*Warning: This article contains spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story.*
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.
But who was Koch and did she actually influence Gein? Read on to find out.
Who was Ilse Koch?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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