Michael Good, a family physician in the U.S. state of Connecticut, says Major Plagge saved his mother and seven other members of his family from sure death, along with hundreds of other inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania. Plagge brought “his Jews” there a week before the Gestapo began annihilating the ghetto inhabitants. Witnesses testified that Plagge freed Jews from prison and pulled entire families from the Vilna ghetto to the relative safety of his labor camp.

HKP 562 forced labor camp - Wikipedia HKP 562 forced labor camp - Wikipedia

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. I had direct knowledge of that era, the era just after the war, felt like. I experienced it first hand. But the true stories only came out later. The 1960's were too soon, it was all too fresh, and painful. Today we know more. We know the ugly side and we know the beautiful, glorious, side. When I was young I thought a new generation was rising, a better generation, the past was gone. But this was not true. Man is weak in his nature, and there are very few heroes.The major insisted that each laborer be permitted to bring his wife and two of his children with him, arguing that this system would raise worker morale and boost productivity. Among this fortunate group were Perela Esterowicz (later Pearl Good) and her parents, Ida and Samuel Esterowicz. Plagge was tried before an Allied denazification court in 1947, which accepted his plea to be classified as a " fellow traveler" of the Nazi Party, whose rescue activities were undertaken for humanitarian reasons rather than overt opposition to Nazism. Survivors he rescued testified on his behalf. Plagge died ten years after the trial. He was ideologically a national conservative, but joined the Nazi Party on 1 December 1931. [4] 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. [3] Between 1931 and 1933, Plagge worked as a local organizer for the party.

Unraveling the Mystery of Major Karl Plagge a Nazi Officer

Upon his release, Plagge studied chemical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, graduating in 1924. He had wanted to study medicine but was prevented from the longer study program required due to his family's financial problems. After graduating, he married Anke Madsen, but the couple had to live with his mother due to their finances. Unemployed, he ran a pharmaceutical laboratory from the house. [3] [4] Interwar period [ edit ] 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. The success of Plagge’s efforts to save Jews is manifested through a survival rate of about 20–25% among those he hired compared with the much lower rate of 3–5% — virtual annihilation — among the rest of Lithuania's Jews. The 250 to 300 surviving Jews of the HKP camp constituted the largest single group of survivors of the genocide in Vilnius. Pearl Good, who was saved by Plagge, points to his name at the Yad Vashem. (Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain) Survivors Mark and Anna Balber in a letter to the court during Plagge’s denazification trial, made the following statement: “During the Nazi occupation of Vilna, we, along with about 1200 other Jews, were prisoners in a forced labor camp known as HKP. We were under the control of both the Wehrmacht and the SS. Major Plagge was in charge of the Wehrmacht detachment.Karl Plagge ( pronounced [kaʁl ˈplaɡə] ⓘ; 10 July 1897 – 19 June 1957) was a GermanArmy officer who rescued Jews during the HolocaustinLithuania by issuing work permits to non-essential workers. 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. After being dismissed fr Good, Michael (2005). The Search For Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews. Fordham University Press. ISBN 0-8232-2440-6.

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

A Jewish survivor, Marek Swirski, recalled how his father and another man were helped by Plagge when an SS officer discovered they were smuggling food. The furious SS officer “drew his gun when suddenly Plagge approached. He asked the SS man to hand the Jews over to him so he could punish them accordingly.” On July 1, 1944, Major Plagge entered the camp and made an informal speech to the Jewish prisoners who gathered around him. In the presence of an SS officer he told the Jews present at his speech that he and his men were being relocated to the west, and that in spite of his requests, he did not have permission to take his skilled Jewish workers with his unit. However, he said that they should not worry, for they too would be relocated on Monday July 3, and that during this relocation they would be escorted by the SS, which as they knew was “an organization devoted to the protection of refugees”. [8] Our relatively stable existence was shattered twice by Gestapo atrocities that made us realize the relative safety we felt in the HKP was an illusion; it could collapse at any moment.Although Plagge claimed upon his return that he would have saved the children if he had been present, it is doubtful that he could have done so, historians say. The harsh reality was that the SS controlled the ultimate fate of the camp’s Jews.