| Original caption: “Two German guards, knee-deep in decaying flesh and bones, haul bodies into place in the Belsen mass grave. The bald-headed [Schutzstaffel] SS officer worked at the camp before its capture by the British in mid-April. He is assisted by strong-armed German SS girl wearing leather jack boots. British Tommies forced Germans to dig this pit and bury the scattered corpses.” SS Aufseherin (“Female Overseer”) Anneliese “Bubi” Kohlmann (March 1, 1921 – 17 September 17, 1977) and SS-Oberscharführer (“Senior Squad Leader” or Sergeant) Friedrich Herzog (December 22, 1886 – May 24, 1945) among the dead during forced burials. When the British and Canadians advanced on Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the German army negotiated a truce and exclusion zone around the camp to prevent the spread of typhus. On April 11, 1945, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler agreed to have the camp handed over without a fight. SS guards ordered prisoners to bury some of the dead. The next day, Wehrmacht representatives approached the British and were brought to VIII Corps Headquarters. At around 0100 Hours on April 13, an agreement was signed, designating an area of 48 square kilometers (19 square miles) around the camp as a neutral zone. Most of the SS were allowed to leave. Only a small number of SS men and women, including the camp commandant Kramer, remained to “uphold order inside the camp,” The outside was guarded by Hungarian and regular German troops who were returned to the German front lines by the British shortly afterwards. The camp was liberated on the afternoon of April 15, 1945. On April 18, 1945, the British set to work burying the dead and evacuating the living to the Panzer Training School. The burial of the dead had already begun on April 16; squads of SS men were put to work, under British supervision, lifting corpses from the heaps in Belsen onto carts and lorries and then unloading them into vast mass graves. 1st those pits left by the Germans; and then, when they had been filled, new ones dug by Hungarian guards and army bulldozers. The 30 SS Aufseherin left behind by the retreat were also made to do this work, and so were German civilians and soldiers. There was a strong theatrical element in the process, with the emphasis as much on retributive ritual as on efficient disease prevention. The SS men – mainly technicians and clerks, because nearly all the guards had fled before the British arrived – worked in hot sunshine in full uniform, goaded by Tommies with bayonets, struggling to retain their dignity and health as they held the corpses at arm’s length like wheelbarrows. The burial parties, Captain Derrick Sington (May 19, 1908 – January 1968) thought, provided “a tremendous emotional release for the inmates of Bergen-Belsen. Each morning a crowd would form near the mass grave in the sandy clearing, in the south-west corner of the camp, to howl and yell execrations at their former tormentors.” But they also provided a similar outlet for British soldiers’ feelings. “The one thing I saw that pleased me was the SS men being bullied into work,” a member of the British medical team wrote on April 22. “They collect dead and infected clothing-push their carts by hand and throw the mixed loads into enormous mass graves (5,000 each). All the time our armed troops shout at them, kick them, threaten them, never letting them stop for a moment. What horrible types they were — these SS! – with their Hollywood criminal features. They are being shown no quarter — they know what end is in store for them when their work is finished.” The SS men were given starvation rations and forced to handle bodies without gloves, the general expectation among British troops being that they would be worked to death – and ultimately 20 of the 50 SS men did die of typhus. But, after a few days, higher authority intervened. The SS were removed and thereafter most of the work was done by German prisoners of war. Having joined the Nazi Party in 1940, Kohlmann was conscripted as an Aufseherin on November 4, 1944, and sent to the Neugraben subcamp of the Neuengamme Konzentrationslager (KZ; “Concentration Camp”). She transferred to the Hamburg-Tiefstack Labor Camp in March 1945. Because of her boyish appearance, the prisoners called her “Bubi.” She could be kind to the young women, but would be accused of beating and berating the older women. Kohlmann engaged in a coerced relationship with a prisoner, Lotte Winterová (December 20, 1922 – September 15, 2010). Kohlmann, a self-identified lesbian, was aware that female homosexuality was not a criminal offense, but also knew of the camp-wide ban on same-sex female relationships. In addition, Winterová had her mother Ella Lindt Winter (December 16, 1896 – 1976) with her, who at 48 was considered an old woman in the camp. Winterová knew full well that old people and those no longer “fit for work” were under the threat of murder. Saving her mother was therefore an additional motivation. Kohlmann’s affection made her cross the line between guards and prisoners, and so eventually she followed Winterová to Bergen-Belsen in the last week of war. Kohlmann was 1 of the guards on the forced march to Bergen Belsen when it closed on April 7, 1945. After the forced march, she was denied permission to stay in Bergen Belsen. She rode back on bicycles from Hamburg to Bergen Belsen on April 8, 1945, with escaped political prisoner and Kapo Willy Brachmann (December 26, 1903 – January 13, 1982), Winterová’s lover. There she donned prisoner’s clothes and joined the barracks to be closer to Winterová. Bergen Belsen survivor Věra Fuchsová (July 7, 1914 – 2009) recalled in 1994: “And there was a thing that happened to us: in Hamburg we already had a SS woman, a guard in the camp, a young girl, we called her “Bubi,” and she treated us kind of okay. A young, pretty girl, but, as it turned out later, she was gay. And she fell in love with 1 of our fellow prisoners. I don’t know in how far the girl came close to her, but she had her mother there, and she would have done anything for her, and on account of Bubi she had it good. After the liberation of Belsen we suddenly found that Bubi is among us, wearing the striped prisoner clothing. What to do now? She treated us fine, but she was a SS woman, so what to do with her? The camp Eldest sent a girl to the English head officer to tell him.” Survivor Edith “Dita” Kraus (born July 12, 1929) recalled: “Yes, we could have asked ourselves why she had chosen to suffer with us and endure lice, infections and intolerable living conditions if she did not have to. But then I thought she probably loved Lotte so much that she refused to be separated from her, even at such a price.” Kohlmann was arrested on April 17, 1945. She was then forced to bury the thousands of prisoners’ corpses in the camp area in mass graves under guard together with SS men and guards. She was eventually transferred to the prison in Celle and remanded in custody until her trial. A British military court held a war crimes trial against Kohlmann on 16 May 1946 in the 2nd Bergen-Belsen trial. As a concentration camp guard, she was accused of mistreating prisoners from Allied countries in Hamburg and elsewhere and pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial. She was represented by a German lawyer who gave an opening speech at the beginning of the trial: He criticized the fact that only interrogation records of the prosecution witnesses were available for the trial. He also stated that Kohlmann had only spent a few hours as a guard in Bergen-Belsen, but otherwise lived there as a prisoner. As a guard, she was popular with the prisoners and helped them by, among other things, organizing additional food. She only hit them “when there was no other alternative.” Kohlmann then took the witness stand and declared that her interrogation record was truthful. She made a supplementary statement in which she denied, among other things, having been a member of the BDM and the NSDAP. Kohlmann’s statement during her trial on 16 May 16, 1946: “I believe that the girls in my work detail in Hamburg all liked me, although I admit that I occasionally hit them when they did something wrong, but they preferred to be hit by me than by the commandant and therefore, despite the beatings […] they loved me no less […] I came to Bergen-Belsen unofficially and without permission because I wanted to help 1 of the female prisoners, Lotte W., who had been in my work detail in Hamburg […] I wanted to help this girl because I was friends with her and she and the other Czech girls had promised to take me to Prague when they were free again […] When I came to Belsen, I […] lived for a few days as a female prisoner with Lotte until I was discovered.” Brachmann and Kohlmann’s mother testified as witnesses for the defense. Her mother claimed Kohlmann had rescued 6 Jews from death during the war while a guard in Hamburg. A former guard from the Hamburg-Tiefstack subcamp stated that Kohlmann was liked by the prisoners and that this had caused her problems with the camp commander Friedrich-Wilhelm Kliem (December 25, 1896 – circa 1955). Winterová did not testify. Prisoners’ homophobic reactions to Kohlmann were rooted in the notion of the monstrous lesbian guard and what they identified as her sexual “perversion” played an aggravating part in her postwar trial. On May 18, 1946, she was sentenced to 2 years in prison, which she subsequently served in Fuhlsbüttel prison. Since Kohlmann herself did not appeal against the verdict and her mother did not submit an application for release in time, the verdict was upheld and Kohlmann had to serve the entire sentence. A later request for clemency was also not granted. She had to spend the time in prison in a solitary cell because she was considered a lesbian. After her sentence was served, she lived in Hamburg and then West Berlin with a woman who was persecuted for being half-Jewish during the Nazi era. She was rumored to be a prostitute for some time. She was also a truck driver. She died on the job as a cook in a hospital in Zehlendorf. Lotte Winterová left Hamburg soon after the end of the war. 1st she returned to Prague with her mother. She tried her hand at film. Later she married a Holocaust survivor and moved with him to Australia. The family lived comfortably, Winterová was a housewife, mother and amateur artist. She never spoke about how she survived. Herzog was assigned as a camp guard at Bergen Belsen in 1943. He was arrested by the British during the liberation of the camp and forced to bury the bodies of the deceased prisoners in mass graves. However, he contracted typhus and died a few weeks later at Schwarmstedt German Military Hospital. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0567.jpg |
| Image Size | 547.55 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1238 x 1876 |
| Photographer | George W. A. Rodger |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 18, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen |
| City | Bergen |
| State or Province | Lower Saxony |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
Author of the World War II Multimedia Database