On December 22, 1947, in Krakow, Poland, former staff of the Auschwitz concentration camp heard their sentences read aloud. After a month of gruesome testimonies, it was revealed that many SS officers had taken part in inhumane torture and the mass murder of prisoners, often for pleasure. Their cruelty went far beyond what their superiors ordered them to do. One such officer was Ludwig Plagge.
Ludwig Plagge was born on January 13, 1910, in Landesbergen, then part of the German Empire. He was a farmer by profession. Like millions of Germans in the 1930s, he believed that Hitler and the Nazi Party would create a strong Germany, fix the economy, and put people back to work. In December 1931 he joined the Nazi Party, and in 1934 he joined the SS.
His criminal career in concentration camps began at Esterwegen, near the German-Dutch border. Most of the inmates there were political prisoners, many of them Communists. The most famous was Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist and political activist sent to Esterwegen in 1933. For his work exposing clandestine German re-armament, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. After years of starvation, mistreatment, and torture in various Nazi concentration camps, Ossietzky died in 1938 in Berlin.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland. In November of that same year, Ludwig Plagge was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people, and later Soviet civilians. One of its most prominent prisoners was Kurt Schuschnigg, who had served as chancellor of Austria from July 1934 until March 11, 1938, when his efforts to keep Austria independent from Nazi Germany failed and he resigned. The next day, when German troops entered Austria and were greeted by cheering Austrians with Nazi salutes and flags, Schuschnigg was placed under house arrest. The annexation of Austria into the German Reich became known as the Anschluss. Kurt Schuschnigg was liberated only in 1945, after spending the whole of the Second World War in Sachsenhausen and Dachau.
At the end of June 1940, Ludwig Plagge left Sachsenhausen and became one of the first SS men sent to the newly established Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Plagge arrived there 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 prisoner 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 the procedure 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 subjecting 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 while Plagge walked in front of individual prisoners and kicked sand in their faces or kicked 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 nearly two weeks, during which he would come up with various exhausting exercises and beat them every single day for no apparent reason, usually with a stick, and 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 two 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 September 3, 1941, he took part 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 sending 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 23,000 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 barracks that were icy cold. To keep warm, all the inmates had to huddle together.
On August 2, 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 of the camp's prisoners died due to conditions there, including disease, starvation, temperature exposure, overwork and exhaustion, or beatings by camp guards. Others were murdered in mass killing actions, in gas chambers and executions. Some 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. Before leaving the camp, the staff destroyed incriminating documents and burned down the large crematorium along with other buildings. However, in their urgency to flee, they neglected to destroy most of the prisoners' barracks and the gas chambers. When the Soviet army liberated the camp on July 24, 1944, it was virtually intact, and only a few hundred Jewish prisoners remained alive. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and the evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. Between 80,000 and 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 become 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 March 19 to April 23, 1945, Plagge was the senior command leader of the Regensburg subcamp of Flossenbürg. On March 29, 1945, the SS hanged 13 Allied prisoners of war, including one US soldier, who had been captured behind German lines on the Normandy coast the previous summer. When 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 finally faced justice and paid for his crimes. He was arrested by the Allies on May 10, 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 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 December 22, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Plagge to death by hanging. He was 38 years old when he was executed on January 24, 1948. There were no tears shed for Ludwig Plagge.