Wilhelm Boger

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Wilhelm Friedrich Boger (between 1933 and 1945)

Wilhelm Friedrich Boger (born  December 19, 1906 in Zuffenhausen ; †  April 3, 1977 in Bietigheim-Bissingen ) was a German SS Oberscharführer and war criminal . He was an employee of the Political Department for Escape, Theft and Search in Auschwitz concentration camp , where he introduced a torture method known as the Bogerschaukel .

Life

Boger, whose father was a businessman, came from a middle-class background. For nine years he attended Bürgererschule II (today Heusteigschule ) in the south of Stuttgart , which he graduated from in 1922 with secondary school leaving certificate. He completed his commercial training at Rheinstahl . From 1925 he worked as an employee of the German National Handicrafts Association in the Stuttgart Gau office.

At the age of 16, Boger was a member of the Nazi youth, the predecessor organization of the Hitler Youth . In addition, he was active in several national organizations, such as the Artamanenbund . At the age of 18 he left the Protestant Church and declared himself “a believer in God”. In 1929 he returned to Stuttgart and joined the NSDAP ( membership number 153.652) and SA . In 1930 Boger switched from the SA to the SS (SS No. 2,779). After changing employment relationships as a commercial clerk several times, he became unemployed in March 1932. From 1933 he lived in Friedrichshafen , where he finally entered service at the local branch of the Württemberg Political Police as a lateral entrant from the SS without any notable police qualifications. After attending the police college, he was promoted to the position of detective inspector.

After the beginning of the Second World War he was ordered to the state police station in Zichenau . After three weeks in 1939, he took over the Ostrolenka border police station . There he was nicknamed "The Hangman of Ostrolenka". He worked there until May 1940, after which he was transferred to the Hohensalza state police station.

Boger had been married since the early 1930s; from this marriage he had three children, two of whom died early. However, he also had extramarital relationships. In the summer of 1940, his suspension from the police department, the senior moderate degradation and a brief imprisonment for carried aid and coercion to abortion . His marriage subsequently ended in divorce. Shortly thereafter, he remarried a woman with whom he already had an illegitimate daughter. Two more daughters followed from this marriage. After the conviction of aiding abortion by the SS and Police Court in Berlin, he was taken to the Gestapo prison at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 in Berlin , where he remained imprisoned until December 19, 1940. After a short military training, this conviction resulted in him being transferred to an SS police battalion on probation. In March 1942 Boger was wounded on the Eastern Front near Leningrad .

Activity in concentration camps

After his probation expired and a stay in the hospital, Boger was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp at the beginning of December 1942 with the rank of SS Oberscharführer . After a brief assignment in the SS guard company in the political department, his area of ​​responsibility included the escape, theft and search department . His family also lived in the storage area.

He had people shot at random and developed brutal interrogation methods, including the Boger swing , consisting of two vertical posts in which the inmates were hung upside down from a pole with the back of their knees, with their wrists tied to the ankles or the bar. This torture instrument, known as the Boger or parrot swing , was introduced by Boger in Auschwitz and called it himself a speaking machine . In this defenseless position, they were interrogated by Boger and others, mistreated with sticks and whips, some of them to the point of death, which earned him the name of the beast of Auschwitz . Former camp inmates later described the torture victims in the Auschwitz trial with the words: "He no longer looked like a person."

Shortly before the concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, Boger took part in the transport of secret files to Buchenwald . From February to April 1945 Boger was a member of the political department in the Mittelbau concentration camp and guarded a death march after the camp was cleared in April 1945 . At the end of April 1945 he was supposed to be on the front line with a combat group, which however disbanded.

After the end of the war

At the end of the war he went underground and hid until he was discovered by the American military police on June 19, 1945 in Ludwigsburg , where his parents lived, arrested and sent to a camp. While in custody in the Dachau internment camp , he willingly made statements about himself and his activities in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He evaded the ordered extradition to Poland on November 22, 1946 during an extradition transport to Poland by fleeing near Furth im Wald . Until mid-1949 he worked unrecognized as an agricultural laborer near Crailsheim . He was arrested shortly afterwards in Ravensburg because he had already committed bodily harm in office in 1936; shortly afterwards he was again at large, since the proceedings had been discontinued, and for the next few years lived with his family under his real name in Hemmingen near Leonberg .

He also survived denazification proceedings without damage. The tribunal in Stuttgart stated "[...] He does not make the impression of a raw, brutal person, rather that of a sensible, well-trained detective", and abandoned the proceedings at the expense of the government treasury. In September 1950 Boger found work as a warehouse manager at the engine and scooter manufacturer Heinkel in his birthplace, Zuffenhausen. He led a petty-bourgeois, rather withdrawn life and rose in the company to become a commercial clerk. When he talked about his activities in the Auschwitz camp, he replied to friends and neighbors that he was not to blame.

Auschwitz trial

On March 1, 1958, the Stuttgart public prosecutor received a letter from the former Auschwitz prisoner Adolf Rögner , who was charged with perjury among other things and was imprisoned in Bruchsal . In this letter Rögner incriminated Wilhelm Boger and other former members of the Auschwitz SS team. Because of his criminal background, Rögner was not questioned personally until May 6, 1958, and the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office therefore initially treated the complaint with caution. Rögner also incriminated Hans Stark , Pery Broad and Klaus Dylewski , who were later accused with Boger . Only after the International Auschwitz Committee under its President Hermann Langbein had exerted pressure on the public prosecutor in May 1958 and provided further witnesses, an arrest warrant was issued for Boger and other perpetrators. On October 8, 1958, Boger was arrested at his workplace and questioned at the Stuttgart police headquarters. The other accused were not arrested until April 1959. In the subsequent investigations, which lasted until April 1963, the Hessian attorney general Fritz Bauer , himself a persecuted person under the Nazi regime, took over the lead. The public prosecutor's office produced a 700-sheet collection of evidence - 252 witnesses had been heard -; To this end, the investigators submitted 17 volumes with further documents, storage plans and photos. Murder charges were brought against 24 accused, and Wilhelm Boger was charged with participating in selections , clearing bunkers , shooting and killing prisoners during interrogations.

The proceedings against 22 accused were opened by the jury court in Frankfurt am Main in the 1st Auschwitz trial on December 20, 1963, chaired by Hans Hofmeyer, the district court director in Frankfurt's Römer . The defendants consistently denied any involvement in crimes at Auschwitz. Boger himself insulted and mocked onlookers and used the Hitler salute in the courtroom . Boger testified that during the National Socialist regime there was only one point of view for him to carry out the given orders of the superior without restriction. It was not until the 145th day of the trial that he made the only admission of his guilt:

“And after about two or three shootings, Grabner said : ' Quakernack , hand in your rifle, Oberscharführer Boger will continue shooting.' I shot two inmates as a result. Grabner then ordered another reliever [...] That was the only case where I was called in, where I carried out executions according to Grabner's orders. "

- Tobias Barth : "Don't cry, they just go for a swim"

The former camp inmate Dounia Zlata Wasserstrom, on the other hand, testified as a witness on April 23, 1964:

“In November 1944 a truck arrived with children on it. The truck stopped near the barrack. A young boy, aged four to five, jumped off the truck. He was holding an apple. I don't know where the children came from. In the door stood [en] [Wilhelm] Boger and [Hans] Draser. I myself stood at the window. The child was standing next to the truck with the apple. Boger went to the child, grabbed it by the feet and threw its head against the wall. He put the apple in his pocket. Then Draser came to me and ordered me to wipe 'that on the wall' off. I did that too. An hour later, Boger came and called me to translate. He ate the apple. I saw the whole thing with my own eyes. The child was dead. An SS man took the dead child away. "

On August 19, 1965, after 183 days of trial, the verdict in the criminal case against Mulka and others began. It lasted two days. Wilhelm Boger was convicted of murder 15 years, in addition to at least five cases and joint murder to life imprisonment and prison convicted. In addition, he lost the civil rights for life. He has not pleaded guilty to a single charge and died in custody in 1977. A request for clemency made by his wife was no longer processed.

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. Oświęcim 1998, ISBN 83-85047-35-2 .
  • Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .
  • Peter Weiss : The investigation . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1991, ISBN 3-518-10616-3 .
  • Hermann G. Abmayr (Ed.): Stuttgart Nazi perpetrators. From fellow travelers to mass murderers. Butterfly, Stuttgart, 2nd edition, 2009, ISBN 978-3-89657-136-6 . The chapter on Wilhelm Boger comes from Ursula Boger, a granddaughter.
  • Donald M. McKale: Nazis after Hitler: how perpetrators of the Holocaust cheated justice and truth. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md. 2012 ISBN 978-1-4422-1316-6 .
  • Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier (eds.): The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. Butterfly, Stuttgart 2013, 2nd edition ISBN 3-89657-145-1 .
  • Wolf-Ulrich Strittmatter: Friedrichshafen apprenticeship years of the mass murderer of Auschwitz. In: Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders. Volume 5. Nazi victims from the Lake Constance area. Kugelberg, Gerstetten 2016, ISBN 978-3-945893-04-3 , pp. 47-64.
  • Raphael Gross , Werner Renz (ed.): The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963–1965). Annotated source edition. Scientific series of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Volume 1. Campus, Frankfurt 2013, ISBN 978-3-593-39960-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Wilhelm Friedrich Boger: The Beast of Auschwitz. In : zeichen-der-erinnerung.org. Retrieved September 15, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 56.
  3. ^ Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier: The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern. P. 101f.
  4. ^ A b Fritz Bauer Institute: Wilhelm Boger. In: auschwitz-process-frankfurt.de. Retrieved September 15, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b c d The accused Wilhelm Boger . From the jury trial of the public prosecutor's office at the Frankfurt am Main regional court in the criminal case against Mulka and others of April 16, 1963. In: Raphael Gross, Werner Renz (ed.): Der Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963–1965). Annotated source edition , Scientific Series of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Volume 1, Frankfurt am Main / New York 2013, p. 316 f.
  6. ↑ a b c d e f g Michael Kienzle, Dirk Mende: Fritz Bauer - Wilhelm Boger. (pdf, 5.8 MB) In: Denkblatt series. Geißstrasse Sieben Foundation , Stuttgart, November 24, 2006, archived from the original on January 1, 2014 ; accessed on September 15, 2019 .
  7. ^ Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz. P. 433f.
  8. ↑ State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. P. 222.
  9. ↑ a b Werner Renz: Genocide as a criminal matter. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . August 18, 2000, accessed September 15, 2019 .
  10. ^ Defendant Wilhelm Friedrich Boger, 145th day of the hearing on March 25, 1965, 1. Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: Criminal case against Mulka et al. , 4 Ks 2/63, Regional Court Frankfurt am Main
  11. ↑ Tobias Barth: Audio book tip: "Don't cry, they just go for a swim". In: MDR Figaro . January 26, 2007, archived from the original on September 30, 2007 ; accessed on September 15, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Manuel Heßling: Apple. In: Revierflaneur. May 15, 2008, accessed August 29, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Boger, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boger, Wilhelm Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS Oberscharführer and Auschwitz criminal
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Zuffenhausen
DATE OF DEATH April 3, 1977
Place of death Bietigheim-Bissingen