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

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Plagge, who had been promoted to major, secured permission from the SS to establish a Juden-KZ for HKP 562 on Subocz Street on the outskirts of Vilnius. Daniel Fraenkel, a member of the Yad Vashem committee that made the decision, said he had been persuaded by "massive and multi-layered evidence". The court did not exonerate Plagge completely, because it believed that his actions had been motivated by humanitarianism rather than opposition to Nazism.

A few Jews hid in the ruins of the ghetto; arguing that he needed more workers, Plagge brought 100 arrested Jews into HKP. At first, Plagge employed Jews who lived inside the ghetto, but when the ghetto was slated for liquidation in September 1943, he set up the HKP 562 forced labor camp, where he saved many male Jews by issuing them official work permits on the false premise that their holders' skills were vital for the German war effort, and also made efforts to save the worker's wives and children by claiming they would work better if their families were alive. In September 1943, rumor spread that many of the Jews in the Vilnius ghetto were to be taken by the SS regardless if they had working papers. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The organisation twice rejected his petitions because it was not certain why the major acted as he did.

Plagge was drafted into the Wehrmacht (German Army) as a captain in the reserve at the beginning of World War II, [4] and stopped paying Nazi Party membership fees at the same time. A partially disabled veteran of the First World War, Plagge studied engineering and joined the Nazi Party in 1931. It's not just the typical villainizing of the evil Nazi Germans, but an even deeper look into the nature of all who either watched, aided or benefited from the extermination of a defenseless people. In February 2006, the former Frankensteinkaserne, a Bundeswehr base in Pfungstadt, Germany, was renamed the Karl-Plagge-Kaserne. Good became interested in Holocaust history in 1999 when he traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, with his parents to explore his family origins and hear their tales of survival during the Holocaust.

During the post-WWI period, he became disillusioned with the political situation in Germany, and actually joined the Nazi party in 1931, believing Hitler's promises of a better future!

Dr Good tracked down survivors and documents to put together a case for Yad Vashem to recognise Plagge's heroism. Knowing that the camp would be liquidated before the Red Army arrived, the Jews made hiding places in the camp in secret bunkers, in walls, and in the rafters of the attic.

He told them that he and his men were relocated to the west and he asked for permission to take his skilled workers with them but was not granted permission.The author's parents attribute their own survival to the actions of a Wehrmacht staff officer, whom they merely knew as a `Major Plagge', who to their personal knowledge, had saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish and Polish inhabitants of their home town, the city of Vilna. During World War II, he used his position as a staff officer in the German Army to employ and protect Jews in the Vilna Ghetto. During this crucial period Plagge made huge bureaucratic efforts to form a free standing HKP562 labor camp on the outskirts of Vilnius.

They applied again the next year and received a reply stating that "we fail to understand what possible risks he had to fear from his superiors". To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. She never talked to us about how she survived, but there she told me about this mysterious officer, Major Plagge, who she said saved her life and the lives of her parents and 250 other Jewish prisoners," he said. It seems that Karl Plagge was born in Darmstadt in 1897, and was therefore old enough to fight in WWI.The HKP (Heeres Kraftfahr Park) was a Wehrmacht military unit that was responsible for the repair of Wehrmacht vehicles. In the novel, which was written while Camus was living under Nazi occupation in France, Rieux risks his life to save people from the plague, but his efforts cannot save very many people and often appear useless. Of 100,000 pre-war Jews in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived, of which the largest single group were saved by Plagge.