After the end of the Second World War, a series of war crimes trials sought to bring the perpetrators of atrocities and crimes against humanity to justice. When the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as the Third Reich fell, they encountered a scene of depravity and suffering. Around ten thousand bodies lay throughout the camp, and sixty thousand people were suffering, many starving and dying from diseases such as typhus, which was running rampant.
Among the prisoners were a number of SS guards responsible for running the camp, and they were put to work burying those who had died inside Belsen. Among the guards was Annelisa Coleman, a young woman known for her brutality and barbarism toward the prisoners. After the second Belsen trial, she was not sentenced to death but instead received time in prison, despite it being established that she was involved in many violent beatings. Her defense claimed she did not take a life, but her brutality was not in question.
Annelisa Coleman was born on the first of March 1921 in Hamburg. Her father, George, was a Masonic leader, and it is assumed she had a normal life growing up inside Hitler's Germany. It is likely she joined the League of German Maidens, where she would have taken part in activities aimed at training women to become good mothers who would provide Hitler with as many children as possible for his Third Reich.
Inside this group, girls also learned domestic roles and jobs such as how to keep a good house and cookery, while boys joined the Hitler Youth, where they completed military drills for a career in the armed forces. Annelisa was an ardent Nazi, and on the first of April 1940 in Hamburg she became a member of the party. At this time she was working as a conductor on the Hamburg streetcar system, and she lived with her parents until the thirtieth of October 1944.
On the fourth of November 1944, she was conscripted into a role that would take her into the depths of the Nazi concentration camps. As the war continued for the Germans, they conscripted different people into different roles and into the military to fight their enemies. There is some debate as to whether she was forced to become a guard or whether she chose of her own free will, as she joined the SS women's auxiliary. By doing so, she knew what she was being let into.
After a short period of training in which she was schooled in how to instill a reign of fear and terror, Coleman was appointed as a female guard officer inside the Neuengamme concentration camp. Specifically, she first worked at the Neuengamme subcamp, where over 500 women prisoners were kept close to her hometown of Hamburg. Neuengamme itself was a large concentration camp through which 106,000 prisoners would pass, and almost 43,000 people were killed inside it.
It was known for its terrible food rations, and the portions offered to prisoners were poor quality and not enough to sustain them, especially with the hard labor administered there. The camp had a policy of extermination through labor, where prisoners would be worked so hard that they would die from the horrific, unsanitary, hard, and terrible conditions. The death rate at the camp was very high, and as the war turned following Stalingrad, a number of Soviet POWs were sent there. The guards exercised terrible brutality over the prisoners, and executions and beatings were very common, administered if a prisoner would not perform enough work.
Annelisa Coleman was transferred to the slave labor camp of Hanbok Tiefstack in March 1945, where she was again involved in overseeing female prisoners. Also in March 1945, the prisoners at the subcamps were being sent on death marches to places such as Bergen-Belsen, and during one transport a prisoner train was hit by an air raid, killing a number of prisoners. Over the course of the month, thousands of people were transported to get away from the front lines and to avoid falling into Soviet hands, and along with the death marches and transports, many SS guards and staff also went.
For some reason, Annelisa Coleman cycled to Bergen-Belsen and arrived there on the eighth of April 1945. As a guard, she was known for being sadistic and violent with prisoners. She would repeatedly whip many different people, including pregnant women. Some pregnant women were found with brutal whip marks across their faces because of Coleman's brutality, and she would also kick them until they lost consciousness. In her jackboots, she would beat prisoners to pieces if they did not do what she asked or were not working hard enough.
It was her job at Neuengamme to get prisoners working as hard as they could so they could perish, and because of this she terrorized her work detachments. During one incident, Coleman punished a female prisoner with 30 lashes for stealing a small piece of bread. She did this a number of times and also sexually assaulted a number of young Jewish girls. While at Belsen, she traded her clothes and her guard uniform to a prisoner who gave her a prisoner uniform. Here she tried to pass herself off as a prisoner of Belsen to evade capture once the camp was liberated, but it did not take long before she was discovered.
Within two days she was recognized and arrested, and she was then forced to take part in the huge cleanup operation along with other guards at Belsen. Coleman was made to take the corpses of those who had died and bury them inside mass graves. The cleanup took a long time before she was then brought to trial. Annelisa Coleman was not tried in the first Belsen trials alongside the former commandant Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, or the infamous female guard Irma Grese. Her case was brought to the second Belsen trial.
This took place at Luneburg on the thirteenth of June 1946 and lasted five days, presided over by the British military. On trial were a number of defendants, and Annelisa was one of them. Witnesses told of her brutality. She was known for carrying her whip and hitting anyone who was not doing what they should, and she was also known for abusing female prisoners. Coleman also became known for the fact that she would brutalize even the most vulnerable people, including pregnant women.
One issue at her trial was the fact that she did not actually take a life, or it was not known, and evidence was not gathered that made her a murderer. She was not found to have participated in selections sending people to their deaths inside gas chambers, and no witnesses came forward to say that Coleman beat someone so badly that they died or that she shot anyone randomly. Because of this, she was considered a minor war criminal compared to others, despite being an ardent member of the Nazi Party and a person who would happily brutalize the vulnerable.
Because of this, she was only sentenced to two years imprisonment, but she would never really serve any time at all for her crimes. Shockingly, despite being found guilty of crimes against humanity, because she had served time in prison before her trial, she was released on the day that her trial finished. A guilty war criminal was let free from the courtroom because of her pre-trial confinement and incarceration. She would stay in Hamburg for a number of years and then moved to West Berlin, where she died at the age of 56 in the German capital.
What is bizarre is the fact that Annelisa Coleman escaped without any real punishment. She was an evil woman who would happily and violently rain down hell with her whip, and her verdict was no real justice for her victims. Coleman was one of many female guards who ended up at Bergen-Belsen as the war turned against the Germans, and a number were sentenced to death in the Belsen trials. Compared to these women, Coleman received a sentence that was incredibly lenient and shocking, and today many of her crimes remain untold.