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.

10,000 unburied bodies lay all around the
camp, and there were 60,000 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 put to work then
in burying those who had died inside of Belsen.

Amongst the guards was Anneliese Kohlmann,
a young woman who was known for her brutality and barbarism towards the prisoners.

However after the Second Belsen 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 defence that she did
not take a life, but her brutality was not in question.

Join us today as we look at, ‘The DISGUSTING
Crimes Of Anneliese Kohlmann,’ remember to support our channel, please make sure to
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Anneliese Kohlmann was born on the 1st March
1921 inside of Hamburg.

Her father Georg 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 the various activities
that the youth group participated in.

The group 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 drills in preparation for a career in the military.

Anneliese was an ardent Nazi and on the 1st
April 1940 inside of Haburg she became a member of the Nazi Party.

At this time she was working as a conductor
on the Hamburg Streetcar system, and she lived with her parents until the 30th October 1944.

But on the 4th 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 freewill, 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 in how
to instil a reign of fear and terror, Kohlmann was appointed to become an Aufseherin, or
female guard inside of the Neuengamme concentration camp.

Specifically she first worked at the Neugraben
sub camp, 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.

The camp was known for its terrible food rations,
and the portions offered for prisoners were poor quality and not enough to sustain especially
with the hard labour 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 to the camp.

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.

Anneleise Kohlmann was transferred to the
slave labour camp of Hamburg-Tiefstack in March 1945 and she was involved again in overseeing
female prisoners.

But in March 1945, the prisoners at the sub
camps were sent on death marches to camps such as Bergen-Belsen and during some transports,
a prisoner train transport was hit by an air raid killing a number of prisoners.

Over the course of the month, thousands of
prisoners were transported to get them away from the front lines and to avoid them falling
onto soviet hands, and along with the death marches and transports went many of the SS
guards and staff.

For some reason, Anneleise Kohlmann cycled
to Bergen-Belsen and arrived there on the 8th April 1945.

Now as a guard, she was known for being sadistic
and violent with prisoners.

She would repeatedly whip many different prisoners,
including pregnant women.

Some pregnant women were found with brutal
whip marks across their faces because of Kohlmann’s brutality, and she also would 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 would perish, and because of this she terrorised
her work detachments.

During one incident, Kohlmann 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 Belsen, she traded her clothes and
her uniform to a prisoner who gave her a prisoner uniform.

Here she tried to pass herself off as a prisoner
to evade capture once the camp was being liberated however it did not take long before she was
discovered.

Wishin 2 days she was recognised and arrested,
and then was forced to take part in the huge clean up operation along with other guards
at Belsen.

Kohlmann was made to take the corpses of those
who had died and then bury them inside mass graves.

The clean up operation took a long time, before
she was then brought to trial.