Tomaz Jardim is the author of The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany, winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. A former fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he is Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Scrupulous and unsettling, this is a vital reconsideration of a
notorious figure from history.
*Publishers Weekly*
[Jardim] argues that Koch, convicted for her moral and ideological
culpability in assaulting prisoners…received a gendered treatment
by the American and German presses…This focus on the salacious,
sensational, and extraordinary hindered an honest examination of
the routinized and bureaucratized slaughter by a regime based on
the popular support and participation of many ordinary people.
*Choice*
The definitive portrait of Ilse Koch, whose caricature as a
sadistic nymphomaniac has for too long dominated representations of
Nazi female perpetrators. In Jardim’s judicious hands, Koch’s story
reveals much about the Nazi system, postwar justice, and the sexism
that permeated both, while firmly establishing Koch’s guilt and
paranoid antisemitism.
*Wendy Lower, author of Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the
Nazi Killing Fields*
An indispensable, superbly researched contribution to the
literature on postwar trials of Nazi crimes. Caught between her own
obvious prevarications and lack of remorse, the US public’s thirst
for sensationalism, and Germany’s need for a spectacular symbol of
gender-violating deviance to serve as a convenient scapegoat, Ilse
Koch was the rare case of a Nazi perpetrator who was
over-prosecuted and over-punished.
*Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police
Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland*
Fascinating and highly original. Deploying a number of previously
neglected sources, Jardim not only explores Koch’s life and trials,
but also raises intriguing questions about how guilt can ever be
established when all but the most circumstantial evidence is
absent. A high-caliber contribution.
*Elizabeth Borgwardt, author of A New Deal for the World:
America’s Vision for Human Rights*
A gripping account of a Nazi placed on trial after the war, both in
court and in the press, for her gruesome acts at Buchenwald
concentration camp. Looking closely at Koch’s life and motivations,
Jardim offers a brilliant study of postwar Germany and America
trying to come to grips with the barbarity of the Nazis, human
wickedness, and the role of women perpetrators.
*Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian
Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany*
In a stroke of genius, Jardim shows how the figure of Ilse
Koch—popularly depicted as a bad wife, a worse mother, and a
sexually threatening woman—helped frame the Holocaust as being,
fundamentally, about psychological perversion and deviation from
the gendered norms of civilization. In so doing, he makes the role
of gender in postwar Nazi trials not only legible, but
inescapable.
*Devin O. Pendas, author of Democracy, Nazi Trials, and
Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950*
A fascinating, revelatory book. Jardim’s deft account of the trials
of one of the most infamous Nazi defendants serves as a prism
through which he examines such big themes as the postwar reckoning
with the camps, the popular (mis)understanding of Nazi crimes, and
the politics of memory.
*Nikolaus Wachsmann, author of KL: A History of the Nazi
Concentration Camps*
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