Peix, Karl, born 27-3-1899 in Herzberg am Harz;
completed an apprenticeship as a brush maker after finishing his school career. Peix took part in the First World War as a soldier. After the end of the war, he worked as a contractor in the enamelling factory of Lauterberg MIAG from December 1919. There he was committed to employee issues and was dismissed as a result. He became a member of the USPD/Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany 
in 1920 and switched to the KPD 
in Bad Lauterberg in the Harz Mountains in 1921, where he was one of the founders. Peix became chairman of the KPD in the Lauterberg subdistrict in 1928. Furthermore, he was a member of the city council of Bad Lauterberg and received memberships in the Osterode district assembly and in the Hanover provincial assembly. Peix was also involved in a street battle with SA 
members. After a trial by SA members against Peix for breach of the peace, Peix was acquitted, but National Socialists carried out several attacks on his house and himself.
After the transfer of power to the NSDAP 
in 1933 and the defeat of the KPD, Peix continued his political and anti-fascist activities illegally and took part twice as a speaker at party events of the KPD in the Harz region. Peix was arrested in Hanover in October 1933; he carried extensive, illegal KPD publications with him.
Death and burial ground of Peix, Karl.
After being in prison in 1937, Peix was finally transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp,
where he was used as a medic in the infirmary. In April 1939 he became the deputy prisoner nurse under Walter Krämer, 
whom he had known since 1932.
Walter Krämer (21-06-1892 – 06-11-1941) was a German politician of the German Communist Party (KPD) and member of the resistance against Nazism. From 1932/33 he was a deputy of the Prussian Landtag, was arrested in 1933 and killed in 1941 in a sub-camp of the concentration camp Buchenwald in Goslar. He assisted prisoners with getting medical help, becoming known as the “Doctor of Buchenwald”, for which he received from the State of Israel the posthumous title “Righteous among the Nations” in 2000.
In the infirmary, contrary to the express instructions of the SS, they also looked after Soviet prisoners who had been brought to the camp as prisoners of war. Krämer and Peix together with Paul Grünewald 
founded a resistance group in the infirmary and continued to participate in the camp resistance. In the autumn of 1941, on the instructions of the camp commandant Karl Otto Koch, 
Krämer and Peix were transferred to the Goslar external command, where they were both shot from behind in quick succession on 06-11-1941. Their bodies were cremated on 08-11-1941 in the Buchenwald crematorium. The background for the murder of Peix and Krämer could be their knowledge of a syphilis treatment by Koch, which he had carried out in secret by the two prisoners, or the participation of Peix and Krämer in the camp resistance. Paul Grünewald survived the war and died 20-10-1996, age 84, in Oberursel
Monument in Bad Lauterberg Peix ’wife Marie, whom he met in 1919 and who was also a member of the KPD, survived imprisonment in the concentration camp. In Bad Lauterberg, a memorial stone erected by the VVN on the Felsenkeller
at has been commemorating the communists and Nazi victims Karl Peix, Otto Bockelmann and Bruno Maue since 11-09-1949. Peix ’’ urn is buried in the Bad Lauterberg forest cemetery.
