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 such officer is Ludwig Plagge.
Ludwig Plagge was born on the 13th of January 1910 in Landesbergen, then part of the German Empire.
He was a farmer by profession and as with millions of Germans in the 1930s, he believed that Hitler
and his Nazi party would create a strong Germany, fix the economy, and put people back to work.
Thus, in December 1931 he joined the Nazi Party and in 1934 he joined the SS.
His criminal career in concentration camps started in Esterwegen,
located near the German-Dutch border. Most of the inmates in Esterwegen were political prisoners,
many of them Communists. The most famous was Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist and political
activist who was sent to Esterwegen in 1933. For his work in exposing the clandestine German
re-armament, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. But after years of starvation, mistreatment
and torture in various Nazi concentration camps, Ossietzky died 3 years later in 1938 in Berlin.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
In November the same year, Ludwig Plagge was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
which was located north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and
Sinti people and, later, Soviet civilians. One of the camp’s most prominent prisoners
was Kurt Schuschnigg who had served as the chancellor of Austria from July 1934 until
the 11th of March 1938 when his efforts to keep Austria independent from Nazi Germany had failed
and he resigned. On the following day, when the German troops entered
Austria and were greeted by cheering Austrians with Nazi salutes and flags,
Schuschnigg was placed under house arrest. The annexation of the Federal State of Austria into
the German Reich became known as the Anschluss. Kurt Schuschnigg was liberated only in 1945 after
having spent the whole of the Second World War in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps.
In the end of June 1940 Ludwig Plagge left Sachsenhausen and belonged to
the first SS men who were sent to newly established Auschwitz concentration camp
located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Plagge
arrived here in July 1940 and became known as one of the most sadistic and cruel guards.
One prisoner who survived the Holocaust remembered how in July 1940 he had come to Auschwitz in a car
transporting over sixty inmates. Each of the prisoners was placed on a vaulting horse and
greeted with 25 beatings with sticks. 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. After
this procedure had finished, every inmate had to stand up and say thank you in German. To make the
prisoners suffer even more, the bullwhips used for the beating had been soaked in water. Plagge took
part in this flogging with a smile on his face and his blows were especially strong and painful.
At Auschwitz Ludwig Plagge became infamous for submitting prisoners
to punitive physical exercises which he called “ sport “ . Plagge would make the
prisoners perform these exercises for hours while carrying his pipe
between his teeth which earned him the nickname “ the little pipe “ .
The exercises included running with their hands held up,
exhausting marches on bare feet, crawling on gravel on their elbows,
so-called goose stepping or rolling around on the ground during which Plagge would walk
in front of the individual prisoners and kick sand in their faces or kick them in the kidneys.
The inmates had to perform these exercises without any regard for their age or health.
Another prisoner who survived the Holocaust remembered how Plagge had done “sport” with
his group for a period of nearly two weeks during which he would come up with various
exhausting exercises for the prisoners, and at the same time he would beat them every single
day for no apparent reason, usually with a stick, and he did so with visible pleasure.
Plagge would particularly beat weak inmates who could not stand the pace of this “sport”.
As a result of the exhausting exercises, hunger, the heat at that time, and the beatings,
a few prisoners passed out on the ground. They were then soaked with water, beaten and forced
to do even more exercises. When one elderly inmate ended up being beaten unconscious,
Plagge ordered him to be thrown into a latrine, where he died the next day.
The ” sport” area where the prisoners were held for over 2 weeks had only one latrine
located outside where inmates were not allowed to go at night or else they would be shot.
At Auschwitz, Ludwig Plagge was one of the main participants in the first mass
killing of prisoners using Zyklon B. On the 3rd of September 1941,
he participated in the first tentative mass gassing in block 11 of the main camp,
in which around 600 Soviet commissars and 250 sick Polish prisoners were killed with Zyklon B.
Plagge also participated in the extermination action of Jews carried out in the gas chambers.
He was seen enjoying selecting prisoners who were sick
and unfit for work and then sent them to their deaths.
He also took part in executions carried out both by shooting at the Death Wall
of the infamous Block 11 of which he was a block leader, and by hanging.
At Auschwitz Plagge also served in the gypsy family camp which existed for 17 months from
February 1943. Approximately 23 thousand Sinti and Roma inmates were deported to Auschwitz.
Romani families deported to the Gypsy Family Camp were held together, instead of being separated
as was typical at Auschwitz. The conditions in the camp were horrible. One holocaust survivor
described it as hell on Earth. The prisoners - half-crazed with hunger - were crammed inside
the barracks which were icy cold. To keep warm all the inmates had to huddle together.
When on the 2nd of August 1944, 2,897 surviving men, women, and children from
this Gypsy family camp were murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz – Birkenau,
Ludwig Plagge did not belong to the Auschwitz personnel anymore as he had been sent to the
Majdanek camp earlier in October 1943. Majdanek’s perimeter incorporated a highly electrified double
barbed-wire fence and 19 watchtowers, where guards stood watch to ensure no one escaped.
A larger crematorium was added in September 1943. Up to 45,000 prisoners could be housed at Majdanek
at a time. Many camp’s prisoners died due to conditions in the camp - disease, starvation,
temperature exposure, overwork and exhaustion, or by beatings by camp guards. Others were murdered
in mass killing actions - gas chambers and executions. Some of the prisoners were sent
directly to the gas chambers upon arrival. In this sense Majdanek operated as an extermination camp.
Because by July 1944, the advancing Soviet army was very close, the Nazis began to liquidate
Majdanek. Approximately 1,000 prisoners were evacuated with only half of them reaching
Auschwitz. Prior to leaving the camp, the staff destroyed incriminating documents and burnt down
the large crematorium along with other buildings. However, in their urgency to flee the camp
they neglected to destroy most of the prisoners' barracks and the gas chambers.
When the Soviet army liberated the camp on the 24th of July 1944 it was virtually intact
and only a few hundred Jewish prisoners remained alive.
Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and evidence of the
horrors that had occurred there. Between 80,000 – 120,000 people
perished in Majdanek between October 1941 and July 1944 when the camp was operational.
When the Soviet army liberated Majdanek, Ludwig Plagge was already in Flossenbürg
concentration camp which by then had became a key supplier of Messerschmitt Bf 109 aircraft parts.
The conditions under which the camp authorities forced the prisoners to work,
and the absence of even rudimentary medical care facilitated the spread of diseases,
including dysentery and typhus. In addition to the dreadful living conditions,
the prisoners suffered beatings and arbitrary punishments such as standing at attention for
hours, whipping or hanging from posts. From the 19th of March to the 23rd of April 1945,
Plagge was the senior command leader of the Regensburg subcamp of Flossenbürg.
On the 29th of March 1945, the SS hanged 13 Allied prisoners of war, including one US soldier,
who had been captured behind German lines on the Normandy coast in the previous summer. When the
US forces approached the camp in mid-April 1945, the SS began the forced evacuation of prisoners,
except for those unable to walk. Nearly 97,000 prisoners, of whom just over 16,000 were female,
passed through the Flossenbürg system between 1938 and 1945.
An estimated 30,000 of them died in Flossenbürg and its subcamps or on the evacuation routes.
After the end of the war, Ludwig Plagge was finally to face justice and pay for his crimes.
He was arrested by the allies on the 10th of May 1945 and handed
over to the Polish authorities in March 1947. He was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began
in November 1947 and lasted one month. At the trial, Plagge admitted only to
slapping the prisoners and making them perform the so called “sport “exercises.
He denied not only his participation in killing the innocent men, women, and children in the gas
chambers, but also taking part in executions carried out by both shooting and hanging.
In order to make the tribunal spare his life, Plagge said that after serving his sentence,
he would atone for his crimes, and therefore would be regarded as a good man.
However, his lies did not help him escape justice. On the 22nd of December 1947,
the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Plagge to death by hanging.
He was 38 years old when he was executed on the 24th of January 1948,
There were no tears shed for Ludwig Plagge.
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