Herta Bothe
- Female Nazi Guard at Stutthof & Bergen Belsen Concentration Camps - World War 2

21 March 2022

Category: Female Nazi Guards

Herta Bothe was born on January 3, 1921 in Germany. In October 1942 she became a guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp where she was also trained and then she was placed to Stutthof concentration camp where she stood until the end of July 1944. Bothe’s exceptional cruelty and brutality earned her a nickname "Sadist of Stutthof". She was responsible for a troop of wood commando consisting of 60 Russian female prisoners cutting wood into smaller parts. In July 1944 she left Stutthof and moved to Bromberg concentration camp. In January 1945 the camp was evacuated and for 4 weeks they marched to Oranienburg and from there to Bergen- Belsen concentration camp where there arrived in late February, 1945.

The Belsen Trial

In Belsen, she became even more sadistic and beat poor female prisoners regularly and hard. After Bergen Belsen’s liberation, Bothe was captured with her fellow criminal colleagues by the British forces and she was forced to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves. At the Belsen Trial Herta Bothe refused to confess to any of the charges brought against her and when asked about her cruelty, she only admitted to having slapped prisoners’ faces with her hand whey they did not obey or stole something. Herta Bothe was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Unlike Johanna Bormann or Elisabeth Volkenrath, she avoided death sentence and, at the end, spent only a few years in prison until she was released in December, 1951. She married, changed her name to Herta Lange and lived in Germany as a free woman. Hertha Bothe died in March 2000 at the at of 79. There were no tears shed for Herta Bothe.

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