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

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They sent a representative, on their own initiative and unannounced, to testify on his behalf, and this testimony influenced the trial result in Plagge's favor. Plagge argued with SS-Obersturmführer RolfNeugebauer in an attempt to secure their release, but was unable to save them. This kind of work permit protected the worker, his wife and 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 Paneriai (Ponary) execution grounds.

Karl Plagge - The German Soldier Who Saved the Jews | Free Karl Plagge - The German Soldier Who Saved the Jews | Free

He graduated with a degree in Engineering and then obtained a Master’s in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1932. It elicited Plagge’s admission of shame and guilt at having contributed to the rise of the Nazi regime. HKP 562 was the site of a Nazi forced labor camp for Jews in Vilnius, Lithuania, during the Holocaust. Imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-warcamp from 1917 to 1920, he caught polio and became disabled in his left leg.

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. During that interval, the camp was officially owned and administered by the SS, but run on a day-to-day basis by a Wehrmacht engineering unit, Heereskraftfahrpark (HKP) 562 (Army Motor Vehicle Repair Park 562), stationed in Vilnius. When his workers were captured during sweeps, Plagge attempted to free them from Lukiškės Prison before they could be executed at Ponary. In this crucial period Plagge made extraordinary bureaucratic efforts to form a free-standing HKP562 Slave Labor Camp on Subocz Street on the outskirts of Vilnius.

Yad Vashem to Honor German WWII Officer – DW – 04/11/2005 Yad Vashem to Honor German WWII Officer – DW – 04/11/2005

A 40-page document he obtained from German court archives—where it had lain untouched since 1946—unraveled the secrets behind the mysterious savior that had flitted in and out of Pearl’s dreams for over half a century. After graduating from Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium, [2] a secondary school that focused on the classics, Plagge was drafted into the ImperialGermanArmy. Polish forces had taken the city, and a region surrounding it, during the Russian Revolution in the wake of WW-I. The Plagge Group disagreed, pointing out that Wehrmacht soldiers associating with Jews were threatened with being treated as Jews; indeed, Wehrmacht Sergeant Anton Schmid had been executed in 1942 for helping Jews in the Vilna Ghetto. He had wanted to study medicine but was prevented from the longer study program required due to his family's financial problems.Plagge also made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht.

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Plagge, who had been promoted to major, secured permission from the SS to establish a Juden-KZ for HKP 562 on Subocz Street on the outskirts of Vilnius. In spite of the generally benign attitude of the officers and men of the HKP unit, the SS did enter the camp on several occasions and committed atrocities. 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.Imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-war camp from 1917 to 1920, he caught polio and became disabled in his left leg. About 70,000 of these people were Jews of Lithuanian or other nationality; others were deported to Nazi extermination camps. Photo of Karl Plagge taken in December of 1943 while he was home on leave from his post in Vilna Poland. But when his mother told him about her time in the ghetto and how she was saved by a German officer, he began using the internet to dig into the past, finding other survivors to corroborate his mother's story.