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

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He did this by giving working certificates to Jewish men certifying them as essential and skilled workers regardless of their backgrounds. It only required a convincing strength that anyone can draw from the depths of a moral conscience everyone has. Major (Karl) Plagge was responsible for saving Jewish and Polish people during WWII, including the author's mother. The front line is moving west and HKP's assignment is to always be a certain number of miles behind the front line. It concludes with some thought as to his motivation, and the account of how the 'Plagge group' fought for official recognition of his endeavours.

In September 1943, rumor spread that many of the Jews in the Vilnius ghetto were to be taken by the SS regardless if they had working papers. 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. The outcome of his trial was positively influenced by the testimony of his many prisoners who heard of the charges being brought against him and sent representatives to testify on his behalf. He was made a prisoner of war by Britain where he caught Polio, which partially crippled him, so that he needed special shoes.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. When word reached Plagge of the impending liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto, he swiftly set up the motor repair works for army vehicles on Subocz Street and shepherded in about 1,000 Jews. When his workers were captured during sweeps, Plagge attempted to free them from Lukiškės Prison before they could be executed at Ponary. Michael Good has appeared on C-SPAN, as a speaker in Israel and Germany, and in schools, libraries, churches, and synagogues across the United States.

Knowing that the camp would be liquidated before the Red Army arrived, the Jews made hiding places in the camp in secret bunkers, in walls, and in the rafters of the attic. 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. The author's parents attribute their own survival to the actions of a Wehrmacht staff officer, whom they merely knew as a `Major Plagge', who to their personal knowledge, had saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish and Polish inhabitants of their home town, the city of Vilna.

In this gripping, emotional work, Good explores the life and legacy of a mysterious German officer who secretly defied his government to save Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust. Of the 100,000 Jews in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived the Holocaust; survivors of the HKP camp constituted the largest single group. During the post-WWI period, he became disillusioned with the political situation in Germany, and actually joined the Nazi party in 1931, believing Hitler's promises of a better future!

On 27 March 1944, while Plagge was away on home leave in Germany, the SS carried out a Kinderaktion ("Children Operation"): they entered the camp, rounded up about 250 children and elderly Jews, and took them to Ponary for execution. It seems that Karl Plagge was born in Darmstadt in 1897, and was therefore old enough to fight in WWI. In February 2006, the former Frankensteinkaserne, a Bundeswehr base in Pfungstadt, Germany, was renamed the Karl-Plagge-Kaserne. After the trial, Plagge lived the final decade of his life quietly and died of a heart attack in Darmstadt on 19 June 1957.Good - persuaded his parents to accompany him on a visit to Vilna, where he met the people who saved his parents' lives during the wartime German occupation. Plagge and his former subordinates told the court about his efforts to help Jewish forced laborers; Plagge's lawyer asked for him to be classified as a fellow traveler rather than an active Nazi. 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. It was during this trip that he heard the story of the enigmatic officer named Major Plagge who his mother claimed had saved her life. Through these efforts he was able to protect over 1250 Jews from the genocide occurring in Vilna until the final days of the German occupation.