Paul Pleiger

Confirmed findings

• As chairman of Reichswerke Hermann Göring and head of the Reich Coal Association, he appeared before the Central Planning Board to demand allocations of labour for industry.
• Reichswerke plants used forced and prisoner labour; the judgment attributed to Pleiger participation in the slave-labour programme and economic plunder.
• In early November 1942 he concluded an agreement with Oswald Pohl concerning a slag-processing plant in Linz, linking Reichswerke to the SS-owned DEST and providing for the division of profits.
• In the Ministries Trial he was convicted under counts 6 and 7 and sentenced to fifteen years; the sentence was reduced to ten years, and he was released in March 1951, before Easter.

Place in the chain of responsibility

Pleiger connects central labour planning, the management of a major industrial group and formal ventures with the SS economy. The profile grounds responsibility in his managerial decisions and a specific agreement, not in his office alone.

Key events and mechanisms

• heading the Reich Coal Association and Reichswerke during the war
• appearances before the Central Planning Board concerning labour allocations
• the Pleiger–Pohl agreement concerning the Linz plant in early November 1942
• the fifteen-year sentence in the Ministries Trial, commutation and release in 1951

Postwar accountability

In the Ministries Trial he was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment for plunder and slave labour. In January 1951 the sentence was reduced to ten years, and he was released in March that year, before Easter. He died in 1985.

Limits of the evidence

Sources

The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.

• deutsche-biographie.de
• Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project
• Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project
• Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History
• landesarchiv-ooe.at