Eventually the Nazi government tried Karl Koch not for his cruelty to prisoners (which was extreme even by Nazi standards), but for stealing stolen goods-the money, jewelry, clothes and extracted gold teeth-that the Nazi regime took from the Jews.ĭespite such examples of sadistic behavior, Segev’s research indicates that the Nazi Commandants of concentration camps had a diverse background. There were rumors that Isle Koch even had lampshades made out of tattooed prisoners’ skin. If any of the inmates looked at her, she would sometimes beat them with her own hands or, more commonly, ask her husband or the SS men to savagely attack them while she watched. Segev recounts that Isle would dress up in a provocative manner and ride around the camp on horseback. Both took great pleasure in abusing and killing prisoners. They lived at Buchenwald in a gorgeous mansion known as “Villa Koch”, like royalty in the midst of the squalor of the concentration camp. ( Soldiers of Evil, 133) The Commandant of Buchenwald, Karl Koch, and his wife, Isle, who herself was known as “the monster of Buchenwald,” were equally notorious for their cruelty to inmates. Segev recounts that on January 1, 1939, Rodl forced several thousands prisoners to line up, selected five among them, ordered them to strip and then proceeded to whip them until the morning to the sound of the camp orchestra. Likewise, Arthur Rodl, Deputy Commandant to Karl Koch at the Buchenwald concentration camp, enjoyed killing inmates with his own bare hands. … They were so foul” ( Soldiers of Evil, 201). In an interview she gave in 1975, Kalder stated, “They were not human like us. Like Goth, she showed no empathy for the prisoners, particularly the Jews, whom she considered subhuman. After the war, she described her life with Goth in the concentration camp with longing and in idyllic terms, comparing her husband and herself to the King and Queen of a fiefdom.
In her eyes, it gave Goth an aura of a God, as he wielded the power of life and death over Plascow’s helpless inmates. His widow, Ruth Kalder, a woman with sadistic predispositions herself, became enchanted with Goth’s cruelty. He enjoyed the process of selecting his victims and witnessing their torment. Sometimes he would sick his dogs upon them to tear them apart limb by limb. Goth would notoriously go on random shooting sprees of the defenseless inmates weakened by hard labor and hunger. Certainly men like Amon Goth, the Commandant of Plascow (so vividly described by Thomas Keneally in Schindler’s List), qualifies as sadistic. In his study, Segev observes that this was true only in some cases, but not most. One might expect that those who directed the mass murder of millions of innocent people would be prone to sadism. Close to one million non-Jewish prisoners and 6 million Jewish prisoners were killed in the Nazi extermination camps. Of those, tens of thousands died shortly after liberation. ( Soldiers of Evil, 15) By the end of the war, in January 1945, only 700,000 were found alive by the Allies.
#FRANZ STANGL INTERVIEW TRIAL#
Segev notes that during Oswald Pohl’s trial (he was the SS Commander in charge of administering the entire Nazi concentration camp system) it was estimated that the Nazis imprisoned about 10 million people. The book relies upon eyewitness accounts, victim testimonials, court documents as well as interviews with some of the Commandants themselves, their acquaintances, colleagues and family members who were willing to talk about the past. Thomas Segev’s dissertation, Soldiers of Evil (Jerusalem: Domino Press, 1987), goes a long way in explaining the psychology and social background of the Holocaust’s most ruthless mass murderers: the concentration camp Commandants. Review by Claudia Moscovici, author of Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels and Films (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2019)
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