Margarete Bothe

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Burial site in Merseburg

Margarete Bothe , (born July 22, 1914 in Merseburg , † April 12, 1945 in Leipzig - Lindenthal ), was a German elementary school teacher, historian and victim of the Nazi regime .

Life

Bothe was born as the daughter of the General Director and former Regional Councilor Gustav Bothe . After graduating from high school in Halle in 1936, she initially trained as a primary school teacher in Braunschweig and then studied history, German and geography in Heidelberg from 1938 and after the university closed because of the outbreak of war in Leipzig .

Through her acquaintance with Renate Drucker and Marianne Goerdeler , in whose parents' house she was occasionally a guest, through her friendship with Käte Lekebusch (later Gadamer), Elisabeth Grosch , Karl-Erich Born and others. a. she became a member of a loose circle of dissident students. In the summer of 1944 , she did her doctorate under Otto Vossler on The Relationship between Morality and Politics in Kant, Herder, Fichte and Hegel , a work on the history of ideas without direct reference to time, but with remarkably outdated and unheroic quotations from Kant and Herder on the subject of war. In November 1944 she passed the state examination for the higher teaching post.

Grave slab with addition 2020

After denunciation by a fellow student , she was arrested on December 1, 1944 for eavesdropping on enemy broadcasters , her former landlord, the regime opponent Alfred Menzel and his wife, a few days later. The sometimes dramatic hearing before the Special Court I in Leipzig ended on February 9, 1945 with an acquittal. The Gestapo continued to keep her in custody because she had not reported her former landlord and also because of her visits to the Goerdeler house and her friendship with Käte Lekebusch, who had to answer to the People's Court for statements hostile to the regime . At times, Bothe shared her cell with Hertha Goldmann, the wife of the publisher Wilhelm Goldmann , with whom she became close friends. An introduction to a concentration camp was obviously planned, but could no longer be realized. On April 12, Margarete Bothe was shot and buried with 51 other Gestapo prisoners in Leipzig-Lindenthal . After the exhumation on May 2nd, her friend Elisabeth Grosch took care of the cremation and the transfer of the urn to Merseburg, where she was buried on February 5th, 1946 between the graves of her grandparents Bithorn in the St. Maximi city cemetery.

On April 12, 2020, the 75th anniversary of M. Bothe's death, at the suggestion of the Merseburg-Saalekreis eV history workshop, the inscription on the grave slab was supplemented by: "I don't despair!" . The sentence comes from one of her last letters from the Gestapo prison.

literature

  • Wulf Bothe: I don't despair! in “Merseburg once and now” issue 13/2005 p. 30 ff.
  • Wulf Bothe: Margarete Bothe (1914-1945) in “Sächsische Lebensbilder” Volume 6. Edited by Gerald Wiemers, Stuttgart 2009, pp. 45–95.
  • Wulf Bothe: Margarete Bothe (1914-1945) in "Leipziger Almanach 2013/2014" Stadtarchiv Leipzig (ed.) Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2016, pp. 319–386.

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Bothe, Margarete
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German elementary school teacher, historian and Nazi victim
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Merseburg
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 1945
Place of death Leipzig