The village is located on a spur of a Geest that runs through the middle of East Frisia.

The village appears under the names Buta-Ee ("outside the Ee") and Uthengrahove ("hove" indicates a court location) in documents from the period between 1250 and 1276.

The church has a detached bell tower and a borg from the fifteenth century that serves as a rectory.

Around 2,000 people were interned in the camp under inhumane conditions, mainly resistance fighters, forced laborers, and hostages from the Netherlands.

The camp inmates were put to work between October and December 1944 in the construction of the so-called Friesenwall, a defense line part of the Atlantic Wall that the Nazis built from the Dutch border to Denmark.