In 1906, Bohle moved to Cape Town, where his father was appointed to a professorship of electrical engineering, and attended a high school there.

Bohle was employed as branch manager and agent in the import-export business for several enterprises in the Rheinland from 1924 until 1930 and established and thereafter directed a large automotive firm in Hamburg from 1930 to June 1933.

The NSDAP/AO was founded on 1 May 1931 in Hamburg, and "Reich Organisation Leader" (German: Reichsorganisationsleiter) Gregor Strasser appointed Nieland as its chief.

Bohle was charged with the leadership of the NSDAP Department for Germans Abroad (Abteilung für Deutsche im Ausland) which from October 1933 reported to Deputy-Führer Rudolf Hess.

[4] The Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, whose knowledge of the world outside of Germany was very superficial and shallow, greatly valued the reports that Bohle sent him.

[6] From 12 November 1933 till the end of Nazi Germany in 1945, Bohle was a member of the Reichstag for electoral constituency 31 (Württemberg) and from December 1937 to May 1945 he was a State Secretary in the Reichsministry of Foreign Affairs.

"Bohle's acts and those of his department in persuading German business firms to discharge Jewish employees working for them abroad, while reprehensible from a moral standpoint, do not come within the scope of either count five of the indictment or of the crimes defined by the London Charter and Control Council Law No.

Before entering his guilty plea, Bohle read a formal statement: "I think it should be the solemn pledge and foremost duty of every German who held a leading position during the National Socialist regime, to do all in his power to remove from the name of Germany the blot which the deeds of criminal brains have cast upon it.

And I think – it is my firm conviction that the world will regain its belief in our national honesty only if we ourselves are honest and straightforward in our confessions and thereafter also in our will to make amends.

I think we leading men have this responsibility, not only to the victims of these crimes but just as much to the German people, as such, who, with or without our participation, were misled and misguided and are today, without any fault of their own, outlawed in the world.

Due to his cooperation and guilty plea, Bohle was an extremely unpopular inmate at Landsberg Prison, which the U.S. military was using to house Nazi war criminals.