The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition

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Plagge, an engineer, joined the Nazi party in 1931 in the belief that it would restore Germany's fortunes, but he became disillusioned with its racial ideology. By 1938, he was godfather to a boy called Konrad Hesse who had a half-Jewish mother, and had left the party. Survivors Mark and Anna Balber in a letter to the court during Plagge’s denazification trial, made the following statement: “During the Nazi occupation of Vilna, we, along with about 1200 other Jews, were prisoners in a forced labor camp known as HKP. We were under the control of both the Wehrmacht and the SS. Major Plagge was in charge of the Wehrmacht detachment. Although Plagge claimed upon his return that he would have saved the children if he had been present, it is doubtful that he could have done so, historians say. The harsh reality was that the SS controlled the ultimate fate of the camp’s Jews. In September 1943 it became clear to Plagge that the Vilna Ghetto was soon to be liquidated. All the remaining Jews in the ghetto were to be taken by the SS, regardless of any working papers they had. In this crucial period Plagge made extraordinary bureaucratic efforts to form a free-standing HKP562 Slave Labor Camp on Subocz Street on the outskirts of Vilnius. Evidence shows that he not only tried to protect his productive male workers, but also made vigorous efforts to protect the women and children in his camp, actively overcoming considerable resistance from local SS officers. [4] [5] On September 16, 1943, Plagge transported over 1,000 of his Jewish workers and their families from the Vilna Ghetto to the newly built HKP camp on Subocz Street, where they remained in relative safety. [6] Less than a week later, on September 23, 1943, the SS liquidated the Vilna Ghetto. The rest of Vilna's Jews were either executed immediately at the nearby execution grounds in the Paneriai (Ponary) Forest, or sent to death camps in Nazi occupied Europe. [7] Plagge had just saved some 250 lives. And that was the tip of an iceberg. So let's learn more about this Nazi officer, Karl Plagge: He'd served in WW-I until the British captured him. Afterward, he'd studied chemical engineering at Darmstadt. And he joined the new Nazi party. That lasted until he'd heard their crazy ideas about race. Then he withdrew from active involvement.

Karl Plagge 60 Years Later, Honoring the German Army Maj. Karl Plagge

Plagge was a World War One veteran and engineer who joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (later to become known as the Nazi Party) in 1931, in the hopes of rebuilding Germany following the economic collapse. In 1942, 200 Jews working for Plagge were rounded up for deportation. Plagge argued with SS-Obersturmführer Rolf Neugebauer in an attempt to secure their release, but was unable to save them. My father had worked in the HKP even before we were moved into the ghetto, and his facharbeiter schein, work certificates, had saved him from the SS murderers. After we were moved to the ghetto on September 6, 1941, Plagge’s gele schein – “skilled worker” certificates saved us and kept us alive until September 1943. Then the four-day aktion that butchered so many Jews put an end to life certificates. Originally a Lutheran, Plagge lost his belief in God because of the atrocities that he witnessed during the Holocaust. [39] [40] Assessment and legacy [ edit ] HKP survivor Pearl Good points to Plagge's name on the Wall of the Righteous at Yad VashemThe organisation twice rejected his petitions because it was not certain why the major acted as he did. It also needed to be persuaded that he took "a considerable and conscious risk" to save Jews. The Vilna Ghetto was seen as a particular threat because of its extensive underground activities and the proximity of partisans in the woods around the city. On the other hand, the historian reasoned, Plagge was a virtual prisoner of the system who took what he saw as the only course “that allowed him to save more Jews than any other rescuer in Vilna.”

Karl Plagge - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center

After the war, Karl Plagge returned home to Darmstadt, Germany, where he was tried in 1947 as part of the postwar denazification process. Some of his former prisoners were in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart and heard of the charges against him. They sent a representative, on their own initiative and unannounced, to testify on his behalf, and this testimony influenced the trial result in Plagge's favor. [12] The court wanted to award Plagge the status of an Entlasteter ("exonerated person") but on his own wish he was classified as a Mitläufer ("follower"). Like Oskar Schindler, Plagge blamed himself for not having done enough. After the trial Plagge lived the final decade of his life quietly and without fanfare before dying in Darmstadt in June 1957. After graduating from Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium, [2] a secondary school that focused on the classics, Plagge was drafted into the Imperial German Army. He fought as a lieutenant in World War I on the Western Front, participating in the battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Flanders. Imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-war camp from 1917 to 1920, he caught polio and became disabled in his left leg. A friend of Plagge’s wrote to Michael Good that the major lived the rest of his life with guilt over his early involvement with Hitler, and because he was convinced that he had done too little to save Jews. This perhaps explains why at his trial he did not ask for exoneration, as some of the judges were inclined to grant him. Instead he asked to be classified as a fellow traveler (sympathizer) to the Nazi regime.Because he had joined the Nazi Party so early and commanded a labor camp where many prisoners were murdered, he was tried in 1947 as part of the postwar denazification process; he hired a lawyer to defend him. [34] Plagge and his former subordinates told the court about his efforts to help Jewish forced laborers; Plagge's lawyer asked for him to be classified as a fellowtraveler rather than an active Nazi. Former prisoners of HKP 562 in a displacedpersoncamp in Ludwigsburg told Maria Eichamueller [ who?] about Plagge's actions. After reading about the trial in a local newspaper, Eichamueller testified on Plagge's behalf, which influenced the trial result in his favor. The court did not exonerate Plagge completely, because it believed that his actions had been motivated by humanitarianism rather than opposition to Nazism. [35] [36] After the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, he was drafted to form part of the engineering facility which brought him to Vilnius, Lithuania. women," said Mr Fraenkel. "He really got into a heated argument with the SS that without the children and the women the motivation of the workers would be very low, and so this would be injurious for production.

Karl Plagge - Krav Maga Karl Plagge - Krav Maga

Plagge had initially embraced the movement’s promises of restoring prosperity and peace to Germany. As Hitler rose to power, however, the Nazis’ warped race-theories and their brutality toward Jews repelled him. Because of his refusal to teach Nazi racial ideology, he clashed repeatedly with party functionaries and was dismissed from his position in 1935. After being drafted into the reserves by the Wehrmacht in 1939, Plagge renounced his membership in the Nazi party. Plagge brought “his Jews” there a week before the Gestapo began annihilating the ghetto inhabitants. Witnesses testified that Plagge freed Jews from prison and pulled entire families from the Vilna ghetto to the relative safety of his labor camp. Righteous among the nations" is the title Israel's Holocaust memorial council at Yad Vashem bestows on people who risked their lives to save jews from death at the hands of the Nazis.An old building complex in Lithuania is marked for demolition. It is a prime location and it is time to build new modern apartments, but these old buildings on the outskirts of Vilnius conceal a dark secret; the current residents may not know that they are living on top of the bones of previous inhabitants - Jews who were hiding from the Nazis. Demolition is being halted at the request of an American doctor.

Karl Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved His Jewish Workers

Israel's Holocaust memorial council, Yad Vashem, will declare Major Karl Plagge righteous among the nations, alongside men such as Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, for an elaborate deception that saved about 250 Jewish lives. It took Good six years of long-distance searching to find other survivors from Plagge's life-saving scheme, but eventually he succeeded. Along with Marianne Viefhaus, an archivist from the University of Darmstadt in Germany, he was able to complete the picture of a German whose courage saved several hundred Jews from certain death.T his Wikipedia article describes Plagge's forced labor camp. The camp was actually located within the (now Capital) Lithuanian city of Vilnius. Polish forces had taken the city, and a region surrounding it, during the Russian Revolution in the wake of WW-I. They'd created a separate. Polish-controlled "Republic of Central Lithuania" that included Vilnius. That region was under dispute between Poland and Lithuania when Germany invaded Poland and this "Republic" in 1939. The "camp" was actually situated in a set of buildings within Vilnius. I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives. What more did you need?" said Dr Good.