Hertha Bothe

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Hertha Bothe in August 1945

Hertha Bothe (born January 3, 1921 in Teterow ; † March 16, 2000 ) was a German concentration camp guard in various concentration camps .

biography

Bothe was a housewife and an auxiliary nurse in a hospital from August 1940 to September 1942. In mid-October 1942, Bothe was made a duty as a guard in concentration camps and, according to her own statements, completed a two-week qualifying course in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . She then worked as a guard in the Stutthof concentration camp from November 1942 and was transferred from there in July 1944 to one of the Stutthof external labor camps in Bromberg . In the course of the evacuation of these camps, Bothe accompanied an evacuation march with Hungarian Jewish women, with which she reached Oranienburg after about four weeks and arrived in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp between February 20 and 26, 1945 . After various short-term jobs as an overseer, she headed the forest command.

After the end of the war

SS entourage in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after liberation on April 19, 1945, including Hildegard Kanbach (1st from left), Irene Haschke (center, 3rd from right), Elisabeth Volkenrath (2nd from right partially covered), Hertha Bothe (1st from right) on April 19, 1945 on the way to the burial of the victims.

On April 15, 1945, the 11th Panzer Division of the British Army occupied the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The neutralized area was handed over. Colonel Taylor, the Commander of the British 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, was given the post of camp commandant. In the camp they found more than 60,000 emaciated and sick prisoners and more than 13,000 dead. The SS camp personnel were obliged to remove all corpses and bury them in mass graves .

Thereafter, Bothe was arrested and interrogated by British military personnel. In the Bergen-Belsen trial (September 17 to November 17, 1945) she was charged with the crimes she committed in Bergen-Belsen, the indictment being based on testimony. Bothe admitted to slapping prisoners in the face, but only with his hand. Bothe, who pleaded “not guilty”, was found guilty on November 17, 1945 and sentenced to ten years in prison. While in custody, she became friends with Savitri Devi . She was released early from the Werl correctional facility on December 21, 1951 . After his release from prison, Bothe married and took the name Lange.

In one of her rare interviews, broadcast in 2009, Hertha Bothe commented on the question of whether she had made a mistake through her complicity as follows:

"Why did you make a mistake? Nope ... I don't know how to answer that. Did I make a mistake? ... Nope ... the mistake is that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go in, otherwise I would have come in myself. That was my mistake - in one way. "

literature

  • United Nations War Crimes Commission (Ed.): Law reports of trials of war criminals, selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. 3 volumes, William S. Hein Publishing, Buffalo (New York) 1997, ISBN 1-57588-403-8 (reprint of the original edition from 1947–1949).
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism , NYU Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-8147-3111-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Overseer Herta Bothe / Lange. Retrieved December 4, 2018 .
  2. ↑ [Derrick Sington: The gates open. LIT Verlab, Dr. W. Hopf Berlin. ISBN 978–3–88660–622–1]
  3. ↑ "The 11th Panzer Division (Great Britain)", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  4. ↑ Friederike Dreykluft: Holocaust - TV documentary series, MPR film and television production, Germany of 2004.
personal data
SURNAME Bothe, Hertha
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bothe, Herta; Lange, Hertha (married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German concentration camp guard in concentration camps
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Teterow
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 2000