10 Most-Evil Nazis You’ve Never Even Heard Of

9. Ilse Koch - "The Bitch Of Buchenwald"

Considered to be one of the most-evil women in the entire Nazi regime, Ilse Koch was married to the commandant of Buchenwald Concentration Camp (and at a later date Majdanek) Karl-Otto Koch. So fearsome was Koch that she was nicknamed "The Bitch of Buchenwald", "The Red Witch of Buchenwald", "The Beast of Buchenwald", "The Queen of Buchenwald", "Butcher Widow", as well as "the concentration-camp murderess" - and that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how brutal she actually was.

A Nazi Party member from the early-1930s onwards, Koch met her husband through mutual friends - and she originally began working as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin before Karl-Otto Koch was made commandant of Buchenwald in 1937. Without remorse, Koch treated inmates at both camps horrendously and she was said to love killing so-called "undesirables". Disgustingly she would even skin the tattooed parts of prisoners' bodies to keep them as lampshades, book covers and pillow cushions - as well as ask camp guards to rape, torture and murder inmates in front of her for her own personal amusement and enjoyment.

Originally arrested by the Nazis on charges of embezzlement in August 1943, the Kochs served a year in prison before Ilse was released. However, she was arrested by the US Army in June 1945. One of the first prominent Nazis to be tried by the US military, Koch appeared before court in Dachau in 1947 and revealed she was pregnant, yet she was still sentenced to life imprisonment for "violation of the laws and customs of war".

In 1948 though General Lucius D Clay reduced the sentence to four years, citing a lack of evidence, before Koch was rearrested and forced to undergo a second trial - where she was found guilty of many counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without civil rights.

Koch committed suicide by hanging in Aichach women's prison in September 1967 - with her body now buried in an unmarked grave in the town's cemetery.