Karl Otto Koch,
who was the lager commandant.
Advanced to the rank of colonel,
the commandant was transferred
to Buchenwald in 1937
and Ilse accompanied him.
In 1941 he was appointed to head
the Majdanek death camp near Lublin
and the couple moved to Poland.

The commandant's wife had a fancy taste
for decorative tattoos.
She took particular interest
in the indelible patterns engraved into
the skin of prisoners.
If she liked the designs,
she selected the inmates to be killed
so that their skins could be made
into lampshades. She used
the tattooed human lampshades in her house
for their atmospheric lighting effects.

Newspapers around the world reported
the repulsive crimes of Ilse Koch,
including a New York Times article
published in 1948.

Mind you, pieces of tattooed skin
from Buchenwald inmates are in the possession
of the United States National Museum
of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.,
and the museum is an integral part
of the Smithsonian Institution.

A few weeks before the end of World War II,
General Eisenhower visited Ohrdorf,
which was a satellite lager
of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Situated about forty miles west of Berlin,
American forces liberated the camps
in April 1945.

Shocked by the piles of decaying human bodies
and starving survivors, Eisenhower invited
politicians and journalists to document the horrors
of Nazi brutality. He wanted for the whole world
to see the evidence that the atrocities perpetrated
by the Third Reich were undeniable facts, and not,
as some claimed, only Allied war propaganda.

Many years later, an American president made
an emotional tour of Buchenwald.
It was Friday, June 6,2009, and accompanied
by German Chancellor Angela Marker,
as well as concentration camp survivors,
President Barack Obama
confronted the heinous terror
memorialized in Buchenwald.

'To this day there are those who insist
the Holocaust never happened', he said.
But the camps are 'the ultimate rebuke
to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty
to confront those who would tell lies
about our history'.

Buchenwald teaches us many compelling lessons,
the President pointed out. For, we have the duty
to be ever vigilant and fight the spread of evil.
Buchenwald obliges us to stand up for justice
and to extend a helping hand to the weak
and the oppressed. Yet this terrible place
also serves as a stark reminder that
'we have to guard against cruelty in ourselves'.

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