In June 1946, a twenty-five-year-old former concentration camp guard stood before a British military court in Germany, accused of abusing the prisoners who had been under her authority. Her name was Anneliese Kohlmann, and although she had worked in the camp system for only about five months, the testimony against her painted a picture of casual, relentless brutality. Witnesses described how she beat prisoners with whatever was at hand, for almost any reason, until she grew tired. They testified that she struck people in the face, kicked inmates, and punished the slightest infraction with violence.
One prisoner who stole a piece of bread was beaten on her hands so severely that they swelled and turned black. Kohlmann did not deny the beatings. Her defense was startling in its confidence. She claimed that she had beaten prisoners deliberately, so that they would be spared the harsher violence of the male guards.
A weak woman, she argued, was a lesser evil than a violent man. She pointed to the fact that she had sometimes given prisoners food, presenting herself as a protector rather than a tormentor. The court, however, noted that she had given food only to those prisoners she favored, those with whom she likely had personal relationships, not to the general population of the camp. The strategy of self-justification partly worked.
Because no evidence showed that Kohlmann had personally killed anyone, she was sentenced to two years in prison for physical and moral abuse of prisoners. Since she had already spent that time in custody awaiting trial, she was released from the courtroom that same day. The path that led Kohlmann to that courtroom had been short but dramatic. Born in 1921, she had lived an unremarkable life, working as a streetcar driver.
Even her membership in the Nazi Party had done little to change her circumstances. Everything shifted in November 1944, when she joined the SS. After a brief training course, she was assigned as a female camp guard, first serving at Neuengamme and then being transferred in 1945 to the Hamburg-Tiefstack concentration camp. In that short period of service, Kohlmann earned a fearsome reputation among the prisoners.
She was known for beating elderly inmates and pregnant women with particular intensity, continuing until the victim showed barely any sign of life. She also treated prisoners in a way that was strikingly different from the cold violence of other guards. She engaged in direct romantic relationships with several female prisoners. Jewish women especially drew her interest, and she established affairs with a number of them.
Among the prisoners, she was referred to only in masculine terms, and was known by the nickname Bubi. One former prisoner from Czechoslovakia, a woman named Věra Fuchsová, later described Kohlmann as they knew her in Hamburg. She recalled that there was an SS woman in the camp, a young girl, and that the prisoners called her Bubi. She said that Bubi treated them fairly well, and that she was young and pretty and fell in love with one of the fellow prisoners.
Several such infatuations were noted by survivors. Among the first was Lotte Winter, a Jewish woman from Bohemia. Another was Charlotte Rusná, a Jewish ballerina. Many prisoners also remembered a prisoner named Helena Sommer, for whom Kohlmann’s feelings were so strong that she planned to run away with her to Prague after liberation.
Fuchsová later told the court about this relationship, explaining that she did not know how close the girl had gotten to Sommer, but that Sommer’s mother was there for her and would do anything for her, and because of Bubi, she was taken care of. These words, offered in testimony, reveal one of the more disturbing dimensions of camp life. There was considerable evidence of violence at the hands of guards and wardens, but that violence, strange as it seemed, was sometimes exchanged for privileges: food, medicine, or requests being granted. The arrangement was hideous, and the psychological damage it inflicted on prisoners is difficult to measure.
For some women living in an atmosphere of constant humiliation, the attention of a guard, even a violent one, could feel like a form of indulgence, a perverse kindness in a world designed to destroy them. In April 1945, as the war was collapsing, Kohlmann made an extraordinary gamble to save herself. On April 8, she accompanied her prisoners on a transfer to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She had argued with the camp commander, who refused to release her beloved Helena Sommer.
After the argument, Kohlmann got on her bicycle and rode back to Hamburg. Some time later, she secretly returned to Bergen-Belsen and slipped into the camp dressed in a prisoner’s uniform. In the chaos that engulfed the camp in those final weeks of the war, no one initially noticed her. She had transformed herself from an executioner of the Nazi regime into one of its victims.
On April 15, 1945, British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen. Kohlmann, now posing as a prisoner, maintained her disguise for only two days. Former prisoners from the Tiefstack camp recognized her. They hesitated before reporting her, because she had been friendly with some of them, and that hesitation itself showed how deeply the prisoners’ minds had been scarred.
Even the faint hint of kindness from a brutal guard had been enough to make some women hesitate to denounce her. Fuchsová, recalling the moment after liberation, wrote that they suddenly found Bubi among them, dressed in the striped clothes of a prisoner. What were they to do? She had treated them well, but she was an SS woman, so what was to be done with her?
Once identified, Kohlmann was handed over to the new authorities. Along with other guards and wardens, she was forced to dig graves for the dead and carry bodies to their burial places. She was then taken to prison, where she remained until her trial in June 1946. At the trial, Kohlmann’s mother also spoke in her defense, claiming that her daughter hated her job and had been in constant depression while at home.
No one, however, answered the obvious question of why she had volunteered for such work in the first place. After her release, Kohlmann moved to West Berlin. She worked first as a truck driver and then as a prostitute. Eventually, she found steady employment as a cook at the Sündholf hospital, where she died suddenly at her job on September 17, 1977.
She was fifty-six years old. A woman who had tormented prisoners, who had escaped justice with a remarkably light sentence, and who had even temporarily escaped the war itself by hiding among her own victims, died quietly in an ordinary workplace, far from the camp gates she had once guarded.