Bothmann was born in
Lohe-Rickelshof village in the
Dithmarschen district of
Holstein (northern Germany) in November 1911. He joined the paramilitary
Hitler Youth (
Hitlerjugend, HJ) in 1932. Soon, he got a full-time job with the
Gestapo office
Stapoleitstelle Berlin, and in 1937 became a
Kriminalkommissar there. He was 27 years old at the time of the German
invasion of Poland. . This particular van has not been modified. During the summer of 1942, after replacing
Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange at Chełmno, Hans Bothmann made substantial changes to the camp's killing methods. These alterations were prompted by two incidents in March and April of that year. First, one of the
gas vans broke down on the highway while conveying living victims, and exploded. The explosion blew off the locked back door, badly burning the victims inside. Bothmann's modifications to the execution methods included adding poison to the gasoline used (there is evidence that some red powder and a fluid were delivered from Germany by Maks Sado freight company) in order to kill the prisoners more quickly. Another major change was to murder prisoners in parked vans instead of en route to the forest cremation area. The
Chełmno death factory, which was responsible for the murder of at least 180,000 Jews before the war's end (see
Chełmno Trials for supplementary data), operated under Bothmann originally between the summer of 1942 and March 1943. With almost all Jews of the
Wartheland District already murdered, the camp was closed in March 1943. Bothmann was sent to Yugoslavia, because the
Łódź Ghetto continued to take in prisoners not only from
occupied Poland but also from Germany, Bohemia, Moravia and other places. A total of 70,000 Jews were still there. In this final phase of the camp operation, Bothmann supervised the murder of some 25,000 victims before finally, in mid-July 1944, the SS and police began deporting the remaining inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto to
Auschwitz-Birkenau. In September 1944, the SS brought in new
Commando 1005 to exhume and cremate any remaining evidence of genocide. Bothmann took part in the shooting of the last Jewish workers. He fled the forest camp just before the arrival of the Soviet Army. Bothmann also served in the 7th SS-Division Prinz Eugen. His final assignment was in
Flensburg with
SiPo and the Border Police before the war's end. ==Suicide==