Herta Bothe

Herta Bothe (born 8 January 1921) was a female Nazi concentration camp guard imprisoned for war crimes, but eventually released.

Early life
Herta Bothe was born in Teterow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. In 1938 (at age 17) Bothe helped her father in his small Teterow wood shop, then worked temporarily in a factory, then as a nurse in the hospital industry. In 1939, Bothe was a member of the League of German Girls and excelled athletically.

At Ravensbrück-Stutthof
In September 1942, Bothe was conscripted as a camp guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp. The former nurse took a four-week training course and was sent as an Aufseherin to the Stutthof camp near Danzig (now Gdansk). There she became known as the "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her brutal beatings of prisoners.

In July 1944, she was sent by Oberaufseherin Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost (Broming East) subcamp.

On January 21, 1945, the 24-years old Bothe accompanied a death march of women prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle. While en route to Bergen-Belsen, she and the prisoners stayed temporarily at Auschwitz concentration camp, arriving at Belsen between February 20–26, 1945.

At Bergen-Belsen
Once in the camp Bothe supervised a female wood brigade of 60 women prisoners. The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945

She is said to have been the tallest woman arrested. Bothe also stood out from other Aufseherinnen because, while most of the SS women wore black jackboots, she was in ordinary civilian shoes. The Allied soldiers forced her to place corpses of dead prisoners into mass graves adjacent to the main camp. She later recalled in an interview some 60 years later that, while carrying the corpses they were not allowed to wear gloves, and she was terrified of contracting typhus. She said the dead bodies were so rotten that the arms and legs tore away from the rest of the body when they were moved. She also recalled the emaciated bodies were still heavy enough to cause her considerable back pain. Bothe was arrested and taken to a jail at Celle.

At the Belsen Trial she was characterized as a "ruthless overseer" and sentenced to ten years in prison for using a pistol on prisoners. She was released early from prison on December 22, 1951 as an act of leniency by the British government.

Later life
During a rare interview that was broadcast in 2004, Bothe became defensive when asked about her decision to be a concentration camp guard. She replied,

What do you mean, made a mistake? No... I'm not quite sure I should answer that. Did I make a mistake? No. The mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go to it, otherwise I would have been put into it myself. That was my mistake.