Ghetto Litzmannstadt
The Chełmno death factory, credited with 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 "processed", the camp was closed in March 1943. Bothmann was sent to Yugoslavia, but a year later he was summoned back to Poznań in order to supervise the renewed killing operations at Chełmno, 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.