True Crime With Caledonian Kitty

In my final instalment of my Horrific History & True Crime series, I have chosen to write about Josef Kramer, otherwise known as 'The Beast of Belsen'. First of all I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has commented about the posts in this series and read them, I really appreciate it and I'm very honoured that you have found my posts to be interesting and informative. It's one thing to be told that my posts have been an interesting read but to also hear that you've learned some new things, well, that is also a nice thing to hear. 

Before I begin getting into the last subject in this series, I would like to let you know (and I'm sure you will be pleased to hear) that I will be starting a new Serial Killer series next week. I know how many of you find my Serial Killer cases to be fascinating and the posts always do incredible with the views. 

As you know. I am very old school and have a vast collection of books on various Serial Killers in my collection, so from next week onwards I will be delving deeper, researching, writing and putting together posts for my Serial Killer series so I hope you will join me for that. 

You're probably familiar with the name Josef Kramer? You may or may not be but he was another sick and twisted individual who was a devoted follower and believer in the Nazi regime. He was born on the 19th of November 1906 in Munich, Germany. His early life was normal, no traumatic incidences or strange behaviour. He was brought up in a strict, religious household and was taught to have manners and always say please and thank you. 

As he got older his life didn't seem to have much of a direction as if he wasn't sure what he wanted to do. He wasn't one to hold down a job for very long and spent most of the time unemployed. He had some previous experience in retail and there was some hopes that he would make a career as an accountant but his heart wasn't really in it. 

Like a lot of Germans, he was exposed to Nazi propaganda and believed in their promises of putting German people first and creating better jobs and living conditions so he joined the Nazi party in 1931. By 1932 he decided he wanted to join the SS, he flourished in training and was soon working as a prison guard before being promoted to the position of guard in a number of the concentration camps 

In his position as guard at the camps, Josef couldn't have been happier, it was like he had found his calling. He was a very proud Nazi and because of how ambitious he was, how he conduced himself towards prisoners and how devoted he was to the regime, he was moved further up the ranks to the point of being given his own camp to manage and that was Bergen-Belsen.

Like all of the camps, Belsen was appalling, the conditions were horrendous and the prisoners were tortured, starved, worked to death or sent to the gas chamber. It really was hell on earth. 

Josef was promoted quickly partly due to his sadistic and evil ways which was a huge bonus for anyone who was a Nazi trying to climb the ranks. It seemed the more evil you were, the more benefits and responsibility you were given and now here he was in charge of his own camp where he'd spent most of the time before this, being unemployed. 

He had no proper experience, no organisational skills and no heart. He was a maniac and a dangerous one at that. When he arrived to take over the Belsen camp by the end of 1944, there were around 15,000 prisoners at the camp, the place was horrendous and already the stuff of nightmares but when he took the helm, things got dramatically worse. 

The camp was already bursting at the seams, there was a lack of food and disease was everywhere. Despite the terribly poor state of the prisoners, they were forced to work to death. Josef enjoyed torturing these poor people, kicking them, shooting them for his own sadistic pleasure. He took an active part in selecting prisoners for the gas chambers as well as forcing them into the gas chambers himself. 

He would beat people, shoot them and there were incidences where he once kicked a woman to death and shot some starving prisoners for eating rotten potato peelings that they'd found in the mud. 

(Bergen-Belsen. Picture credit: Wikipedia)

He had no soul and was very proud of his role. Unknown to him though, his evil reign of terror was to be a short lived one because just months later, the whole Nazi regime was about to come crashing down. The British Army was on their way to liberate the camp and try their best to bring the Nazi war criminals who were responsible for all of the sickening atrocities, to justice. 

In April 1945, the British Army descended upon Bergen-Belsen and what they found was the stuff of nightmares, there were no words for it. There are some clips on YouTube (viewers discretion is advised) which I will include at the bottom of the post which show the devastating conditions of the camp and the prisoners. 

I mentioned earlier about Josef Kramer taking over the camp in late 1944 and the numbers of prisoners being around 15,000, well by the time the British Army arrived, that number had swelled to 60,000 just in a matter of months. There was no food and Josef said himself that hundreds of prisoners would die every day due to lack of food and the diseases that ran rampant in the camp. 

The British Army were made of tough stuff (forgive me for blowing our own trumpets - my grandparents fought in the war) and had seen a lot in their time but nothing could have prepared them from Bergen-Belsen or the other scenes from neighbouring camps. There was decomposing bodies everywhere, scattered all over the ground, some were piled on top of each other. There was flies, insects and rats everywhere. There were people who were barely alive, their bones and ribs protruding through their pale, malnourished skin. 

The smell was horrific, a mix between decomposing flesh and human waste. there was horror at every turn and there was no escaping it. 

I mentioned in previous posts in this series that some of the guards made a run for it, Dr Josef Mengele used his money and connections to flee, others were caught some time later but in the case of Josef Kramer, well, that was an unexpected turn of events. 

With all of this going on, some guards escaping, some being caught (who were forced to gather the bodies on the ground under order by the British Army) and thousands of prisoners, guards and British soldiers in this one place of hell, Josef stood there without a care in the world. 

Instead of running off and joining his Nazi pals on the run and ending up in Argentina. Josef Kramer proudly stood before the British Army like this whole disgusting place of death and torture under his watch was something to be proud of. He stayed right there and actually took British soldiers on a tour of the camp, showing them around without a shred of remorse. He seemed proud and like he had accepted his fate, 

Well, of course they took him away and put him on trial where he tried to deny everything. He said he wasn't part of the selection process and had no idea what the gas chambers were for. His excuse was (like we've all heard before) that he was simply following orders. 

Despite his 'charming' personality (yes, he was a charming sadist and psychopath who thought he was clever at manipulating people) and denials of the extent of his involvement in the deaths of thousands of innocent people, the evidence and witnesses was too much to deny. He was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. 

Josef Kramer was executed on the 13th of December 1945 by the famous British executioner, Albert Pierrepoint. (on a side note: if you would like me to write about Albert Pierrepoint in a future post, please let me know as his story is quite a fascinating one in itself) Josef was 39 years old. 

And there you have it. In this series we had Irma Grese who met the hangman's noose for her crimes, Dr Josef Mengele who escaped justice for his murders, sadistic torture and so-called experiments. Ilse Koch who almost got away with it, served some of her life sentence and then took her own life for her sickening pleasure and fetish for human skins. Ilse's husband, the equally evil Karl Otto Koch, who took the fall for everything and met his end in front of a firing squad, and finally here, we have Josef Kramer he stood proud with no regret or apology for his crimes. 

Another thing that all of these monsters had in common was the lack of remorse, even seeing the death, the suffering all around them was not enough to bring a flash of humanity. Just when you thought they had gone far enough they would go further, there was no line drawn. 

I always think of the innocent prisoners who died and suffered so horribly in these camps and the people who were beaten and had their homes and livelihoods stolen from them but I also think of these soldiers not just from the British Army but other countries too (the ones with the purest of hearts) who went into these camps and saw the devastation before them. I can imagine it must have left some terrible psychological scars. Just seeing the pictures from the camps and the footage on the TV screen is enough but to be there, to see it in front of your very eyes, to smell the death all around. It just doesn't bare thinking about. 

RIP to all of the victims and survivors of WW2 and God Bless all of the soldiers and good Samaritans who did what they could do help the victims and bring the war criminals to justice

Further reading & sources:

- Nazi Concentration Camp Commandants | Book by Ian Baxter

- The Nazis: A Warning From History | Book by Laurence Rees

- The Nazis & The Final Solution | Book by Laurence Rees

- Josef Kramer | Murderpedia

- Josef Kramer | Wikipedia

- Josef Kramer | Encyclopedia Britannica

- The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen | (Documentary Clip)

Thank you again for joining me in this series. I will be doing another series in this vein soon. As mentioned earlier my Serial Killer series starts next Sunday. See you on my socials x

 I know what you're thinking when you see the title of this post, you're probably thinking.....Ed Gein & I wouldn't blame you (I actually covered the life and story of Ed Gein back in 2020 here if you're interested in reading). I originally intended to focus on just Ilse Koch for this post until I did further research into her husband who happened to be just as sick and twisted as she was. 

The pair of them cut a very sadistic and evil pair and I'm surprised that they are not talked about more when the subject of evil couples in history are discussed. I really appreciate all of the amazing feedback I have gotten so far in this series (In case you haven't read the first two subjects of my Horrific History & True Crime series, check out Irma Grese and Josef Mengele).

With a lot of people, especially young people like myself who are just learning more about everything that went on with the evil Nazi regime and the role of the concentration camps, it's easy to forget how huge the whole operation was. Some people think that the camps were limited to a small number, mainly being Auschwitz but when you do your research you see how it was a whole lot more, more than you could even imagine. 

Auschwitz concentration camp was like a little city in itself, there was a theatre, a cinema, a sports hall, swimming pool, restaurant etc and right next to this was blocks of hell where people were starved, beaten, tortured, raped, experimented on and murdered. It's so hard to describe not just Auschwitz but all of it's neighbouring camps because they were literally hell on earth.

Sometimes I think about visiting Auschwitz to go and lay some flowers, pay my respects and possibly write more about it but then the thought leaves my mind and I decide to leave it. I don't know if I ever will because I think I would find it very difficult from all of the research I have done. It's one thing reading and researching but to see everything, the belongings of the victims, the remains of the gas chambers right there in front of your eyes....I'm not sure how I would cope with that. I think it would haunt me. 

I have read a lot of comments from people who have actually visited Auschwitz and they have spoken about how huge the place actually is and the very uncomfortable feeling when you are taken by the tour guide into the gas chambers with other tourists. Some people find it morbid, others think that it's important that we face it and see the reality of the situation that these things happened. For me, I can imagine people having panic attacks in such a place. I'm not sure how I would react. What are your thoughts on this? 

But, moving on to my subjects in this post, Ilse and Karl Koch, these two were another set of components in the Nazi regime. Like most Nazis, they came from unremarkable backgrounds and there was nothing in their childhoods to suggest any major trauma or what was to come later. Ilse was born in Dresden, German in 1906 as Margarete Ilse Kohler, she officially joined the Nazi party in 1932. Karl-Otto Koch was born in Darmstadt, Germany in 1897, he joined the Nazi party just a year before Ilse, in 1931. 

Karl had been a decorated soldier but he was no stranger to controversy having previously spent time in prison for forgery. He paints a very dishonest individual who would cheat on his first wife (who wasn't accepting of his Nazi views) which eventually resulted in divorce in 1931. He was a fanatical and ambitious Nazi (like a lot of them were) and became a favorite amongst the likes of Heinrich Himmler (he was said to have been far worse than Adolf Hitler himself and was the architect of the Holocaust) who selected him as not only a model Nazi but for further promotion up the ranks (Himmler and his fellow Nazis had observed and heard about Karl's sadistic methods of torturing prisoners at the concentration camps and were very impressed with him). He also introduced him to Ilse and the pair were married in 1936. 

A year after the marriage, Karl was promoted to commandant (Officer in charge of the camp) at Buchenwald. The role of the camp was for the prisoners to be worked to death. Life expectancy, due to the conditions, torture, starvation and slave labour, was said to be 2 to 3 months at most although some prisoners were able to survive for much longer. Ilse didn't have an official role, like most Nazi wives, she was expected to remain in the home and raise a family. Ilse had other ideas and took it upon herself to become a a guard and overseer of the camp. With her husband in charge there was nothing that she couldn't do. 

The couple lived in luxury as the prisoners lived in appalling conditions and like all of the Nazi guards and commandants at the various camps, they over abused their positions and even more sadistically than one could imagine. They both enjoyed torturing prisoners. Ilse was bored at home and used the camp as her own sadistic playground. 

Knowing that the camp was full of men of all ages, Ilse (who some would describe as an attractive woman) would wear provocative clothing to tease the sex starved prisoners. A lot of these men had not had intimate relations with a woman for years so this was another form of torture that she enjoyed very much. She was a sexual sadist, who would tease male prisoners and then have them punished or murdered for daring to look at her. She loved and craved attention from men and was rumoured to have had affairs with some of the guards from the other camps whilst still being married to Karl. 

As Ilse and Karl had not been brought up with much money, they both enjoyed the novelty and trappings that came with being considered 'The Nazi Elite'. They enjoyed living in their luxury home with servants, delicious food, wines and expensive clothing as well as their sadistic playground on the other side where they tortured prisoners. 

Like a lot of Nazi criminals at the time, Ilse and Karl would help themselves to various items that were taken from the prisoners in the camp. They went a step further with the thefts and began taking more money and expensive items and using them for their own gain, stealing money and building a personal sports facility so that Ilse could ride horses. They kept the stolen money in private bank accounts. They were basically stealing from their fellow Nazis and this didn't go down well in the slightest. 

As well as ripping off their fellow Nazis (even though all the goods and money originally belonged to the prisoners of the camps) Ilse had been conducting some evil torture and experiments of her own, she would select prisoners from Auschwitz who had certain tattoos and arrange for these people to be murdered so that she could have their skins, if they had gold teeth, she would have them removed and would add to her and her husband's private stash. Ilse worked alongside a doctor in the camp to have the stolen human skins made into lampshades and other artifacts, reportedly, other limbs and remains were removed. 

Ilse would take her gruesome items that were made from human skin and body parts, and decorate her house with them. She would give some away to fellow Nazis as gifts. 

When word soon spread to those higher up about Ilse and Karl's behaviour towards prisoners, the torture, the mutilation of human skins and the constant thefts, they both suddenly found themselves in hot bother. 

The Nazis didn't care about stealing from the Jews or the other innocent people they tortured and murdered during WW2 for their phoney cause but a fellow individual Nazi taking money and goods for their own benefit was frowned upon in a big way. 

The horrific experiments that Ilse Koch had arranged and the skinning of prisoners to make sickening artifacts was almost too insane to believe but when you consider all of the other horrendous atrocities that were being done in the camps for sadistic pleasure or 'in the name of science' (see my Dr Mengele posts), you realise (along with the witness accounts and evidence produced) that these horrific and extremely cruel events occurred. So, along with the pair ripping their fellow Nazis off, their conduct and what was deemed 'Needless experiments' (to benefit themselves and not the Nazi regime) was also listed for them to be brought before their superiors and to answer for their conduct. Karl also didn't do himself any favours when he was sent to another camp and carelessly allowed some of the prisoners to run amok. All of this was noted and a decision had been made. 

They'd both been married for quite a while and had one son and two daughters whilst all of this was going on. In 1944 the pair were brought to trial in front of their fellow Nazis and Ilse pretended to be 100% innocent of all wrongdoing claiming that the lampshades and other artifacts were actually animal skin. There was no escaping that they'd both been found out for stealing as evidence in their lifestyle, the bank accounts and the expensive sports facility that Ilse had built. Karl took the blame for it all and was sentenced to death, Ilse managed to get away with it. 

In a shocking twist to events, Karl was sent to the very camp that he was once commandant of, Buchenwald. He was treated like every other prisoner and declared a POW, he was taken out of one of the blocks and shot to death by firing squad. If Karl had been given a life sentence, no doubt he would have been walking out of the gates to freedom along with the other prisoners when the camp was liberated just a short time later in 1945. 

When the camp was liberated in 1945, members of the German public along with soldiers had been granted the rights to view the camp and what they saw was something so indescribable and horrific. They witnessed the skeletal remains of people who had starved or been worked to death, all piled up together like trash, human body parts kept in jars, dead and decomposing corpses all over the place and a table full of what was said to be lampshades, book covers etc made from human skin and body parts. The camp was originally meant to house 8,000 prisoners but the shocking number of people forced to squeeze into this vile place was actually 80,000. 

This wasn't the end of the story for Ilse though, she almost got away with her crimes but she was arrested again and it was soon time for her to face the music. Whilst waiting for her trial for her crimes, she managed to get herself pregnant by a fellow German prisoner. Being the master manipulator that she was, one wonders if she thought that being pregnant would gain her some sympathy, but it didn't work. As soon as the child was born (he was named 'Uwe') he was taken away and she ended up being served a life sentence. 

When Uwe got older he found out who his natural birth mother was and instead of running for the hills like a lot of normal people would, he decided to visit this monster on a monthly basis in an attempt to build a relationship with her. Ilse saw Uwe like she saw other people, someone that she could use for her own gain and a possible opportunity for her to try and get out of prison. 

Her other children wanted nothing to do with her. her two daughters moved away, changed their names and started a family. Her other son, however, met a more tragic fate. Being just children when their parents were carrying out their sickening crimes, the Koch children were completely innocent of what their parents had done but that didn't stop the feelings of shame and humiliation. The girls were able to move on and cut Ilse out of their lives but their brother couldn't live with what his parents had done and ended up taking his own life. 

So, Uwe was all that Ilse had left because nobody wanted to know, she'd burned so many bridges and caused so much pain and suffering that she deserved the punishments that were now on her shoulders. She finally gave up September of 1967 and hung herself in her prison cell. She'd apparently been having a series of nightmares and delusions that previous prisoners (who she had tortured and sent to death) were haunting her. 

After her death, her estranged son Uwe went to the newspapers and tried to tell his mother's side of the story based on what he knew. Nobody was interested. One does wonder if Uwe really cared about his mother or saw this as a way to make some money, who knows? I guess it's pretty hard for me to understand why someone would want to track down their mother who they found out was a Nazi war criminal and had been responsible for all of these horrendous things, you'd think that you'd want to distance yourself as much as possible from that person and get on with your life. 

Despite her efforts to change the public perception of herself by using her estranged son, Ilse Koch has gone down in history as one of the most evil and sadistic women to have ever lived. Her sadistic ways put her husband in her shadow and they were both cold hearted people who enjoyed inflicting pain on others. 

RIP to those people who lost their lives (and thoughts for all of those who suffered) at the hands of these evil people. Thoughts also to the survivors and those brave enough to share their stories to help educate us all about what really happened in those horrifying days, weeks, months and years that the Nazis were in power. 

Further Reading & Sources:

- The Beasts of Buchenwald | Book by Flint Whitlock

- Karl-Otto Koch | Biography

- Buchenwald | Holocaust Encyclopedia

- Karl-Otto Koch | WW2 Database

- Ilse Koch | Britannica

- Ilse Koch | Biographics

- Ilse Koch | Wikipedia

- Ilse Koch | WW2 Database

- The Nazis: A Warning From History | Book by Laurence Rees

- Nazi Concentration Camp Commandants | Book by Ian Baxter

I hope you will join me next time for my final subject in this 'Horrific History & True Crime' series (please check out my previous posts in this series: Irma Grese: The So-Called Beautiful Beast of Auschwitz and The Life & Sadistic Crimes of Dr Josef Mengele) 

If you would like to see me do another series similar to this one, please let me know in the comments below. See you in the next post or on my Socials x