Herta Bothe Lange (born January 8, 1921 in Teterow, Mecklenburg,Germany, was an infamous female nazi concentration camp guard. She was imprisoned for war crimes and was released in 1951.

Early Life

In 1938 at age 17, Herta helped her father in his small Teterow wood shop, then she temporarily worked in a factory and then as a nurse in the Reichs hospital industry. In 1939 Herta was a member of the "BDM" and excelled in sports among her BDM counterparts. Then in September 1942, Herta was conscripted as a camp guard at Ravensbruck. The former nurse took a four week training course, and was then sent as an Aufseherin to the Stutthof camp near Danzig (Gdansk). She stayed in Stutthof, until she was sent by Oberaufseherin Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg Ost (Broming East) subcamp in July 1944. On January 21, 1945, Herta accompanied a death march of women prisoners from central Poland, to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp near Celle. While on the death march enroute to Bergen-Belsen, she and the prisoners made a temporary stay-over at Auschwitz camp until later moving on to Belsen. She and the prisoners arrived at Belsen camp between February 20-26, 1945.

At the Bergen-Belsen Camp

Once in the camp, Herta supervised a female wood brigade with 60 women under her control. The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British forces, and Herta was the tallest SS women arrested. She stood out from the other Aufseherinnen because she was one of only a few other SS woman not wearing the black Nazi jack-boots, just regular civilian shoes. During the liberation, the British forced her to dump corpses of the dead prisoners into mass graves dug adjacent to the main camp. She later recalled in an interview some 60 years later that after carrying the corpses during those liberation days, that they were not allowed to wear gloves and she was terrified of contracting typhus from the dead, rotting prisoners. She said that when she tried to lift the dead bodies, they were so rotten, that the arms and legs would just tear away from the rest of the body. She also recalled that the weight of the emaciated bodies was still heavy enough to cause her considerable back pain for quite awhile after the mass burials were complete. Herta was then arrested and brought to a jail at Celle. Months after the liberation, the Belsen Trial began, and Herta was found to be a ruthless overseer. She was sentenced to ten years in prison at the Belsen Trial of 1945 for using a pistol on prisoners, as well as her overall abuse and sadism. She was prematurely released from prison on December 22, 1951 as an act of leniency by the British government. After the war she married and became "Lange".

Later Life

She is still alive today (2005) at the age of 84, residing in a modest community in Northeastern Germany. During her rare 2000 interview, Herta became defensive in regard to the question posed to her about her mistake of deciding 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". 84 year old Herta Bothe Lange, and her life story have been exstensively researched, studied and compiled by Chris Keyser, an avid Holocaust and Aufseherinnen researcher. Chris Keyser has published public information on the world wide web concerning Herta Bothe and her life as a former Aufseherin in the Nazi concentration camp system during the Holocaust. He was recently able to obtain Herta Bothes` private 53 page interview transcript from the leading German film company that conducted her rare 2000 taping for their 6 part documentary entitled "Hitlers Holocaust". Chris Keyser is known to be the leading authority on the former female Nazi Aufseherin Herta Bothe Lange, and the details of her life.