Wilhelm Boger

Wilhelm Friedrich Boger
File:Wilhlem Boger RhyzMarananPix.jpg Official portrait, as an Oberscharführer
Personal details
Born	(1906-12-19)19 December 1906 Zuffenhausen, Germany
Died	3 April 1977(1977-04-03) (aged 70) Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany
Military service
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Branch/service	Schutzstaffel
Rank	SS-Untersturmführer

Wilhelm Friedrich Boger (December 19, 1906 Zuffenhausen – April 3, 1977 Bietigheim-Bissingen) known as “The Tiger of Auschwitz” was a German police commissioner and concentration camp overseer. He was infamous for his appalling crimes at Auschwitz, together with his Austrian superior officer, the Gestapo chief Maximilian Grabner.

Early life

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Boger joined the HJ (Hitler youth) in his teens. From school, in 1925 he took an office job in Stuttgart and joined the Nazi Party in 1929. He was admitted to the Auxiliary Police at Friedrichschafen after losing his job in 1932. From 1936–37, he attended the police training school and was appointed Police Commissioner after he took a police examination in 1937.

World War II

At the outbreak of the Second World War he was transferred to the state police office at Zichenau. He was placed in charge of setting up and supervising the border police station in Ostrolenka three weeks later. In 1940, he joined the 2nd SS and Police Engineer reserve unit based in Dresden, from where he was dispatched to the front and subsequently wounded in 1942. Nine months later, he was transferred to Auschwitz, serving as an Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) in the Auschwitz political department. The Political Department was the representative of the RSHA in the camp and its chief responsibilities were to keep files on individual prisoners, the reception of prisoners, maintaining the security of the camp, combating internal resistance and conducting interrogations.

Auschwitz

Wilhelm Boger invented the "Boger swing”, an instrument of torture: "it was a meter-long iron bar suspended by chains hung from the ceiling", said Frau Braun. We could never have imagined what it was for until she described it, in a monotone spoken as by rote, its details recalled and rehearsed repeatedly during her months bearing witness in Frankfurt.

" A prisoner would be brought in for “questioning,” stripped naked and bent over the bar, wrists manacled to ankles. A guard at one side would shove him—or her—off across the chamber in a long, slow arc, while Boger would ask “questions,” at first quietly, then barking them out, and at the last bellowing. At each return, another guard armed with a crowbar would smash the victim across the buttocks. As the swinging went on and on, and the wailing victim fainted, was revived only to faint howling again, the blows continued—until only a mass of bleeding pulp hung before their eyes. Most perished from the ordeal; some sooner, some later; in the end a sack of [sic] bones and flayed flesh and fat was swept along the shambles of that concrete floor to be dragged away".

Post War

His atrocious crimes in the Political Department lasted until the liberation of Auschwitz, in January 1945. Thereafter on the run for five months, he was eventually detained in 1946 and should have been extradited to Poland for trial, but he managed to escape later that same year. In 1948, he was living in Crailsheim and two years later, he had a job at an airplane factory in Stuttgart.

Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials

In 1959 he was arrested again and this time was charged for the war crimes he committed at Auschwitz. On August 20, 1965 he became part of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials by the Landgericht Frankfurt am Main Community for aiding and abetting the murder of Jews. After a series of eyewitness' testimonies he was finally sentenced to life imprisonment.

Death

He died in the prison at Bietigheim-Bissingen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany on April 3, 1977, 19 years after his arrest and trial.