Herta Bothe
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Herta Bothe Lange (born January 8, 1921 in Teterow, Mecklenburg,Germany was a Nazi concentration camp guard imprisoned for war crimes and later released.
Early life
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 Reichs hospital industry. In 1939 Bothe was a member of the BDM and excelled in sports. In September 1942 Bothe was conscripted as a camp guard at Ravensbruck. The former nurse took a four week training course and was sent as an Aufseherin to the Stutthof camp near Danzig (Gdansk). In July 1944 she was sent by Oberaufseherin Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg Ost (Broming East) subcamp. On January 21, 1945 Bothe accompanied a death march of women prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp near Celle. While enroute to Bergen-Belsen she and the prisoners stayed temporarily at Auschwitz, 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 by the British 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 jack-boots, she was in ordinary civilian shoes. The British 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. After the war she married and her name changed to Lange.
Later life
In 2005 she was 84 and residing in a modest community in northeastern Germany. During a rare interview in 2000 Lange 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.