Karl-Otto Koch, an SS officer who was commandant at Buchenwald and later Majdanek, was executed before a Nazi firing squad on 5 April 1945 after being found guilty of corruption and—strange as it sounds for a Nazi concentration- and extermination-camp guard—murder. <Thread>

Karl-Otto Koch's wife, Ilse Koch, remained at Buchenwald even after he moved to Majdanek; she is infamous for her sadistic "medical" experiments on prisoners and forcing them to sexually attack one another. The stories of her making lampshades from human skin are likely mythical.

The person who uncovered Karl-Otto Koch's "misconduct" as commandant of Buchenwald was Josias, a senior SS officer, who was formally the Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, a principality dating back 800 years as a part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The case that led Waldeck to investigate Buchenwald commandant Karl-Otto Koch was that of Walter Kramer, an important member of the German Communist Party (KPD), and his deputy Karl Peix, who had been killed on 6 November 1941 allegedly while trying to escape.

In fact, Kramer, as chief of the hospital—he was known as the "Doctor of Buchwald"—was aware of Koch's treatment for syphilis, and it was to cover this up that Koch had had Kramer murdered. https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1343464786198110208

Waldeck appointed Georg Konrad Morgen, an SS judge, to investigate Buchenwald commandant Karl-Otto Koch and the administration of the camp. Morgen found that there were other cases of personal murder than Walter Kramer's and that Koch stole prisoner property on a vast scale.

(It is partly from Georg Morgen's investigation of Karl-Otto Koch, which involved going through his house at Buchenwald where his wife, Ilse, remained—he was at Majdanek by this time—that we can be reasonably sure the human skin lampshades story is legend.)

Morgen reported his findings that Buchenwald commandant Karl-Otto Koch had murdered prisoners for personal reasons and stolen property, and Koch was executed about a week before Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945.

The execution of Koch and, for example, the disciplining of some Nazi intelligence officers who used torture during the BARBAROSSA operation, show a weird legalism that in places governed Hitler's state in a way that simply didn't apply with Stalin's. https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1343466837107855363

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