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

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It was centered around 47 & 49 Subačiaus Street, in apartment buildings originally built to house poor members of the Jewish community. The camp was used by the German army as a slave labor camp from September 1943 until July 1944. 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. On certain occasions, Plagge’s general policy of non-confrontation with the SS put him “in a gray zone, and in a catch-22 situation with serious moral implications,” according to historian Kim Priemel.

Karl Plagge | The Engines of Our Ingenuity Karl Plagge | The Engines of Our Ingenuity

The SS entered the camp on two occasions to commit atrocities, before finally liquidating most of the Jewish laborers in July 1944, shortly before the German retreat out of Vilnius. In November 1943, a Jewish prisoner named David Zalkind, his wife, and child attempted to escape from the camp and were caught by the Gestapo. They were publicly executed in the camp courtyard in front of the other prisoners. On March 27, 1944, while Plagge was away on home leave in Germany, the SS carried out a Kinder Aktion ("Children Operation"). They entered the camp, rounded up the vast majority of the camp’s 250 children and then transported them away from the camp to be killed (most likely at the killing grounds of Paneriai (Ponary). Thus both Plagge, his subordinates and the prisoners understood that ultimately the SS would decide the fate of the camp’s Jews. A bust of Karl Plagge was placed in the schoolyard of the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium in Darmstadt, the oldest establishment of secondary higher education in the city. 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. In an unparalleled atrocity, on March 27, 1944, during Plagge’s home leave absence, the SS carried out a vicious Kinder Aktion (Children Operation). They tore through the camp and rounded up the vast majority of the camp’s 250 children, transporting them out of the camp to be killed at Ponary. Probably 95% of the 57,000 Jews who lived in Vilnius before the war were murdered. Of the rest, as many as 10% were saved by Plagge.

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In February 2006 the former Frankensteinkaserne, a Bundeswehr base in Pfungstadt, Germany, was renamed the Karl-Plagge-Kaserne.

Karl Plagge - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center

Karl Plagge ( pronounced [kaʁl ˈplaɡə] ⓘ; 10 July 1897– 19 June 1957) was a German Army officer who rescued Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania by issuing work permits to non-essential workers. A partially disabled veteran of World War I, Plagge studied engineering and joined the Nazi Party in 1931 in hopes of helping Germany rebuild from the economic collapse following the war. After being dismissed from the position of lecturer for being unwilling to teach racism and his opposition to Nazi racial policies, he stopped participating in party activities in 1935 and left the party when the war broke out. And you know full well how well the S.S. takes care of their Jewish prisoners…” Plagge added carefully.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. When the city was liberated by Soviet forces a few days later, some 200 Jews shakily emerged. They represented the largest single group of Jewish survivors in Vilna. Major Karl Plagge was a high-ranking Nazi officer who used his influential position to save hundreds of people from violent persecution in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, including dozens of Jewish workers and their families. Plagge graduated from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1924 with a degree in engineering. On being drafted into the Heer at the beginning of World War II, he was put in command of an engineering unit, HKP562, whose duties involved repairing military vehicles damaged on the eastern front. Plagge and his unit arrived in Vilnius (Vilna) in July 1941 and soon witnessed the genocide being carried out against the Jews of the area. Plagge would later testify that "I saw unbelievable things that I could not support...it was then that I began to work against the Nazis". [3] 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 - The German Soldier Who Saved the Jews | Free Karl Plagge - The German Soldier Who Saved the Jews | Free

One morning, when we stood for roll call, the SS commander, Bruno Kitel (a particularly vicious Nazi) singled out a group of young girls and took them away. One of our Jewish leaders, N. Kolish, appealed to Major Plagge to save the girls. They were released the same day. 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.” 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 YadVashem, Israel's official memorial to the Holocaust, to have Plagge recognized as " RighteousAmongtheNations". [42]Plagge’s efforts are corroborated by survivor testimony, historical documents found in Germany, and Plagge’s own testimony found in a letter he wrote in 1957, a year before his death. In this letter he compares himself with the character of Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus' novel The Plague and describes his hopeless struggle against a plague of death that slowly envelops the inhabitants of his city. [11] Post-war [ ]