Wilhelm Boger

Wilhelm Friedrich Boger
Accessory to murder (1000 counts)
Trial	Frankfurt Auschwitz trials
Criminal penalty	Life imprisonment with hard labour
Military career
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel
Rank	SS-Hauptsturmführer

Wilhelm Friedrich Boger (19 December 1906 – 3 April 1977) known as "The Tiger of Auschwitz"

]

World War II

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At the beginning of the

SS-Hauptsturmführer

.

The "Boger swing"

Wilhelm Boger invented the "

Boger swing

", an instrument of torture. Reported after the war by his secretary, Frau Braun:

It was a meter-long iron bar suspended by chains hung from the ceiling ... 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.^[3]

Post-war

His crimes in the

“The 5‐year‐old child, clasping an apple in his hands, had jumped off a truck filled with other boys and girls en route to the gas chamber,” the witness said. “Boger grabbed the crying boy by his feet and hurled him against the nearest wall."[6]

The witness testified she had been forced to clean the wall, and that Boger munched the apple later while he interrogated another prisoner.^[6]

At the conclusion of the trial in August 1965, Boger was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for murder in at least 114 cases and an accessory to murder in at least 1000 cases.^[7] In his final statement to the court, Boger downplayed his personal guilt.^[8] He claimed that he did not beat prisoners to death and just carried out orders. Like the other defendants, he showed no regret.^[9]

Death and aftermath

On 3 April 1977 he died at the age of 70 in prison.^[10]

In 2011, Boger's granddaughter recounted that she only learned the truth about her grandfather when she was in the university, and that it took her several years of therapy to begin to cope with that. She said that she found it hard to come to terms with the fact that the man who had killed a little boy and eaten his apple had placed a photo of her as a little girl on the wall of his prison cell.^[10]

References