Boger, Wilhelm

Wilhelm Boger (19 Dec. 1906 – 3 April 1977), SS Oberscharführer, was employed at the Political Department of the Auschwitz Camp, where he investigated inmate escapes and theft, among other things. He was arrested on 19 June 1945, in Ludwigsburg, Germany, by U.S. service units. While in U.S. custody, he was softened up, probably with the usual torture, to such a degree that 16 days later, on July 19, he signed an utterly absurd, incoherent confession, in which he confirmed the Allied mass-murder propaganda about Auschwitz, down to the claim of four million victims. Such nonsense would never have come from an SS man voluntarily.

Boger was one of the main targets of convicted fraudster, serial liar and perjurer Adolf Rögner, who submitted an absurdly long list of outrageous accusations against Boger when trying to initiate West Germany’s investigations into wartime-events at Auschwitz. Boger’s own testimony of early 1959 was rather reasonable, except when it came to homicidal gassings, the existence of which he confirmed, yet claimed to have no personal knowledge at all. Considering that the Political Department was in charge of the crematoria that are said to have housed these gas chambers, this denial appears as a mere attempt to deny personal responsibility while confirming that which, for the judiciary, was irreversibly set in stone and which, after 15 years of propaganda, Boger may have come to believe himself.

Maryla Rosenthal, a Jewess, was one of Boger’s secretaries in Auschwitz. As to her own statements, she refused to participate in the camp’s rumor mill, and hence tried to rely only on what she had experienced herself. She was one of the first inmates interrogated in this context by West-German authorities in February of 1959, and had had no prior contact with other inmates or inmate organizations; thus she was largely uninfluenced. As such, she was unable to confirm either Rögner’s raging accusations against her former boss, or the general allegations of cruelties in Auschwitz:

Boger was polite to me, and I cannot complain about him with regard to my person. He even went so far as passing on to me parts of his food in his dishes on a regular basis, with the pretense that I should clean them. Apart from this, he organized clothes for me from the Birkenau camp. […] He was also very polite to the other Jewish female prisoners, who worked in the Political Department, and we Jewesses liked him very much. I also remember that Boger had no distinct hatred against Jews. […] To summarize it, I really cannot say anything bad about Boger in regard to my person and to the other female inmates of the Political Department.

No one was inclined to believe Mrs. Rosenthal, though. (See Rudolf 2004b, c; 2023, pp. 368f., 384-386, 392-394)