1. Herta Bothe was a German concentration camp guard during World War II.
12 Facts About Herta Bothe
1. 2.
Herta Bothe was imprisoned for war crimes after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and was released early from prison on 22 December 1951.
3.
Herta Bothe was born on 8 January 1921 in Teterow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
4.
In 1938, at the age of seventeen, Bothe helped her father in his small Teterow wood shop, then worked temporarily in a factory, then as a hospital nurse.
5.
In 1939, Herta Bothe was a member of the Bund Deutscher Madel.
6.
In September 1942, Herta Bothe became the SS-Aufseherin camp guard at the Nazi German Ravensbruck concentration camp for women.
7.
On 21 January 1945, the 24-year-old Herta Bothe accompanied a death march of women prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle.
8.
Once in the camp Herta Bothe supervised a group of sixty women prisoners who were conscripted to a wood cutting brigade.
9.
Herta Bothe stood out from other Aufseherinnen because, while most of the SS women wore black jackboots, she was in ordinary civilian shoes.
10.
Herta Bothe recalled in an interview some sixty years later that, while carrying the corpses, they were not allowed to wear gloves, and she was terrified of contracting typhus.
11.
Herta Bothe said the dead bodies were so rotten that the arms and legs tore away when they were moved.
12.
Herta Bothe recalled the emaciated bodies were still heavy enough to cause her considerable back pain.