Recipients of the Knights Cross of the War Merit Cross

Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen, Erbsälzer zu Werl und Neuwerk (German: [ˈfʁants fɔn ˈpaːpn̩] ; 29 October 1879 – 2 May 1969) was a German conservative politician, reactionary, diplomat, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer. He served as the chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as the vice-chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934.
Born into a wealthy family of Westphalian Catholic aristocrats, Papen served in the Prussian Army from 1898 onward and was trained as a German General Staff officer. He served as military attaché in Mexico and the United States from 1913 to 1915, while also covertly organising acts of sabotage in the United States and quietly backing and financing Mexican forces in the Mexican Revolution on behalf of German military intelligence.
After being expelled as persona non grata by the United States State Department in 1915, he served as a battalion commander on the Western Front of World War I and finished his war service in the Middle Eastern theatre as a lieutenant colonel.
Asked to become chancellor of the Weimar Republic by President Paul von Hindenburg in 1932, Papen ruled by presidential decree. He launched the Preußenschlag coup against the Social Democratic Party-led Government in the Free State of Prussia. His failure to secure a base of support in the Reichstag led to his removal by Hindenburg and replacement by General Kurt von Schleicher.
Determined to return to power, Papen, believing that Adolf Hitler could be controlled once he was in the government, pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor and Papen as vice-chancellor in 1933 in a cabinet ostensibly not under Nazi Party domination. Seeing military dictatorship as the only alternative to a Nazi Party chancellor, Hindenburg consented. Papen and his allies were quickly marginalized by Hitler and he left the government after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, during which the Nazis killed some of his allies and confidants. Subsequently, Papen served the German Foreign Office as the ambassador in Vienna from 1934 to 1938 and in Ankara from 1939 to 1944. He joined the Nazi Party in 1938.After the Second World War, Papen was indicted for Nazi war crimes in the Nuremberg trials before the International Military Tribunal but was acquitted of all charges. In 1947, a West German denazification court found Papen to have acted as the main culprit in crimes relating to the Nazi government. Papen was given a sentence of eight years' imprisonment at hard labour, but was released on appeal in 1949. Franz von Papen's memoirs were published in 1952 and 1953; he died in 1969.

Gerhard August Heinrich Rose (30 November 1896 – 13 January 1992) was a Nazi German physician and war criminal who performed medical atrocities on concentration camp prisoners at Dachau and Buchenwald without the subjects' consent. He infected Jews, Romani people, and the mentally ill with malaria and typhus. Following the Doctors' Trial, Rose was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison, but he was released in 1955.

Waldemar Erfurth (4 August 1879 – 2 May 1971) was a German general of infantry, a writer and liaison officer to Finland during World War II
Erfurth was born in Berlin. He served in World War I, winning the Iron Cross 1st Class and the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern. After the war, he continued in the Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic. During the Second World War, he was a liaison officer in the Finnish headquarters 1941–44. He wrote a book about the Murmansk railroad and a war journal from 1944. He died in Tübingen.

Hans Kammler (26 August 1901 – 1945 [assumed]) was an SS-Obergruppenführer responsible for Nazi civil engineering projects and its top secret V-weapons program. He oversaw the construction of various Nazi concentration camps before being put in charge of the V-2 rocket and Emergency Fighter Programs towards the end of World War II. Kammler disappeared in May 1945 during the final days of the war. There has been much conjecture regarding his fate.

Karl Küpfmüller (6 October 1897 – 26 December 1977) was a German electrical engineer, who was prolific in the areas of communications technology, measurement and control engineering, acoustics, communication theory, and theoretical electro-technology.

Oswald Ludwig Pohl (German: [ˈɔsvalt ˈpoːl] ; 30 June 1892 – 7 June 1951) was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. As the head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office and the head administrator of the Nazi concentration camps, he was a key figure in the Final Solution, the genocide of the European Jews. After the war, Pohl went into hiding; he was apprehended in 1946. Pohl stood trial in 1947, was convicted of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death. After repeatedly appealing his case, he was executed by hanging in 1951.

Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch (German: [ˈzaʊ.ɐˌbʁʊx]; 3 July 1875 – 2 July 1951) was a German surgeon. His major work was on the use of negative-pressure chambers for surgery.

Wolf-Heinrich Julius Otto Bernhard Fritz Hermann Ferdinand Graf von Helldorff (14 October 1896 – 15 August 1944) was an SA-Obergruppenführer, German police official and politician. He served as a member of the Landtag of Prussia during the Weimar Republic, as a member of the Reichstag for the Nazi Party from 1933, and as Ordnungspolizei Police President in Potsdam and in Berlin. From 1938 he became involved with the anti-Nazi resistance, and was executed in 1944 for his role in the 20th July plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler's regime.