RESISTING THE GRIP OF NAZI OPPRESSION

In a quiet Kent village, 98-yearold Waltraud Hollman tells reporter Brad Harper how she was imprisoned by the Nazis – eventually escaping their clutches with a marriage in Maidstone…

It was December 1944, and to the people of Berlin it was clear that their country would lose the Second World War.

Waltraud Hollman, an accountant and opponent of Nazism, took a risk that almost cost her life.

Asked by a fellow anti-Nazi to distribute illegal leaflets calling on Berliners to rebel against their government and stop the war, she agreed.

But the 23-year-old’s act of rebellion was spotted by the ever-vigilant Gestapo.

Two Nazis stormed into her office to arrest her as a “traitor and saboteur”.

Sitting in her quiet lounge at home in Kent, the great-grandmother of nine recalls how resistance to Nazism was an act of treason – punishable by death, often by guillotine or firing squad.

After Waltraud’s arrest and with no official charge or court trial, she was taken to a prison in Stendal, 65 miles from Berlin, and locked in a cell with six other women – all incarcerated for different crimes.

There were two beds in the small cell and the other prisoners had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. They used a bucket as a toilet, which was emptied in the morning.

Waltraud said: “You had dinner, usually soup, which had maggots floating on it already. But we were all hungry so we ate it.”

She had no idea what her fate would be. There was an ever-present risk of bombs being dropped on the prison by the Allies.

In a lucky turn of events, the Ninth United States Army liberated the prison in April 1945 and Waltraud was released.

Today, aged 98, the horrors of life in Nazi Germany are as vivid for Waltraud as ever. Born Waltraud Fischer on May 14, 1921, she grew up in Wilmersdorfer Straße, Charlottenburg, in Greater Berlin and lived through the rise of the Third Reich.

Waltraud belonged to a sports club when she was 14 but was forced to join the League of German Girls – the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth – and was a member for a couple of years.

She even performed a gymnastics routine in front of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Summer Olympics opening ceremony.

Her mother hated that she was in the youth movement, and so did Waltraud, but she said: “I had to laugh at it, I didn’t take it all that seriously.”

Nor did she take politics very seriously at a young age, but that changed during November 1938.

Waltraud recalls being woken by loud smashing in the street outside her home.

She looked out of the window and saw the Sturmabteilung (the original Nazi Party paramilitary) smashing windows of Jewish shops and stealing from them.

On another occassion, Waltraud and her family helped a Jewish mother and her baby