Execution of Ludwig Plagge
- Sadistic Nazi Officer at Auschwitz & Majdanek & Flossenbürg Camp - WW2

30 July 2022

Category: Male Nazi Guards

Ludwig Plagge was born on the 13th of January 1910 in Landesbergen and 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.

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. 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.

Arrival at Auschwitz

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. 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 “ .

At Auschwitz, Ludwig Plagge was one of the main participants in the first mass killing of prisoners using 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. Ludwig Plagge 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.

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.

From Majdanek to Flossenbürg

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. 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. 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 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 Plagge to death by hanging. He was 38 years old when he was executed on the 24th of January 1948.

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