Rögner, Adolf

Adolf Rögner was an incorrigible, pathological liar with multiple convictions for swindling, forgery and perjury, both before and after the war. Because of his status as “incorrigible,” he spent time as a criminal at the Auschwitz Camp, where he was deployed as an inmate electrician. After the war, he was convicted again for similar offenses. While in prison, he stayed in contact with a former co-inmate of his, Hermann Langbein, head of the International Auschwitz Committee. Rögner hoarded publications and unpublished documents on all matters concerning Auschwitz and other wartime camps, and from his prison cell, he started pressing hundreds of criminal charges against a long list of former members of the Auschwitz Camp’s staff. On inquiry by the Ministry of Justice of the German State Baden-Württemberg as to what was going on, the public prosecutor in charge of handling Rögner’s case wrote that Rögner’s criminal record showed

“that as prosecution witness in trials against concentration camp personnel, Rögner has obviously lied for reasons of hatred and revenge.

Rögner was therefore sentenced to a prison term of 3 years and 6 months for false accusations, false testimonies while not under oath, and perjury. […] In addition, Rögner’s right to testify as a witness or expert in a trial has been revoked permanently.”

The prosecutor described Rögner as a “vindictive psychopath” and a “self-contradicting pathological professional criminal,” while Rögner described himself as a staunch communist who planned to move to Krakow in communist Poland, then the seat of the International Auschwitz Committee. He prided himself to have been instrumental in getting “many a Nazi” executed after the war with his testimonies, and that he had succeeded in starting the investigations which eventually led to the infamous Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial. Once Langbein found out about the investigation triggered by Rögner, he jumped on the bandwagon and offered his committee’s assistance. Rögner was also the first witness testifying during that trial, thus setting the standards for this travesty of justice.

Here is a brief list of absurdities extracted from Rögner’s demented claims:

• He made concrete accusations against 1,400 to 1,600 people, approximately 160 of whom were allegedly known to him by name. Almost all of them were probably taken from books and documents he had hoarded, which underscores Rögner’s real career: a professional (dis)informer and perjuring false witness.
• Rögner claimed to have hidden behind a tree at the Auschwitz railway ramp, from where he claims to have seen how Wilhelm Boger, an investigator at the Auschwitz Camp’s internal Gestapo unit, beat a girl unconscious, ripped her clothes off, then “drew his pistol and shot the girl once each in the left and right breast. Then he stuck the pistol barrel in the girl’s genitals and fired one more shot.” Apart from no other witness confirming this, the problem is that there were no trees anywhere near that ramp.
• Rögner accused another member of the camp gestapo, Walter Quakernack, to have tortured “inmates by crucifixion, stabbing the testicles with steel needles, and burning tampons in the vagina.” This one and the previous example are nothing more than made-up Holocaust pornography invented by a sexually deprived, sick and perverted mind.
• Rögner claimed to have witnessed 30 other individual murders, all committed by Boger, in similar or even more sadistic ways. He also claimed to have witnessed acts of torture committed by Boger “without being noticed, through keyholes or windows.” Peeping Tom Rögner never got caught spying around like this, of course.
• He alleged that the smallest children of arriving prisoners were thrown on a big pile, from where they were tossed in a truck, and then thrown alive into roaring cremation furnaces. Usually, however, this cliché involves throwing them into flaming pits of fire, not into furnaces.
• He stated that arriving children became so desperate on the ramp because of the brutality of the SS people that they hugged the legs of the SS men – and were then shot by them. That’s not how children react to brutal people. Like everyone else, they try to get away from them and seek shelter with anyone else.

Rögner prided himself for having been a member of the camp’s inmate resistance, together with other personalities such as Hermann Langbein and Bruno Baum, who even had the support of some SS men, such as Richard Böck. Studying these men’s entries gives an idea what their main activity consisted of: spreading atrocity propaganda about what was going on at Auschwitz. But Rögner clearly went over the top with his frenzy. However, the investigating prosecutor’s qualms in pursuing this case were brushed aside by orders from the highest political levels of West Germany, who saw themselves under massive international pressure – among them many Jewish organizations – to stage a show trial on Auschwitz.

(For more details, see Rudolf 2003a–c; 2004c, p. 328; 2023, pp. 383-386, 423, 473.)