September 1967, a woman hangs herself in a German prison cell.

She’s been called the witch of Bukenvald, one of the most hated figures to survive the Nazi regime.

But before she ties bed sheets to a heating pipe, she writes one final letter.

Not to the daughter who testified against her in court.

Not to the son who condemned her on the BBC before taking his own life.

She writes to UA, the child she gave birth to in prison, the one who didn’t know she was his mother until he was 19 years old, and the one who would spend the rest of his life trying to prove she was innocent.

This is the story of what happened to Ilsok’s children, and why the one who had the best chance to escape became the most trapped inside the common dance villa.

Before we can understand what happened to the children, we need to understand what they grew up inside.

Ilsa lived in the common dance villa at Bukinvald with her husband Carl Otto and their three children, Artwin, Gizella, and Goodrun.

But this wasn’t a normal family home.

It sat on the edge of a concentration camp.

The children played in gardens within sight of barbed wire.

Their mother rode horses past prisoner work details, her riding crop in hand, while inmates in striped uniforms labored just yards away.

The family ate well, fresh meat, vegetables, luxuries unavailable to ordinary Germans during wartime, while thousands starved within earshot of their dinner table.

Good, the youngest, died in infancy in February 1941.

She never had to carry the weight of the coat name.

But Artwin and Gizella grew up surrounded by death they were trained not to see.

They learned to treat the camp as background noise.

The prisoners as something less than human.

This was their normal.

The villa had a swimming pool.

It had servants, prisoners assigned to domestic work.

It had everything a powerful Nazi family could want.

What it didn’t have was any barrier between childhood innocence and industrial murder.

That proximity to horror would define everything that followed, every choice each surviving child would eventually make.

Executed by his own side, you might assume Carl Otto [ __ ] died when the Allies arrived, the Americans liberated Bookenvald in April 1945.

And it would make sense for the commandant to fall in those final chaotic days.

But that’s not what happened.

The SS killed him first.

On April 5th, 1945, exactly one week before American troops reached the camp, Carl Ottok faced a firing squad of his own men.

His crime wasn’t running a concentration camp.

It wasn’t the thousands of deaths he oversaw.

It was corruption.

He’d been skimming funds from the camp’s operations.

pocketing money that was supposed to flow to Berlin.

Worse, he’d started eliminating witnesses, murdering prisoners, and even SS personnel who knew too much about his schemes.

The Nazi hierarchy could tolerate mass murder.

What they couldn’t tolerate was stealing from them.

Carl Otto’s last words were directed at his executioners.

Boys, shoot well.

His body was burned in the same crerematorium that had incinerated thousands of his victims.

The children’s father was killed by Nazis for being too corrupt, even by Nazi standards.

But the father’s death was just the beginning.

The mother’s fate would spark an international firestorm.

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The sentence that enraged America.

Ilsuk was arrested in June 1945 when a former Bukinvald inmate recognized her on a street in Ludvigsburg.

She was tried at Dhaka in 1947 alongside 30 other Bookenbalt defendants.

The evidence was damning.

Testimony from survivors who described her cruelty, her habit of selecting prisoners for punishment based on whims.

Her treatment of human beings as objects for her amusement.

The verdict came in August 1947.

Life imprisonment.

Then something happened that triggered riots in American cities.

General Lucius Clay, the military governor of occupied Germany, reduced her sentence to 4 years.

The stated reason, the evidence against her specifically, as opposed to her husband, was deemed insufficient for a life sentence.

But what enraged the public was a different detail entirely.

Ilsuk was pregnant.

She’d conceived a child in the interament camp under circumstances that were never fully explained.

The father was listed as unknown.

The public reaction was immediate and furious.

Veterans groups pickoted General Klay’s offices.

The New York Post ran the headline, calling it Clay’s counter atrocity.

Woody Guthrie wrote a folk song bearing her name.

There were Senate hearings, rallies in major cities, and a sustained outcry that forced the newly formed West German government to arrest her again the moment she was released from American custody in October 1949.

The pregnancy that sparked all this controversy.

That child would become the central figure in the final chapter of Ilsa Ko’s story.

The child no one claimed.

Uva Kura was born in October 1947 at Lansburg prison, the same facility where Hitler had written mine camp two decades earlier.

His father was officially listed as unknown, though records suggest he was likely a fellow German internee named Fritz Sheffer.

The circumstances were described in prison documents as murky.

No one pursued the question too hard.

No one wanted to claim this child.

Within hours of birth, Uva was taken from his mother and placed with a Bavarian foster family.

He would grow up knowing nothing about who he was.

His foster parents gave him their surname, Kula, and raised him as their own.

The name Ko never entered his vocabulary.

Meanwhile, his older siblings were scattered, their mother was imprisoned, their father dead, their family name synonymous with atrocity.

Artwin and Jizella had to navigate a postwar Germany that remembered exactly who the Ces were.

They had their memories of the villa, of the camp, of their parents.

Uber had nothing but a birth certificate with a name that meant nothing to an 8-year-old in 1955.

That ignorance would shape everything that followed.

The son who couldn’t survive.

Artwin Ko, the eldest son, took the most dramatic public stance against his mother.

As a young man, he gave interviews to the BBC explicitly condemning her war crimes.

He said he was ashamed of her actions, using that word deliberately, understanding its weight.

He seemed to be building an identity defined entirely by rejection, by separation from everything his parents had represented.

For a while, it looked like it might work.

He was young.

Germany was rebuilding.

Plenty of people wanted to move forward, not backward.

If anyone could escape the Coke name through sheer force of public disavowel, it should have been Artwin.

But psychological wounds don’t heal just because you denounce them publicly.

The memories didn’t disappear.

The knowledge of what had happened in that villa, what his mother had done, what his father had been executed for.

None of it could be unsaid or unknown.

He carried it every day.

In 1964, at age 26, Artwin Ko killed himself.

It happened 9 months before his mother would hang herself in that same prison system.

The son, who condemned her loudest, couldn’t survive the weight of her name.

Public rejection wasn’t enough to escape.

The trauma ran deeper than any statement could reach.

The daughter who escaped.

The middle child, Gazella, found another way.

When West German authorities put Ilsok on trial again in November 1950, Gizella appeared as a witness, not for the defense, for the prosecution.

She testified against her own mother, providing details about life in the villa, about what she had seen and heard.

She was 16 years old.

Then she systematically erased every connection to the Koch name.

She earned a business degree.

She became a banker, successful, respected, utterly unremarkable in the best possible way.

She married a man whose surname happened to be Ko, no relation, which meant she could keep a common name without carrying its history.

She raised two children far from their grandmother’s shadow in a Germany that was rapidly forgetting what it didn’t want to remember.

In 1984, Gazella founded a charitable organization supporting women.

She served as its chairman for over a decade.

When she died in November 2018 at age 76, her obituary in Bremen focused on her philanthropy, her banking career, her community service.

The word banvald appeared nowhere.

Gazella proved it was possible to escape, but the price was absolute betrayal.

Standing in a courtroom and helping to condemn the woman who gave birth to her.

Most people would call that justice.

But it’s worth noting that it required her to become a witness against her own mother before she could become anyone else.

The boy who didn’t know Uva Kur grew up in his foster home knowing nothing about his biological parents.

When he was 8 years old, he spotted his mother’s name on his birth certificate.

The name meant nothing to him, just words on a document.

Why would a child in 1955 connect Ilskok to anything? The war had ended a decade ago.

He had other things to worry about.

It wasn’t until 1966 when Uber was 19 years old that he picked up a newspaper and saw a headline, no pardon for coke.

The article was about a woman in it prison, an aging inmate who had repeatedly petitioned for clemency and been denied.

The papers called her the witch of Bukinvald.

They recounted her crimes, her trials, her notoriety, and UA recognized the name.

That Christmas, he visited Aishak women’s prison for the first time.

He later described the experience as a creepy feeling.

He had just met a woman the entire world considered a monster.

He had looked into her eyes and seen what? His mother, a stranger, a myth made flesh.

Unlike Artwin and Gizella, who had grown up in that villa with all its horrors, UA came to his mother’s story as an outsider.

All he had was her word, and she had decades to prepare her case.

The final victim.

U began visiting his mother monthly at Aishak Prison.

During those visits, Elsa told him everything he wanted to hear.

The prosecution was lying.

The accusations were fabrications invented by what she called damned liberal American courts.

The famous allegations about lampshades made from human skin never proven.

And she was quick to point out that US Army lawyers had admitted the evidence was inconclusive.

The cruelty, the sadism, the selection of prisoners for punishment, all invented by people who wanted to destroy her.

Oo believed her.

He had no competing memories.

He had no childhood in the villa to contradict her version of events.

He had only a mother who seemed frail and persecuted, who wept when he visited, who told him she’d been wrongfully imprisoned for decades.

What 19year-old wouldn’t want to believe his mother was innocent.

After her suicide in 1967, Uber launched a decadesl long campaign to rehabilitate her reputation.

In 1971, he wrote to the New York Times attempting to clear her name, arguing that she had been the victim of mass hysteria and cold war politics.

He contacted historians, journalists, anyone who might listen.

Historians who studied the case later described Uva as Ilsa Cook’s final victim of manipulation.

A child who never knew her, raised in total ignorance, who became her most devoted defender, precisely because he had no memories of who she actually was.

The very circumstances that should have freed him, his separation from her at birth, his foster family, his new name, became the mechanism of his capture.

The witch’s last letter.

On September 1st, 1967, Ilsuk hanged herself with bed sheets tied to a heating pipe in her cell at HAK prison.

She was 60 years old.

She had spent 24 years in custody, first American, then German, and never once admitted guilt for anything.

Her suicide note was addressed to Uber.

There is no other way.

Death for me is a release.

Not to Gizella, who had testified against her and built a new life.

Not to the memory of Artwin, who had condemned her and then died.

To UA, the son who believed her, the only one who might continue carrying her version of events into the future.

Prison records noted that Elsa had deteriorated mentally in her final years.

She experienced delusions that concentration camp survivors would break into her cell to abuse her.

She complained of phantom torments, invisible persecutors.

She died believing herself a victim of vast injustice, perhaps the only role she ever truly inhabited.

The note to Uva confirmed where she had placed her final hopes.

Her other children had escaped or died.

Only the prison-born son remained loyal.

Only he could be trusted with her legacy.

Three paths from the same shadow.

The witch of Buenvault left behind three surviving children who reached adulthood.

Each found a different answer to the same impossible question.

How do you live with a mother like Ila Coke? Gizilla’s answer was betrayal.

She testified against her mother, erased her past, and built a life so thoroughly ordinary that her obituary could ignore Bukinvald entirely.

It worked.

She lived to 76, raised a family, founded a charity, and died respected in Bremen.

The cost was standing in a courtroom and helping condemn the woman who gave her life.

Artwin’s answer was death.

He condemned his mother publicly, declared his shame to the BBC, and tried to outrun the Koch name through explicit rejection.

But the memories followed him.

The knowledge of what his parents had done proved impossible to escape through words alone.

He killed himself at 26.

U’s answer was denial.

Born in prison, raised by strangers, he met his mother only as an old woman claiming innocence.

He had no competing memories, no childhood in the villa, nothing to contradict her carefully rehearsed defense.

So he believed her.

He spent decades trying to prove the impossible.

that the witch of Buenvald was a victim, not a perpetrator.

After 1971, Uber largely disappears from the historical record.

Whether he ever stopped defending his mother, whether he ever accepted what she was remains unknown.

Some questions don’t have endings.

What historians still debate isn’t what Ilsok did.

The evidence is overwhelming, the testimony extensive, the guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

The question that lingers is whether anyone raised in the shadow of that kind of evil can truly escape it.

Whether betrayal, death, or denial are the only options, or whether there’s a fourth path no one has found yet.

Three children, three answers, none of them good.

Thanks for watching History Hangover.

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