Herta Bothe was a female guard who served at several concentration camps during the Nazi era. She became known by the nickname the "sadist of Stutthof." She is also noted as the only female guard to tell her story publicly.
Bothe served as a guard at Ravensbrück, Stutthof, and Bergen-Belsen. Her service placed her among the women who oversaw prisoners at some of the most notorious camps of the period.
After the war, she was convicted of crimes at the Belsen trial. She received a sentence of 10 years in prison.
She was released on 22 December 1951. The British government granted her release as an act of leniency.
Decades later, in an interview recorded in 1999, Bothe was asked whether she regretted having been a guard at a concentration camp. Her answer was blunt: "What do you mean I made a mistake? No."
She went on to explain her reasoning. According to Bothe, the mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but she had to go to it. Otherwise, she said, she would have been put into it herself.
She described that as her mistake. If she had refused the guard duty, she said, she would have been kept in the camp.
That explanation was one often given by several female ex-guards. It framed their service as a matter of survival rather than choice.