Who Was Ilse Koch? Her Connection to Ed Gein in Netflix’s Monster

Courtesy of Netflix

Experts have speculated for decades what factors drove Ed Gein to murder and grave robbery, from an unhealthy obsession with his mother, Augusta , to undiagnosed mental illness.

However, Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story suggests a real-life Nazi war criminal from the Holocaust may have influenced Gein’s gruesome actions.

In the new season of the popular Netflix anthology series, Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam ) learns about Ilse Koch, the notorious wife of a German Schutzstaffel officer during World War II. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that after Gein’s 1957 arrest—when he admitted to killing hardware store owner Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan—police discovered that, like Koch, he had a morbid fascination with human anatomy.

While it’s completely unknown