The organisation twice rejected his petitions because it was not certain why the major acted as he did. I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.

Karl Plagge Saved Jewish Lives Ahead of a Camp Liquidation

Plagge was born to a Prussian family in Darmstadt, Germany, on 10 July 1897; many of his ancestors had been military doctors. One week later the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated by the SS and its 15,000 remaining residents were either killed in the nearby killing grounds at Ponary or transported to concentration camps across Nazi-occupied Europe. Plagge also made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht. Another 100 Jews were smuggled in by the resistance movement with Plagge’s consent, and the population peaked at 1,250 early in 1944, according to historian Kim Priemal.Plagge tried to spare as many as he could from this by purposely recruiting Jews instead of Poles for labor. Plagge issued 250 of these life-saving permits to men, many of them without mechanical skills, thus protecting over 1,000 Jewish men, women, and children from execution from 1941 to mid-1944. Then, a strange thing: The Komandant, Karl Plagge, let the prisoners know that the retreating SS was coming to kill them all. About 70,000 of these people were Jews of Lithuanian or other nationality; others were deported to Nazi extermination camps. In 2004, the committee for the Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust, recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations.

Karl Plagge - death camps Karl Plagge - death camps

You will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS which, as you know, is an organization devoted to the protection of refugees. 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. 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. Plagge was drafted into the Wehrmacht (German Army) as a captain in the reserve at the beginning of World War II, [4] and stopped paying Nazi Party membership fees at the same time.During the summer of 1944, the RedArmy advanced to the outskirts of Vilnius and the Wehrmacht withdrew abruptly in early July. Imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-warcamp from 1917 to 1920, he caught polio and became disabled in his left leg. The sight of the former HKP 562 forced labor camp where she and her parents had lived for nine months triggered powerful, crystal-clear memories that she shared with her family. He was liberal in granting work certificates and was not particular about the professional skills of the Jewish workers.

The Good Nazi (TV Movie 2018) - IMDb The Good Nazi (TV Movie 2018) - IMDb

Plagge assigned them all kinds of “support” functions that he persuaded his superiors were “vital” to the camp’s productivity. He also insisted that the men be allowed to bring their wives and children, saying it would be good for morale and pro duction. Plagge went to the train station to argue with an SS non-commissionedofficer, BrunoKittel, who was in charge of the liquidation. After the trial, Plagge lived the final decade of his life quietly and died of a heart attack in Darmstadt on 19 June 1957. He retained relative independence so long as the repair work got done until shortly before the end of the war, when the SS and Gestapo outmaneuvered him.

Witnesses testified that Plagge freed Jews from prison and pulled entire families from the Vilna ghetto to the relative safety of his labor camp. The conditions in the HKP camp were relatively benign, especially when compared with those in other slave labor camps across Nazi occupied Europe, with tolerable work conditions, and food at subsistence levels. In 1941, he was put in command of an engineering unit, Heereskraftfahrpark562 (vehicle maintenance unit 562, or HKP 562; literally, "Army motor-vehicle park"), which maintained and repaired military vehicles. year old Pearl later described how she found a hiding place underneath the stairwell and crouched there in horror listening to the shrieks and cries of the doomed children. His success was only partial; his unit had to retreat, thereby removing the slave-labor framework that had protected them until that point.

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

As a veteran of World War I, was initially drawn to the promises of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to rebuild the German economy and national pride during the difficult years that Germany experienced after the signing of the Versailles Treaty. Plagge first traveled to Kaunas to the Wehrmacht headquarters and then to Riga to the SS administrative offices to argue on behalf of establishing a free-standing camp outside of the Vilna Ghetto. His continued refusal to espouse the Nazi racial teachings led to accusations that he was a “friend of Jews and Freemasons” by the local Darmstadt Nazi leadership in 1935, and he was removed from his leadership positions in the local party apparatus. As a work assignment, HKP 562 was particularly sought after by Jews because of Plagge's efforts to treat his workers well. Was it possible that Pearl’s memories were part fantasy—a young girl’s desperate need to believe in human kindness in a world gone mad?On March 27, 1944, while Plagge was away on home leave in Germany, the SS carried out a Kinder Aktion ("Children Operation"). Hundreds rushed to conceal themselves in bunkers, behind false walls, and in hidden recesses in attics. He then ran a medical laboratory in his mother’s house in an attempt to support his family through the recession.