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

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As Hitler rose to power, however, the Nazis’ warped race-theories and their brutality toward Jews repelled him.

Years Later, Honoring an Unlikely Hero of the Holocaust 60 Years Later, Honoring an Unlikely Hero of the Holocaust

At Monday's ceremony in Israel, Plagge's name will be inscribed on a garden wall, not far from trees honoring Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and others who risked their "lives, freedom or safety" to save Jews. He kept these people out of the reach of the Nazi death machine, as SS squads butchered tens of thousands of Vilna Jews at Ponary.A local party official accused Plagge of being on good terms with Jews and Freemasons, treating Jews in his home laboratory, and opposing the NaziboycottofJewishbusinesses, threatening to bring Plagge before a party tribunal. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, HKP 562 was deployed to Vilna, Lithuania, in early July 1941. A partially disabled veteran of the First World War, Plagge studied engineering and joined the Nazi Party in 1931.

Karl Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved His Jewish Workers

Righteous Among the Nations Ceremony at Yad Vashem Tomorrow Major Karl Plagge to be posthumously honored in presence of German Ambassador". The trial investigated this political history as well as the series of events that brought Plagge to Vilna as commandant of a slave labor camp. It only required a convincing strength that anyone can draw from the depths of a moral conscience everyone has. A partially disabled veteran of WorldWarI, Plagge studied engineering and joined the NaziParty in 1931 in hopes of helping Germany rebuild from the economic collapse following the war.

What Good found was this: Just a week before the ghetto was purged by the Germans in September, 1943, Plagge commandeered some 1,000 Jews to work in an military-vehicle maintenance camp outside the ghetto, keeping them safe from death squads. The camp, which consisted of two multistory tenements originally constructed to house Jews on welfare, was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Lithuanian collaborators and SS men. The camp was to be dissolved; accused of being soft on Jews, Plagge was forbidden to take them with his unit. We all knew that Major Plagge would intercede with the SS and do anything he could to help us and to alleviate our suffering.

Karl Plagge - Krav Maga Karl Plagge - Krav Maga

Born in Germany in 1897, Karl Plagge became permanently disabled after contracting polio as a prisoner during World War I. I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. He then ran a medical laboratory in his mother’s house in an attempt to support his family through the recession. 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.In 1941, he was put in charge of Heereskraftfahrpark (HKP) 562 and stationed in Vilna, Lithuania (modern day Vilnius), which was home to the Vilna Ghetto. Plagge argued with SS-Obersturmführer Rolf Neugebauer in an attempt to secure their release, but was unable to save them.

Karl Plagge - Holocaust Historical Society

About 70,000 of these people were Jews of Lithuanian or other nationality; others were deported to Nazi extermination camps. However, he began to come into conflict with the local party leadership over his refusal to teach Nazi racial theories, which, as a man of science, he did not believe. After the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, decided to liquidate all ghettos.Through these efforts he was able to protect over 1250 Jews from the genocide occurring in Vilna until the final days of the German occupation. The HKP (Heeres Kraftfahr Park) was a Wehrmacht military unit that was responsible for the repair of Wehrmacht vehicles. 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". who passed away last month, prompted interest not only in his remarkable wartime odyssey but also that of his devoted wife, Pearl, who survives him.