4. Herta Bothe
‘The Sadist Of Stutthoff’
She is famous for her defiant attitude when in an interview- taken sixty years after the war- she had said – “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.” You can see the video above.
A tall athletic built woman, Bothe served at the Stutthoff camp near Danzig. Comparatively her crime was not considered as brutal as those of her counterpart so her life was spared and she was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. In that same interview she had recalled with anger how the British troops had ordered the guard to bury the death bodies of the prisoners they had killed and that she was ‘terrified of contracting typhus because the guards were not allowed to wear gloves or masks.’ She described how the arms and legs of the decomposed bodies came off in her hands when she tried to pick them up, and how lifting the emaciated bodies caused her back pain.’ 90 years old Herta Bothe still lives.
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