100 Most Infamous Criminals Read Online Free PDF

aide, the brutish Karl Koch. Shortly after the wedding, when Koch was appointed commander of Buchenwald, she was installed in a villa near the camp, given two children, and then more or less forgotten by her husband, who was too busy staging multiple sex-orgies in Weimar to care.

    Isle Koch, otherwise known as the Bitch of Buchenwald
    Perhaps in revenge, Ilse began mounting orgies of her own, taking five or six of her husband’s officers into her bed at a time. She was perverse, sexually insatiable – and it wasn’t long after the beginning of the war that she started turning her attention to the mostly Jewish prisoners at the camp.
    She first sunbathed nude outside the wire to tantalize them; then started greeting their trucks and transport trains semi-naked, fondling her breasts and shouting obscenties. If any of the incoming prisoners looked up at her, they were beaten senseless; on one occasion, about which she filled out a report, two were clubbed to death and one had his face ground into the earth until he suffocated. All were executed, she wrote blithely, for ogling her.

    Koch committed suicide in prison in 1967
    She encouraged the guards to use the prisoners for target practice – and often took part herself. She scouted out good-looking soldiers seconded to the camp and offered them mass-orgies with her. Then, finally – perhaps jaded with mere sex – she started to collect trophies…
    One day, by chance, she saw two tattooed prisoners working without their shirts. She ordered them to be killed immediately and their skins prepared and brought to her. She soon became obsessed with the possibilities of human skin, particularly if tattooed. She had lampshades made from the skin of selected prisoners for her living room, even a pair of gloves. Not content with this, she also started to experiment with prisoners’ severed heads, having them shrunk down by the dozen to grapefruit size to decorate her dining-room.
    She was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg after the war by an American military court, and sentenced to life in prison, but two years later she was released, on the grounds that a crime by one German against others could not properly be considered a war crime. By the time she appeared in a German court in Augsburg, she was a bloated, raddled figure who blamed everything on her husband – who had conveniently been executed by the Nazis for embezzlement years before. She staged an epileptic fit in court, and when she heard its final judgment in her prison cell, she merely laughed. She hanged herself in Aichach Prison in 1967.
     

Joachim Kroll
    I t wasn’t until July 1959 that German police began to recognize the signature of the man they came to call ‘the Ruhr Hunter’, Joachim Kroll. For it was only then that he began cutting strips of flesh from his victims’ bodies to take them home and cook them – and sometimes he couldn’t be bothered to do any butchery at all if they were old and tough. When he was finally caught in 1976, he confessed to a total of fourteen murders over a twenty-two-year period. But there could well have been many more.
    For Kroll, though entirely cooperative, was a simpleton with not much of a memory – and what little he had, had to be jogged. He did, though, finally exonerate two men who’d been arrested for his murders and then released for lack of evidence. Of these two, one had been divorced by his wife and had then committed suicide; the other had been ostracized by his neighbours for six long years.
    He’d started, Kroll told police, in 1955 at the age of 22. Too self-conscious and nervous for a real relationship – and dissatisfied with the rubber dolls he mock-strangled and masturbated over at home – he’d beaten unconscious, then raped and killed a nineteen-year-old girl in a barn near the village of Walstedde. Four years later, in a different part of the Ruhr, he struck again in exactly the same way, after tracking the movements of another young girl