Who was Ilse Koch and did she influence Ed Gein? Monster season 3 character explained

As well as digging into the story and crimes of serial killer and grave robber Ed Gein, Monster: The Ed Gein Story also throws up some unexpected characters in the overarching timeline of events.

The series looks into Gein's influence on Hollywood, showing us how his story came to inspire films like Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But when it comes to where Gein got his own inspiration from, the series paints it out to be a very dark story.

As shown in the series, Gein is given a comic book about Ilse Koch, who was branded as the 'B***h of Buchenwald'. Through flashbacks, we come to learn of her gruesome and unspeakable crimes and how they may have lit a fuse in Gein.

But who was Koch and did she actually influence Gein? Read on to find out.

Who was Ilse Koch?

In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Ilse Koch is played by Vicky Krieps and is shown in the first episode when Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) brings Ed a box full of dark concentration camp paraphernalia as a present.

In the box, as well as pictures of concentration camp prisoners, there's also a colourful and glossy comic book all about the 'B***h of Buchenwald', otherwise known as Ilse Koch.

He starts to read the comic book in secret in his bedroom, without his mother's knowledge, and starts to imagine the reality of some of the graphic illustrations that are mapped out in the book. Later in the episode, we get a flashback to Koch's life as wife of the commandment of Buchenwald, Karl Otto-Koch.

In Monster, we see Koch run a very strict house but also how she had a secret underground room where she stored tattooed prisoners for unthinkable crimes. We then see how in the evenings, she held extravagant parties where the Nazi officers and their wives torture prisoners.

In reality, we know that Koch did host big parties and ordered the prisoners in her home to refer to her as “eine gnädige Frau”, meaning “gracious lady".

As for whether her parties involved her riding horses inside her home, Dr Konrad Morgen (an SS judge and investigator who testified against Koch in all three of her trials) described her as "a hussy who rode on horseback in sexy underwear in front of the prisoners and then noted down for punishment the numbers of those who looked at her … Simply primitive." So it seems as though the Netflix series is accurate in that sense.

Koch was a German war criminal who didn't hold any official position within the Nazi party but due to her gruesome crimes, became one of the most infamous and talked-about people by the end of the Second World War. Also known as the "Kommandeuse of Buchenwald", she joined the Nazi part in 1932 and started working as a secretary at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Berlin.

She moved to Buchenwald in 1937 with her husband Karl and together, they had three children. It was there that Koch committed her heinous crimes, torturing prisoners physically and also forcing them to have sex with her.

But throughout her trial and in the aftermath of her alleged crimes, Koch became known for identifying prisoners with tattoos, ordering their deaths and allegedly using their skin for a variety of household items including, infamously, lampshades.

During the Nuremberg war trials, a German inmate gave the following testimony: “All prisoners with tattooing on them were to report to the dispensary… After the prisoners had been examined, the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses were then turned over to the pathological department, where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further.”

Koch was arrested after World War II and, due to the nature of the criminal charges she faced, there was plenty of public fascination. The first trial, which was conducted in 1947 by the American military commission court at Dachau, couldn't find Ilse guilty of the charges against her on account of lack of evidence despite former prisoners of hers testifying against her.

However, Ilse was convicted of being a part of the “common design” to abuse prisoners and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison. Her sentence was reduced and due to time already served, she was released in October 1949. But upon the day of her release, West German government officials arrested her once again and she was indicted by Bavarian chief prosecutor, Johann Ilkow, Koch for 25 misdemeanour counts.

Those included grievous bodily harm, incitement to grievous bodily harm in a number of cases "no longer determinable," sixty-five counts of incitement to attempted murder, and twenty-five counts of incitement to murder.

The trial lasted seven weeks, with 250 witnesses testifying, 50 of those in defence of Koch. However, she was eventually convicted and in January 1951, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

While in prison at Landsberg prison in 1947, Koch gave birth to a son named Uwe Köhler, who was placed into foster care. It is said that Uwe's father was a fellow incarcerated German war criminal. As shown in Monster, Koch experienced delusions in her later years, convinced that concentration camp prisoners were going to hurt her.

She died by suicide in prison aged 60 on 1st September 1967.

She left a note to her son Uwe, which read: "There is no other way. Death for me is a release."

Did Ilse Koch influence Ed Gein?

Gein never publicly spoke about Ilse Koch, her crimes or her influence on his own crimes.

In the series, it's shown that Gein developed a deep interest in Koch, with the final episode showing Gein imagining having a conversation with her about their shared criminality.

While it's not known if Koch did influence Gein, her trials were heavily publicised and written about by various US outlets. In fact, after the reduction of her initial sentence, a group of US senators led an investigation into why it was and led to a US senate recommendation that she be tried again, but by the newly independent West German court system.

So, while it's plausible that Gein did know of Ilse Koch, given how much US interest there was in the case, her crimes and her eventual trials, we'll never really know for certain.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix – sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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