Germans, for the most part, did nothing to oppose Hitler and his Nazi acolytes but there were a few – very few – who took a stand against the collective madness, risking their lives in the process.

Waltraud Hollman, who has died aged 101, was one of these unsung heroes, an ordinary German woman who had never previously been particularly interested in politics.

Born Waltraud Fischer, she grew up in Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin. Like most German girls of the time, in her teens she had been a member of the League of German Girls (the female wing of the Hitler Youth).

As a 14-year-old gymnast she had even performed in front of Hitler himself at the opening ceremony of the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Not that she had taken the whole thing seriously at all: although her mother reportedly hated the fact that Waltraud had no choice but be a member of the Hitler youth movement, she herself preferred to laugh about it.

Her attitude changed in November, 1938 after Kristallnacht: woken up by a loud noise, the sound of things being smashed, she saw Nazi Brownshirts breaking the windows of Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues before looting them.

Waltraud’s family was shocked into action: when one of her father’s Jewish customers went missing after breaching the 8pm curfew imposed on Jews, they gave shelter to the man’s wife and baby.

“The trouble was,” recalled Waltraud, “that every time there was an air raid, we had to go in the cellar and we were afraid to take her. Then one day she went out with the baby in the pram. We told her to be careful but we never saw her again.”

Waltraud did join an anti-Nazi group that circulated leaflets exhorting people to overthrow Hitler but lost touch with them when she was evacuated from Berlin. In late 1944, however, she came across Ernst, a member of the group, who asked her to help: “We have got to get rid of them,” he explained.

The war was going disastrously for Germany with defeat looming, yet the wider public seemed to be paralysed, unable or unwilling to do anything.

Not so the young Berlin accountant who decided it was time to take action, whatever the cost. Waltraud and her friends decided to hand out leaflets inciting people to start a revolution and put an end to the war.

“I was told to hand the leaflets to as many people as possible but it was so dangerous,” recalled Waltraud.

The danger was all too real: “saboteurs”, as those who resisted Nazism were called, risked death, either by firing squad or the guillotine.

It didn’t take long for the Gestapo to come knocking at Waltraud’s door – she had been betrayed. “Someone split on me,” she said.

She was arrested and taken to Stendal prison, 65 miles from Berlin, without being put on trial or even formally charged: the Nazis didn’t care about such details.

Waltraud was locked in a cell with six other women.There were only two beds so the other inmates slept on the floor; the lavatory was a bucket, which was emptied once a day. Food was a soup dotted with maggots, “but we were all hungry so we ate it,” recalled Waltraud. “I was held there waiting for something to happen.”

If the conditions inside were primitive, outside it was total chaos: Nazi Germany was in its death throes and the Allies were trying to hasten its demise by bombing what was still standing, like the prison that held Waltraud.

But she managed to stay alive until the Ninth United States Army reached Stendal and liberated it in April, 1945. There was no room on the train to Berlin but Waltraud didn’t care and with her fellow prisoners made the journey riding on the roof.

Now back home, she got a job and went back to some sort of normality. One evening she was waiting for a friend to go to the movies when a young man chatted her up. He was a young British soldier, Benjamin Hollman, newly demobbed and just arrived in Berlin. It was love at first sight.

The city was a physical and moral wreck and so were its people. That day Benjamin witnessed something that would shock him and convince him that he needed to get

Waltraud out of there as soon as possible: a lorry mounted the pavement, killed an elderly woman and drove off without stopping.

The problem was that getting out of Berlin appeared impossible, as the only bridge to West

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Waltraud Hollman as a young woman

Germany was being repaired and was therefore out of action. Then Waltraud was diagnosed with TB and a collapsed lung, the result of the hardship endured at Stendal; she failed the medical examination to leave the country.

But with the help of what Waltraud would describe later as “a little bit of fiddling” on the British side, they managed to secure a passport and a permit for a three-week visit to England.

Once there they had to wait for a marriage licence but on 21 June, 1946, the day her permit expired and she was due to return to Germany, Benjamin and Waltraud finally tied the knot at Maidstone Register Office.

They would live in Kent for the rest of their lives, at one point even running a fish and chip shop in Sandwich.

They eventually settled in the village of Staple, near Canterbury, and it was to a local newspaper, the Kentish Gazette, that Waltraud chose to tell her extraordinary story of defiance in 2019.

Benjamin Hollman predeceased her in 2007. She is survived by two children, Barbara and Michael, and several grandchildren.


Waltraud Hollman: born 14 May, 2021. Died 10 August, 2022