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

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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.

Karl Plagge - Krav Maga Karl Plagge - Krav Maga

Our survival was thanks to the efforts of Major Karl Plagge, Chief of the Army Vehicle Repair Shops (HKP) of the Vilnius area. In 1934, Plagge began to work at Hessenwerks, an engineering company run by Kurt Hesse, whose wife Erica was half-Jewish. By hiring a nominal Nazi, Hesse hoped to prevent the " Aryanization" of his business. [7] After Kristallnacht in 1938, Plagge became the godfather of Hesse's son Konrad. [8] The same year, Plagge took over as chief engineer of the Hessenwerks. [9] Service in Lithuania [ edit ] HKP 562 [ edit ] Lithuanian collaborator with Jewish prisoners, July 1941 For further information, please see enclosed denazification files of Karl Plagge, which contain many more testimonies to his rescuing help and protection of Jews, at the risk of his life. At least 500 people were caught the next day as the SS death squads arrived and swept through the camp. The prisoners were herded to Ponary where the Nazis mowed them down into huge pits. The Nazis then made a thorough search, discovered a few hundred people in hiding and killed them on the spot.

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Claiming that he needed additional workers, Plagge brought 100 arrested Jews into HKP. Another 100 Jews were smuggled in by the resistance movement with Plagge’s consent, and the population peaked at 1,250 early in 1944, according to historian Kim Priemal. Michael Good, a family physician in the U.S. state of Connecticut, says Major Plagge saved his mother and seven other members of his family from sure death, along with hundreds of other inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania. German troops rounding up residents of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943. (Photo Credit: Roger Viollet Collection / Getty Images) With the Hamas massacre fresh in the minds of people around the world, the Hamas murderers pulled off another terrible crime against the Jewish 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.

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

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. In 1999, HKP 562 survivor Pearl Good traveled to Vilnius with her family. Good's son, Michael, decided to investigate the story of Plagge, but he had trouble locating him because survivors knew him only as "Major Plagge" and did not know his full name or place of birth. After fourteen months, Good was able to find Plagge's Wehrmacht personnel file. He eventually published the results of his research in 2005 as The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews. [41] Good formed an organization of researchers and friends that he called the "Plagge Group" and, along with HKP survivors, petitioned Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the Holocaust, to have Plagge recognized as " Righteous Among the Nations". [42] He also insisted that the men be allowed to bring their wives and children, saying it would be good for morale and pro duction. In time, they too were certified as essential workers. This article does not contain any citations or references. Please improve this article by adding a reference. 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.

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But he could not prevent the SS from seizing 250 children from the camp and murdering them while he was on leave. On his return he made no secret of his disgust with what he called the latest "achievements of my fellow Germans". We all knew that Major Plagge would intercede with the SS and do anything he could to help us and to alleviate our suffering. Of the many situations that arose, the following event stands out in our minds:

Karl Plagge - Holocaust Historical Society

For more on the Yad Vashem identification of the "Righteous Among the Nations" project, see: https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous.html Here is their tribute to Plagge. I doubt the name Rayan Aourram means anything to you. I doubt it means anything to most of the readership of this newspaper. But Photo of Karl Plagge taken in December of 1943 while he was home on leave from his post in Vilna Poland. Wikipedia/Public DomainTodd Neikirk is a New Jersey-based politics, entertainment and history writer. His work has been featured in psfk.com, foxsports.com, politicususa.com and hillreporter.com. He enjoys sports, politics, comic books, and anything that has to do with history. The dictionary defines dust as fine particles of earth or other matter. That definition applies to “outside” dust. The dust that you find on The success of Plagge’s efforts to save Jews is manifested through a survival rate of about 20–25% among those he hired compared with the much lower rate of 3–5% — virtual annihilation — among the rest of Lithuania's Jews. The 250 to 300 surviving Jews of the HKP camp constituted the largest single group of survivors of the genocide in Vilnius. Plagge subtly warned the families that they would be called for and now was the time to hide. Only half of the 1,000 inmates showed up to the roll call in the hopes that they would be spared. They were led to the forest and executed by the SS.

Karl Plagge - the Nazi Party member who employed and Karl Plagge - the Nazi Party member who employed and

Good said he sought the Yad Vashem honor for Plagge after he found out the German had no relatives he could thank directly. He told England's Guardian newspaper that during their trip to Vilnius, his mother was "waving her cane around and saying 'He was better than Schindler.'"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. Serving initially in Poland after the German invasion, he witnessed atrocities that caused him to decide "to work against the Nazis". [10] In 1941, he was put in command of an engineering unit, Heereskraftfahrpark 562 (vehicle maintenance unit 562, or HKP 562; literally, "Army motor-vehicle park"), which maintained and repaired military vehicles. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, HKP 562 was deployed to Vilna, Lithuania, in early July 1941. Plagge witnessed the genocide being carried out against the Jews of the area. [4] [11] He came into conflict with the leadership of the party after 1933 when Hitler seized power. According to his later testimony, Plagge refused to accept Nazi racial theories, which he considered unscientific, and was disgusted by the persecution of political opponents and the corruption of many Nazi functionaries. Instead of leaving the party, he attempted to effect change from within, accepting a position as a scientific lecturer and leader of a Nazi educational institute in Darmstadt. [5] Because he refused to teach Nazi racial ideology, he was dismissed from his position in 1935. A local party official accused Plagge of being on good terms with Jews and Freemasons, treating Jews in his home laboratory, and opposing the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, threatening to bring Plagge before a party tribunal. Instead, Plagge ceased his activity with the party, disenchanted with Nazism. [6] 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 fellow traveler rather than an active Nazi. Former prisoners of HKP 562 in a displaced person camp 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] Priemel, Kim C. (2008). "Into the grey zone: Wehrmacht bystanders, German labor market policy and the Holocaust". Journal of Genocide Research. 10 (3): 389–411. doi: 10.1080/14623520802305743. S2CID 144427695.