Wilhelm Boger
Wilhelm Friedrich Boger (19 December 1906 - 3 April 1977) was a German police commissioner and overseer at the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust.
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Biography edit
Boger was born in Zuffenhausen, Germany, in 1906 and joined the Hitler Youth in his teens. After finishing high school, he joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and was a member of the General SS from 1930. After losing his job in 1932, Boger applied to join the political police. He trained from 1933 until 1937, when he passed his police force examination. He was appointed as a police commissioner despite having been taken into custody in 1936 for beating a suspect.
With the outbreak of World War II, Boger was placed in charge of supervising border police stations. He was later transferred to the front, but was wounded in action in 1942 and was transferred to serve in Auschwitz, one of the German death camps at which Jews and other undesirables were exterminated. Boger served as an Untersturmfuhrer in the Auschwitz political department under Gestapo chief Maximilian Grabner, specifically as the leader of the section responsible for interrogations.
Boger's main job was to torture those who were suspected of involvement in internal resistance. He devised the "Boger swing", an instrument of torture, to further his interrogations. His secretary described this as a metre-long iron bar hung from the ceiling of the interrogation room. Prisoners were forced to strip naked and bend over the bar, which was then swung back and forth by guards while Boger questioned the prisoner. At each return, one of Boger's men would hit the prisoner across the buttocks with a crowbar, until the victim was reduced to a mass of bleeding pulp. Most subjected to the Boger swing died from the beating. Boger continued his interrogations until Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.
Boger fled when Auschwitz was liberated and remained at large for five months before he was arrested. He would have been extradited to Poland to be charged at the Auschwitz Trial, but managed to escape from custody and worked as a farmhand. He was tracked down in 1949, but was cleared by a denazification court after an investigation into him was halted due to costs. Boger was later arrested again in 1959 on charges of murder and war crimes and remained in custody until 1965, when he was charged in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. He was convicted of five counts of murder and 109 counts of acting as an accessory to murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1977 after serving 19 years.