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

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It seems that Karl Plagge was born in Darmstadt in 1897, and was therefore old enough to fight in WWI.

During the summer of 1944, the Red Army advanced to the outskirts of Vilnius and the Wehrmacht withdrew abruptly in early July. 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. Very interesting to me because my mother and her siblings were helped by a German officer in Poland after the arrest of their parents by the gestapo.When war broke out in September 1939, Plagge, who by this time was an educated man, was drafted by the Wehrmacht, given the rank of Major, and placed in charge of a military motor-vehicle repair station in Vilna. In 1939 major Karl Plagge was drafted in to the Wermacht at the beginning of World War II when Germany invaded Poland. With an SS officer at his side, he told the inmates that they "will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS, which, as you know, is an organisation devoted to the protection of refugees.

However, the soldiers under his command and other Wehrmacht officials, including Hans Christian Hingst, the civilian administrator of German-occupied Vilnius, were aware of Plagge's rescue activities and did not denounce him. The front line is moving west and HKP's assignment is to always be a certain number of miles behind the front line.I found the most interesting parts of the book were the denazification trial (Appendix A) and whenever the author was quoting a direct source (memoir, letter, etc. Plagge also made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht. 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. Many years later, during his denazification trial, Plagge stated that he was initially drawn to the promises of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to rebuild the German economy and national pride, which suffered during the years that Germany experienced after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

On multiple occasions, HKP 562 loaned trucks and drivers to the SS to transport Jews to Ponary for execution. Plagge and his unit arrived in Vilnius in July 1941 and soon they witnessed the genocide being carried out against the Jews of that area. In 1943, after negotiations with the SS, Plagge was able to expand his workforce from 394 Jews in July to more than 1,000 when the ghetto was liquidated in September.

Imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-war camp from 1917 to 1920, he caught polio and became disabled in his left leg. This kind of work permit protected the worker, his wife, and up to two of his children from the SS sweeps carried out in the Vilna Ghetto, in which Jews without work papers were captured and killed at the nearby Ponary execution grounds. 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.

Part detective story, part personal quest, Michael Good’s book is the story of the German commander of a Lithuanian work camp who saved hundreds of Jewish lives in the Vilna ghetto ―including the life of Good’s mother, Pearl. I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives. It appears that Plagge now decides that it is his duty to save as many of the local people from extermination as possible, and according to the author's parents, manages to save at least 500 lives!Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in this era or in the way people treat each other. Former prisoners of HKP 562 in a displaced person camp in Ludwigsburg told Maria Eichamueller [ who?

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