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

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Another 100 Jews were smuggled in by the resistance movement with Plagge's acquiescence, and the population peaked at 1,250 early in 1944. 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. Plagge saved not only skilled male workers but also their wives and children, arguing that the workers would not be motivated without their families. By the third application, I was able to come up with cases and specific instances in which he surely was risking his life.

This is an exceptional story of one man’s bravery and compassion in a world where six million Jews were murdered. Major (Karl) Plagge was responsible for saving Jewish and Polish people during WWII, including the author's mother. Outside of the world of medicine and Holocaust history, he enjoys open water swimming, inline skating, vegetable gardening and geocaching. In the aftermath of the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising and an increase in Soviet partisan activity, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, decided to liquidate all Nazi ghettos, regardless of the slave labor they provided to the Wehrmacht's war effort. 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.The account of finding out who his parents' rescuer was and how they obtained recognition for his work is told by a non-historian. 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. This is worth watching to see both the good and evil in our world that still exists today in a different form. In Yad Vashem's view, Plagge's efforts to save Jewish workers and treat them humanely were probably related to serving the German war effort.

He fought as a lieutenant in World War I on the Western Front, participating in the battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Flanders. During WWII, The city had approximately 200,000 inhabitants, of which so many were Jewish, (80,000), that it was known, at least by the self-mocking Jews, as the `Jerusalem of Lithuania'! Mordecai Paldiel, the director of the committee, thanked Pearl Good for making the trip to Vilnius with her family and sparking the chain of events that uncovered Plagge's actions during the war. Good eventually traces Major Plagge, makes a fascinating story in itself, which he describes in his wonderful book. In 2005, after two unsuccessful petitions, the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem recognized him as one of the " Righteous Among the Nations".The Jews in the HKP camp knew, however, that before the SS retreated, the SS would most likely kill any Jewish slave laborers that might have been left behind. 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 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. Following archaeological work done at the HKP 562 site in 2017, a documentary about Plagge and the camp, The Good Nazi, premiered in Vilnius the following year. The SS arrived on July 3, 1944 and took 500 prisoners to the forest of Peneriai where they were killed.