Who was Herta Bothe ?

Herta Bothe was born in Teterow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. In 1938, at age seventeen, Bothe helped her father in his small Teterow wood shop, then worked temporarily in a factory, then as a hospital nurse. In 1939, Bothe was a member of the League of german girls.

In September 1942, Bothe became the SS-Aufseherin camp guard at the Nazi German Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. The former nurse took a four-week training course and was sent as an overseer to the Stutthof camp near Danzig. There she became known as the "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her brutal beatings of prisoners

She was sentenced to ten years in prison for using a pistol on prisoners. Their was one Bergen-Belsen survivor claimed to have witnessed Bothe beat a Hungarian Jew named Éva to death with a wooden block while another teenager stated that he saw her shoot two prisoners for reasons he could not understand. Nevertheless, she was released early from prison on December 22, 1951 as an act of leniency by the British government.