Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Anna Keldorf * 1897

Hansaplatz 4 (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

HIER WOHNTE
ANNA KELDORF
JG. 1897
MEHRFACH VERHAFTET
ZULETZT 1942
FRAUENZUCHTHAUS AICHACH
ERMORDET 10.7.1943
AUSCHWITZ

Anna Margarethe Keldorf, born 23 June 1896 in Norburg (Nordborg) on the Danish island of Alsen (Als), killed in Auschwitz on 10 July 1943

Last residence in Hamburg: Hansaplatz 4

Anna Keldorf was the daughter of the painter Thomas Keldorf and his wife Anna in the town of Norburg on the island of Alsen, then belonging to the German Reich, now a part of Denmark, (Nordborg/Als). Anna was Lutheran and grew up with her grandfather – the relationship to her parents was always difficult.

Already as a young girl, she went to work as a maid in farmers‘ households. There, she developed a tendency to purloin objects belonging to her employers‘ households. Between 1917 and 1933, she was convicted of theft, peculation and fraud seventeen times in several places in northern Germany and given sentences of less than a year each time.

Since the end of the 1920s, she stayed mostly in Hamburg and, when she was not in jail, worked in private households. In September of 1933, she was sentenced to six months by the district court. After her release in March 1934, she did not remain in freedom for long, because the same court convicted her again in January 1935, giving her a sentence of a year in prison, which she serve until Christmas of that year.

This time, she was put under police surveillance when she was released and referred to an accommodation with the Liefland family, who rented out rooms at 4 Hansaplatz. In the middle of February, she received an order to present herself for a "medical examination at the Barmbek Women’s Camp.”Anna did not follow the order; instead, she stopped registering her residence and evaded police surveillance.

She now resumed her routine of frequently changing her residence, mostly staying with single women whom she told she had fallen into distress without a fault of her own and that she would like to work in their household. After short sojourns at these households, often in the Hammerbrook section of Hamburg, she would steal household items and valuables from her landladies and disappear. In the summer of 1936, she is supposed to have had a temporary job at the "Strandbad Jungbrunnen", an open air bath in the Eidelstedt district.
On account of criminal complaints by the damnified women, Anna was finally arrested by the police on September 4th and admitted to the remand center at Sievekingplatz two days later. Even though the jail administration rated her as a "good prisoner” considered as "completely calm and industrious… diligent and interested”, she was not only sentenced to two years in prison by the Hamburg district court, but also to subsequent "preventive custody” because the court judged her as a "dangerous habitual criminal”, a sentence that was confirmed by the Court of Appeals in February, 1938.

She served her sentence beginning March, 1938 at the women’s prison in Lübeck-Lauerhof, as well as the following preventive custody that was regularly extended until October 1942, last on October 3rd, 1942, at the review of the remand, when the Attorney General in Kiel again rejected her release for the reason that "purpose of the placement had not yet been fulfilled.” On the 28th of the same month, Anna Keldorf was transferred to the "Women’s Prison and Institution of Custody” in Aichach in Upper Bavaria. After exactly half a year of imprisonment at Aichach she was "consigned to the police” by an order of the Reich Department of Justice. It is to be assumed that Anna Keldorf fell into the hands of the SS and was soon deported to Auschwitz, where she was killed on July 10th, 1943..

Translated by Peter Hubschmid

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Benedikt Behrens

Quelle: StaH 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Abl. 13 und 2000/1; StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen; Schreiben des Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau v. 30.6.2005 und E-Mail dess. v. 5.8.2005.