The Female Concentration Camp Guard Who Whipped Pregnant Women
Following the end of the Second World War, there were many different war crimes trials that aimed 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 would come across a disgusting scene of depravity and suffering. Ten thousand very bodies lay all around the camp, and there were sixty thousand people who were suffering, and many were starving and dying from diseases such as typhus, which was running riot throughout.
Amongst the prisoners were a number of SS guards who were responsible for the running of the camp, and they were then put to work in burying those who had died inside of Belson. Amongst the guards was Annalisa Coleman, a young woman who was known for her brutality and barbarism towards the prisoners. However, after the second Belson trial, she was not sentenced to death and instead was sentenced to time in prison, despite it being established that she was involved in many violent beatings. It was claimed by her defense that she did not take her life, but her brutality was not in question. Join us today as we look at the disgusting crimes of Annalisa Coleman.
Annelisa Coleman was born on the 1st of March 1921 inside of Hamburg. Her father, George, was a masonic leader, and it’s assumed that she had a normal life growing up inside of Hitler’s Germany. It’s likely that she would have joined the League of German Maidens and would have in this group been involved in various activities that the group participated in. They aimed to train women to become good mothers and mothers who would provide Hitler with as many children as possible for his Third Reich. Inside of this group, girls also learned domestic roles and jobs, such as how to keep a good house and cookery, whilst the boys joined the Hitler Youth where they completed military drills for a career in the armed forces.
Annalisa was an ardent Nazi, and on the 1st of April 1940 inside of 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 30th of October 1944. But on the 4th of November 1944, she was conscripted into a role which 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 the military to fight their enemies. There is some debate as to whether she was forced to become a guard or whether she actually chose of her own free will, as she joined the SS Women’s Auxiliary. By doing this, she knew what she was going to be let into.
And before a short period of training in which she was schooled into how to instill a reign of fear and terror, Coleman was appointed to become an officer or female guard inside of 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 in which 106,000 prisoners would pass through its barbed wire fences, and almost 43,000 people were killed inside of the camp. It was known for its terrible food rations, and the portions offered for prisoners were poor quality and not enough to sustain them, especially with the hard labor that was administered there.
The camp had a policy of extermination through labour, 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 here exercised terrible brutality over the prisoners, and executions and beatings were very common and would be administered if a prisoner would not perform enough work.
Annalisa Coleman was transferred to the slave labor camp of Hamburg-Tiefstack in March 1945, and she was involved again in overseeing female prisoners. But 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 them 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 8th of April 1945. Now, 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 to 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. Whilst at Belson, she traded her clothes in her guard uniform to a prisoner who gave her a prisoner uniform. Here, she tried to pass herself off as a prisoner of Belson 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 then was forced to take part in the huge cleanup operation along with other guards at Belson. Coleman was made to take the corpses of those who had died and bury them inside of mass graves. The cleanup took a long time before she was then brought to trial.
Annalisa Coleman was not tried in the first Belson trials alongside the former commandant Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belson, or the infamous female guard Irma Grese, which was brought to the second Belson trial. This took place at Lüneburg on the 13th of June 1946 and lasted five days, being presided over by the British military. On trial were a number of defendants, and Annalisa was one of those, and witnesses told of her brutality. She was known for carrying her whip and hitting anyone who was not doing what they should, and also she was known for abusing female prisoners. Coleman also became known for the fact she would brutalize even the most vulnerable people, including pregnant women.
But one issue at her trial was the fact that she did not actually take her 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 of gas chambers, and there were no witnesses that came forward that said that Coleman beat someone so badly that they did die, 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 actually bizarrely released on the day that her trial finished. So a guilty war criminal was happily 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 she moved to West Berlin and died at the age of 56 inside of 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 Belson trials. But compared to these women, Coleman received a sentence which was incredibly lenient and shocking, and today many of her crimes remain untold.
