The Truth About Ilse Koch and the Human Skin Lampshade Legend

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In 1937, a Dresden librarian married an SS colonel and stepped into a world of absolute power.

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Within years, her name would become synonymous with the most grotesque crimes of World War II.

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Human skin lampshades, systematic torture, a legend so dark it's hard to separate what actually happened

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from what the world needed to believe.

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This is the story of Elsa Cook.

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[Music]

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So let's start with who Elsa actually was before she became infamous because that context really matters.

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In 1906, Marguerite Elsa Kohler was born in Dresden, Germany.

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She wasn't born into Nazi royalty or raised in some dynasty of evil.

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She was ordinary.

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She worked as a librarian. That was her life.

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Then on May 29, 1937, she married Carl Otto Koch, an SS colonel who was already running a concentration camp.

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And just like that, her entire world changed.

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She went from stamping library books to living at the top of the Nazi concentration camp hierarchy.

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When Carl Otto transferred to Buchenwald that same summer, Elsa went with him.

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And this is where things get dark really fast because even though she never held an official rank

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as a female guard, she had something arguably more powerful.

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She was the common-dance wife.

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That gave her this weird, unofficial authority that came with zero oversight.

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The prisoners and guards started calling her the "common-duse of Buchenwald".

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That title told you everything you needed to know about how power worked there.

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She could basically do whatever she wanted because she was sleeping with the man in charge.

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The lifestyle they maintained was absolutely obscene.

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We're talking lavish parties at their villa just outside the campgrounds,

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entertaining guests while thousands of people starved and died literally down the road.

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Elsa insisted that prisoners address her as a title that translates to "A Gracious Lady".

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And let's think about that for a second.

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She wanted them to address her as "A Gracious Lady" in a literal concentration camp.

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She wanted to be seen as high society as aristocracy.

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She was playing dress-up with absolute power over human lives.

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And she took that role very seriously in the most horrific way possible.

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In 1940, she commissioned the construction of an indoor riding arena.

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This luxury project cost over 250,000 right marks, which is about $100,000 in 1940 money.

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Multiple prisoners died while building that facility so that she could ride her horse indoors.

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That's a documented fact.

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Elsa earned every single one of her nicknames,

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the Witch of Buchenwald, the Beast, the Bitch of Buchenwald.

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They sound like they were invented by the media, but they weren't.

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They came from survivors who lived through what she did.

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Survivor testimony confirmed that she would ride her horse through the campgrounds

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dressed provocatively, deliberately taunting male prisoners.

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But here's the sick part.

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If any prisoner looked at her, even just a glance, he would be immediately beaten.

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Sometimes killed.

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She created this impossible situation where she forced her presence on people

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and then punished them for the involuntary human reaction of seeing her.

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That's a special kind of sadism.

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At her trials, later on, witness Ludwig Tobias testified that she kicked out

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13 of his teeth.

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Other witnesses confirmed that she directly assaulted inmates on multiple occasions.

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She also reported prisoners to the SS for beatings,

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and at least one of those reports resulted in a prisoner's death.

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That's proven that is in the legal record.

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So when we talk about Elsa Koch, we're talking about someone who absolutely committed

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documented atrocities.

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That part is not up for debate.

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But the thing that made Elsa Koch internationally famous wasn't the beatings or the riding arena,

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or even the deaths she directly caused.

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It was the human skin lampshade.

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When American forces liberated Buchenwald in April 1945,

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they found artifacts made from human remains.

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Lampshades, book covers, pocket knife cases,

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General Eisenhower ordered photographs to document everything.

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They forced local German townspeople to tour the camp and see what happened there.

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The images went global.

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The lampshade itself became the symbol of Nazi depravity

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that everyone could understand instantly.

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One lampshade in particular was reportedly made from a human foot and shin bone.

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And the shade itself showed tattoos and even nipples.

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A British soldier took a fragment of it, and decades later,

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scientific testing confirmed it was made of human skin.

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These artifacts were unfortunately all real.

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That's historical fact.

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They were created starting in 1941 by the camp doctor,

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Dr. Hans Mueller.

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Witnesses testified that Carl Otto Koch and Dr. Mueller would review

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"tanned human skins" and selects ones with interesting tattoos for these projects.

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But here's where the story gets legally complicated.

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The charge that defined Elsa Koch globally was that she personally selected tattooed

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prisoners and ordered their execution specifically to harvest their skin.

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That she was the driving force behind these grotesque objects.

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Two separate courts, the 1947 American military tribunal,

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and the 1950-1951 West German trial, both found that specific charge to be without proof.

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Her defense successfully argued that while the artifacts existed and horrible things happened,

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there wasn't direct evidence linking her to ordering the killings for skin procurement.

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Does that make sense?

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The lampshades were real, the murders were real,

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but proving she gave that specific order couldn't be done to the legal standard required for

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conviction on that specific charge.

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The public didn't care about that distinction.

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At all.

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To everyone following the trials, the lampshade and Elsa Koch were inseparable.

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She became the face of that horror whether the legal record could prove it or not.

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Elsa actually faced three separate legal proceedings, and each one reveals something different

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about justice after the Holocaust.

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In 1944, before the war even ended, the SS arrested both Koch and her husband.

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Not for murdering prisoners, my new, for corruption.

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They were stealing from the SS,

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embezzling money and killing witnesses who knew anything about their theft.

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The SS court found Carl Otto Guilty and executed him in April 1945,

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just days before Buchenwald was liberated.

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Elsa was acquitted due to lack of evidence and released after 16 months.

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Then, the American forces found her.

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On June 30, 1945, she was recognized on the street in Ludwig'sburg by a former prisoner

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and immediately arrested.

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Her trial in Dachau in 1947 was massive international news.

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She was the only woman among 31 defendants.

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The prosecutor called her, quote, "no woman in the usual sense,

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but a creature from some other tortured world."

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On August 14, 1947, she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

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22 of her male co-defendants got death sentences.

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She didn't.

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And the reason why is genuinely wild.

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She was seven months pregnant with her fourth child.

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Nobody knew who the father was.

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Many people believed she got pregnant deliberately to avoid execution,

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using an old legal protection for pregnant women to save her own life.

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In 1949, General Lucius Clay reviewed her case.

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He was required to follow strict legal standards.

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And when her lawyers argued that there was insufficient proof for the most serious allegations,

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particularly the lampshade murders, he agreed.

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He commuted her sentence to four years, including Time Surfed.

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She was released.

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The global reaction was explosive.

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People lost their minds.

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The public saw this as a complete betrayal of justice.

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A moral failure of epic proportions.

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The outrage was so intense that it triggered the U.S. Senate investigation

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and required President Truman's personal intervention.

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West German authorities immediately re-arrested her.

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This time, they charged her with crimes against German citizens,

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which got around the jurisdictional limits of the American trial.

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During the next proceedings, she put on quite a show,

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collapsing dramatically, screaming, "I am guilty. I am a sinner."

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And smashing furniture.

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Some doctors thought she was genuinely having a breakdown.

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Others thought she was faking it in order to delay the trial.

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On January 15, 1951, she was convicted again,

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and sentenced again to life in prison.

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This time at Stuck, she appealed to the International Human Rights Commission,

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rejected in 1952.

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She petitioned for pardon multiple times, denied every single time.

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Elsa spent 16 years in a women's prison in West Germany.

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According to reports, she became increasingly paranoid and delusional,

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convinced that camp survivors would eventually come for her.

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On September 1, 1967, at the age of 60, she hanged herself with a bedsheet.

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Her suicide note to her son, Redd, "There is no other way.

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Death for me is a release."

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Here's what's so important to understand about her legacy.

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Elsa Koch absolutely committed horrific crimes.

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The beatings, the exploitation, the deaths caused by her abuse of power

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are all documented and proven beyond doubt.

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But her transformation into the ultimate symbol of female Nazi evil

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served a purpose for post-war Germany.

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As the only woman among the Buchenwald defendants,

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her trials became these intense spectacles.

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Her conduct, including rumors of affairs,

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and sexual humiliation of prisoners,

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was sensationalized through this lens that treated female violence as somehow

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more unnatural than male violence.

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Scholar Tomas Jardim argues that Koch became a national scapegoat

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by focusing obsessively on her on the perverse and partially-unproving crimes

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like the lampshades,

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post-war German society could avoid confronting the harder truth,

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that millions of ordinary Germans participated in

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or enabled Nazi atrocities through boring bureaucratic complicity.

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Elsa was spectacular evil.

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She was a monster, and that meant everyone else could distance themselves

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from the systematic nature of the Holocaust.

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She became the exception that proved the rule.

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When reality, she should have been a reminder of how normal people can do unthinkable things

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when given power and permission.

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The human skin and bone artifacts were real.

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Her cruelty was real.

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Her crimes were real.

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But the legend of Elsa Koch, the bitch of Buchenwald,

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who ordered prisoners killed for lampshade material,

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that became bigger than the legal truth.

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And maybe we needed that legend.

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Maybe post-war society needed a female face of evil that was so grotesque,

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so beyond normal comprehension that it could carry the weight of collective guilt.

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But that doesn't change what actually happened.

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It doesn't change what we can prove.

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Elsa remains one of the most hated figures of the Nazi era,

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called forever between the monster she was, and the myth she became.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder,

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Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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I'm Joe, I'm the host, and I really appreciate you if you're new listener

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"What was that? That short podcast that guy's weird?"

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But the stories are good.

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10 Minute, I don't know something.

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You don't have to go through all that.

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It's immediately going to be there because you've already hit subscribe.

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So do that now.

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Help me help you.

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And after you do that, you can go to my website 10minuteMurder.com.

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Lots of things to see and do there.

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You can send me an email.

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Let me know what stories you'd like for me to cover.

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And this one, by the way, this one was not a listener-suggested story.

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After I binge watched all of the monster Ed Geen,

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I decided to do this one because this character, this person,

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is in that series.

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And I say character because they embellish a whole lot.

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So at this point, you know the truth about who Elsa really was.

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In the series, you're going to see kind of a little bit of a different character plate.

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For dramatic reasons, I'm sure.

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But I thought it was important to let you know who the real person behind that character is.

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So that's why I decided to cover this.

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But you can email me your suggestions as well.

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Let's get to one of those emails.

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Subject finished.

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Hey Joe, I'm Alana from Colorado and I'm not sure you've gotten this kind of email before.

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But I just had to come and email you saying that after almost a year,

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I have finished the whole 10 Minute Murder Podcast stories.

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I started out with the oldest, then the latest.

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And I ended up scrolling so much I had to switch to Unplayed.

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And now I have no more stories until your next post.

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I just want to say keep up the great work and I'm excited to hear more stories.

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I've also put on like 10 of my friends as well.

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Alana from Colorado.

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And Alana, thank you so much.

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I do hear that and it surprises me every single time.

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Whenever someone reaches out and says, "I've finished all of them."

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Part of me is like, "But did you really?"

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Because it just seemed so unbelievable to me.

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And I love hearing.

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Keep it up by the way.

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Keep emailing and let me know that you finished the whole thing.

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Because I love reading that.

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It encourages me to keep doing what I'm doing and putting these things out

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and researching these creepy cases for you.

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And for me too, I mean, I wouldn't be doing this podcast

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if I wasn't interested in true crime stories.

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All right, that's going to do it.

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That is your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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See you next time.