A convicted Nazi concentration camp guard who brutalized prisoners with a whip, kicked dying women in the face, and coerced young female inmates into sexual relationships in exchange for food and medicine died alone and forgotten in a West Berlin hospital kitchen — her name barely a footnote in the annals of Holocaust justice.
Anneliese Kohlmann, born March 1, 1921, in Hamburg, was sentenced to just two years in prison by a British military tribunal in 1945 for her crimes at the Neuengamme concentration camp complex and the Bergen-Belsen camp. She served her full sentence. She was never charged with murder.
She never expressed remorse. And when she died of a heart attack at her workplace on September 17, 1977 — the anniversary of the opening of the Bergen-Belsen trials — no one beyond a handful of aging survivors remembered her name.
Her story, pieced together from trial records, survivor testimony, and historical research, reveals a woman who was neither a monster nor a victim, but something perhaps more disturbing: an ordinary person who eagerly embraced a system of brutality because it allowed her to exercise power she could never have achieved in normal life.
Kohlmann was not a deceived follower of Hitlerism. She joined the Nazi Party in 1940 at age 19, a conscious and voluntary act. Before the war, she worked as a tram driver in Hamburg — an unusual profession for a woman at the time, one that reflected what contemporaries described as her masculine tastes and demeanor.
In surviving photographs, she is almost always dressed in men’s clothing, her hair cropped short.
In early November 1944, she volunteered for the SS women’s auxiliary corps, the SS-Gefolge, and was assigned to serve as a concentration camp guard. Her defense later claimed she was forcibly mobilized and hated her duties. Historians find this unconvincing.
Forced conscription into guard service was rare in Nazi Germany and typically targeted unemployed women. Kohlmann had a job. She also joined the SS auxiliary voluntarily, which implied her consent.
Her career as a warden lasted from November 4, 1944, to April 15, 1945 — barely five months. Yet in that time, she left a trail of terror across Neuengamme, its numerous satellite camps, and finally Bergen-Belsen.
At Neuengamme, where prisoners were worked to death producing bricks and armaments under conditions of deliberate starvation and disease, Kohlmann earned the nickname “Bubi” — a masculine diminutive meaning “little boy.” Survivors remembered her as a guard who beat prisoners with any improvised weapon she could find, with or without provocation, until she grew tired.
One witness testified that a prisoner caught stealing a piece of bread was beaten on the hands until they swelled, blackened, and stopped moving entirely. Another recalled that Kohlmann personally whipped a woman thirty times for the same offense. She harbored a particular hatred for elderly prisoners and pregnant women, whom she beat with special ferocity, sometimes until they showed no signs of life.
When prisoners could not walk during the forced evacuations known as death marches, they were finished off. Kohlmann participated in these transports, moving prisoners between camps as the Nazi leadership sought to hide evidence of their crimes from the advancing Allied armies. Prisoners were driven on foot in inadequate clothing, sometimes without food for days.
Those who fell behind were killed.
But it was Kohlmann’s sexual predation that survivors remembered most vividly. In the camps, she forced young female prisoners into intimate relationships, offering medicine, extra food, better clothing, and other privileges in exchange for compliance. The alternative was violence.
Women who refused became targets of her whip and her boots.
Vera Fuka, a former prisoner, testified that Kohlmann “treated us normally” — a relative term in the context of a concentration camp — and fell in love with one of the inmates. Francisco Solar, another survivor, described Kohlmann’s “great love” for a Jewish ballerina from Prague named Helen Sommer. Sommer’s elderly mother was also in the camp.
To protect her mother, Sommer submitted to Kohlmann’s demands. In return, the elderly woman received tolerable living conditions.
When Kohlmann was transferred with a transport of prisoners to Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, she was supposed to return to her post. Instead, she asked to remain. The camp commander refused.
She left, then secretly returned in civilian clothes, slipped into the camp during a changing of the guard, and hid among the prisoners. She was discovered after the British liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, following a denunciation by prisoners. She had been hiding among them, dressed as an inmate.
Her arrest led to the Bergen-Belsen trial, which began on September 17, 1945, before a British Military Tribunal. Forty-five defendants were tried separately, each case considered in isolation. The prosecution focused on specific acts of murder and 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 rather than on membership in a criminal system.
This approach had profound consequences.
Kohlmann’s lawyer argued that she had served under duress. Her mother, Margarete, testified on her behalf, praising her daughter. The court concluded that it had no information about a single murder committed by Kohlmann herself.
No witness could say with certainty that any prisoner had died specifically as a result of her actions. Since each defendant was judged outside the context of the system they served, Kohlmann was found guilty only of ill-treatment of prisoners and sentenced to two years in prison, with credit for time served before and during the trial.
She served her sentence in Hamburg — in full, unlike many of her co-defendants, who were released early. After her release, she faded into obscurity. She worked for a time as a prostitute, though without much success; survivors noted she was not particularly attractive.
She drove a truck, a job that suited her masculine tastes. In 1965, she moved to West Berlin and eventually found work as a cook in a hospital kitchen.
She never gave interviews. She never shared her feelings or memories with newspapers or television. She never expressed regret.
She simply became what she had been before the war: an unremarkable, inconspicuous woman without special talents, abilities, or skills.
On September 17, 1977 — thirty-two years to the day after the Bergen-Belsen trials began — she suffered a heart attack at her workplace. She was in a hospital kitchen, surrounded by medical facilities. Doctors were a stone’s throw away.
But she was an unknown, unnecessary middle-aged woman doing hard, unskilled work. No one bothered to save her.
Historians who have studied her case note that Kohlmann was not among the most notorious perpetrators of the Holocaust. She did not select prisoners for gas chambers. She did not poison children with dogs or shoot inmates for sport.
Compared to figures like Irma Grese, Josef Kramer, or Elisabeth Volkenrath — all of whom were executed — she appears almost insignificant.
But this is precisely what makes her story important. Kohlmann was not a sadist of extraordinary proportions. She was an ordinary woman who volunteered to serve in a system of industrial murder because it offered her power, sexual access, and a sense of purpose she could not find elsewhere.
She beat prisoners because she could. She coerced women into 𝒔𝒆𝒙 because she could. She participated in death marches because she could.
And when the war ended, she was punished with a two-year sentence and then released to live out her life in obscurity. She died alone, unmourned, her name known only to historians and the dwindling number of survivors who remembered her whip, her boots, and her demands.
The question her life poses is not why she did what she did. The question is why the world allowed her to do it — and then allowed her to forget.