December 22, 1947, Krakow, Poland. The former staff of Auschwitz - the deadliest German Nazi
concentration camp – hears their sentences read. After a month of gruesome testimonies, it is
revealed that the many SS officers were involved in the acts of inhumane torture and the mass
murder of prisoners often for pleasure, and that their cruelty went far beyond what their superiors
ordered them to do. One of the perpetrators of this criminal Nazi regime is August Bogusch.
August Bogusch was born on the 5th of August 1890 in Lubliniec, then part of the German
Empire. He was a clerk by profession and in June 1921 he married Eugenie Mandel.
In October 1932 Bogusch joined the Nazi Party and in April 1933 he joined the SS.
The SS – Schutzstaffel or Protection Squads - was originally established in April 1925 to protect
Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders and speakers and provide security for political meetings. SS
members were subject to strict military discipline and swore an oath of complete loyalty to Hitler
and those appointed by him. Afterward in January 1929 Heinrich Himmler became the head of the SS
and the organization greatly expanded in size and strength. By the time Hitler came
into power in 1933, Himmler had made the SS the dominant organization within the Reich.
From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler entrusted the SS first and foremost
with the removal and eventual murder of political and so-called racial enemies
of the regime. The SS became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany and
was staffed by men who perceived themselves as the “racial elite” of the Nazi future.
From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question which
then culminated in 1941, when the leadership planned, coordinated and directed the
so-called Final Solution. This “solution” was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.;
also known as the Holocaust. SS officers were directly responsible for the management of
concentration camps, where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
In one such camp – Buchenwald – August Bogusch arrived in
August 1939, one month before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Established in July 1937, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps
established within the German borders. The camp played an important role in the
aftermath of Kristallnacht, which occurred on the 9th – 10th of November 1938, when the Nazi
leaders unleashed a series of coordinated violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and
recently incorporated territories. The Nazi SA and German civilians not only ransacked Jewish homes,
businesses, synagogues, hospitals, and schools but the German SS and police sent almost
30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps. 10,000 of them were sent to Buchenwald where
upon arrival, camp authorities subjected them to extraordinarily cruel treatment.
Over 250 of these prisoners died as a result of the injuries incurred
during their arrest or from their initial mistreatment at the camp.
Prisoners lived in the Buchenwald main camp which was surrounded by an electrified
barbed-wire fence, watchtowers, and a chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns.
At the entrance to the main camp, there was a notorious punishment block, known as the Bunker,
where prisoners who violated the camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death.
In addition to the punishment block, the main camp included 33 wooden barracks,
disinfection buildings, a brothel, and a crematorium.
Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners, people who had been arrested
for some form of political opposition to the Nazi regime. One such prisoner was
Ernst Thälmann. Before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Thälmann had been the chairman of the
Communist Party of Germany. However, in 1933, he was arrested by the Nazi regime and in August
1944, the SS staff murdered Thälmann in Buchenwald after holding him there for several years.
In addition to political prisoners and Jews, Buchenwald prisoners also included repeat
offenders, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma and German military deserters.
August Bogusch left Buchenwald in January 1941, shortly before a number of physicians
and scientists began to carry out a program of medical experimentation on the camp’s prisoners.
On the 27th the same month, he arrived in Auschwitz, which was located in German
occupied Poland, where he first served as a guard. Bogusch became known for his incredible hatred
towards the Polish prisoners whom he used to call such names as Polish swine and bandits.
Among the Auschwitz prisoners, whom he would beat for the smallest violations of the rules,
he had a reputation of a stupid, rapacious and sneaky man. He blackmailed the inmates,
demanding things and services that he had no right to, and if a prisoner refused or
there was any delay, Bogusch reported the prisoner, which entailed severe punishment
He was infamous for skillfully using his whip to make the inmates suffer as much as possible.
On a few occasions, he would place the prisoners over a special construction called the “goat.”
and punish them with 25 lashes with a whip. While the prisoners were beaten, they had to
count out the blows in German, and if they made a mistake, the counting and beating began again.
When he finished, an inmate had to stand up and say thank you in German. Bogusch would
flog the prisoners with a smile on his face and his blows were especially strong and painful.
Sometimes Bogusch did not administer the punishment himself but would send inmates
to a notorious penal company to which the prisoners were assigned for various reasons,
including escape attempts, contact with civilians or the illegal possession of
food money and additional clothing. Assignment to the penal company, situated in infamous Block
11 which was led by sadistic Otto Moll, lasted from one month to one year and the prisoners
were not only completely isolated but had to perform the hardest labor and were continually
beaten by the SS men and prisoner functionaries. On one occasion Bogusch pulled a female Polish
prisoner by the collar and took her to the panel company where she received a
punishment of 25 lashes with a whip. After the war the prisoner testified that the reason for
the punishment was that she had accepted the food from people when working outside the camp.
Another of Bogush’s specialties was hitting the prisoners in the face and kicking them.
Once, a Jew was hanged in the camp for an escape attempt. After the execution,
Bogusch terrorized the other prisoners, calling one of them over to the gallows
and threatening to hang him, too. When the prisoner resisted, Bogusch hit him in the face.
At Auschwitz he also worked as a block leader. Bogusch watched the prisoners all the time,
checking to see if they were working hard enough and would constantly push them to work even
harder. He did not allow any of them to go to the toilet, nor did he allow any consumption of even a
scant amount of bread during working time, stating that they could do so after finishing work.
Bogusch also took part in selections on the rail ramp and actively participated in taking
prisoners – especially Jews and those who were sick - to the gas chambers. During these actions,
especially when unloading transports and loading victims on trucks to be murdered,
Bogusch was extremely brutal and was seen beating and kicking them.
During the German occupation of Poland, the London radio announced that Bogusch
had already been sentenced to death by the Polish underground.
In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz
concentration camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.
SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from the the Auschwitz camp system. Prisoners
suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure during these death marches.
On the 21st of January 1945, August Bogusch joined the escort of such a death march and along with
other SS guards drove the prisoners to Wodzisław, which was located 70 km away from Auschwitz. On
the way, he beat the prisoners and ordered the SS men to shoot on the spot those inmates who,
due to exhaustion, could not march any further. Out of the 300 prisoners who
left Auschwitz on this particular death march, 100 were shot along the way.
Bogusch was then sent to Mysen concentration camp near Oslo in German occupied Norway.
Soon after in February 1945, he was transferred again to the Buchenwald camp,
and finally to Gusen, which was a sub-camp of Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
Established in May 1940, the Gusen site had attracted the SS because of
its proximity to the stone quarries. Gusen retained its autonomous status
until early 1944. It had its own numbering system, death registry,
SS guard battalion, and a postal administration. Living and working conditions in Gusen, as in
Mauthausen, were harsh, which led to the death by murder, mistreatment, starvation, exposure,
and disease of more than half of the prisoners. In December 1940, the SS had already ordered
construction of a crematorium inside Gusen to handle the disposal of the bodies of the dead.
While initially, the SS deployed prisoners in construction of the camp and in the Gusen
and Kastenhof stone quarries, during 1943, the SS deployed Gusen prisoners increasingly in armament
production. By the end of 1944, some 6,000 prisoners worked in 18 factory halls in Gusen
producing rifles, machine pistols and aircraft motors. The stress on armaments production
brought some benefits to the prisoners in 1943 and 1944. The SS authorities increased rations,
allowed packages with food and medicine to come in from the outside, and issued worker vouchers
for especially productive workers. In 1944, with the danger from Allied bombing increasing,
the Gusen camp authorities deployed thousands of prisoners to build the underground tunnels
which housed the armaments production sites. Like other concentration camps in the interior
of the German Reich, Gusen was the destination for thousands of concentration camp prisoners
in 1945. In January and February 1945, the SS forcibly evacuated thousands of prisoners
to Gusen from Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Sachsenhausen. Most of the new arrivals were Jews.
In February 1945, shortly before August Bogusch arrived in the camp,
Gusen reached its peak capacity of just over 26,000 prisoners.
More than 10,000 prisoners died in Gusen between January and May 1945, including 4,500 prisoners
who were shipped back to Mauthausen to die. During the month of April, Kapos,
acting on the orders of the SS, beat several hundred prisoners to death.
At the end of that month, in one of the last gassing operations in the Third Reich, the SS
murdered 650 ill prisoners with poison gas in a barrack. In early May 1945, some in the SS and
in the Upper Austrian Nazi Party leadership toyed with the idea of forcing the surviving
prisoners into the underground tunnels dug for the armaments industry and caving the tunnels
in with explosives. However, neither the SS nor the Nazi Party zealots carried out these plans.
Gusen concentration camp was liberated by the US soldiers on the 5th of May 1945. They found some
20,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. In the confusion during the liberation,
prisoners, enraged by the killings perpetrated by the Kapos and barrack elders the previous month,
killed a number of prisoners who had served as Kapos, room elders or other
types of auxiliary service to the SS staff. Over the course of its existence, some
35,000 of a total of over 60,000 registered prisoners were killed in Gusen.
After the end of the war, August Bogusch was finally to face justice and pay for his crimes.
He was captured by the Allies and handed over to the Polish authorities. Bogusch was
tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began in November 1947 and lasted one month.
On the 22nd of December 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced
Bogusch to death by hanging. He was 57 years old when he
was executed on the 28th of January 1948. There were no tears shed for August Bogusch
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