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Karl Plagge

Major Karl Plagge (July 10, 1897, in Darmstadt–July 1957 in Darmstadt) was a German officer and Nazi Party member who during World War II employed some 1,200 Jews—500 men, and the rest women and children—for forced labor, thus giving them a better chance to survive the nearly total annihilation of Lithuania’s Jews that took place in 1941–1943.

Plagge, a veteran of World War I, was initially attracted to the promises of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to rebuild the German economy and national pride during the difficult years experienced by Germany following the signing of the Versailles Treaty. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and worked to further the its stated goals of national rejuvenation. However, he began to come into conflict with the local party leadership over his refusal to teach Nazi racial theories, which, as a man of science, he did not believe. 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 within the local party apparatus.

Plagge graduated from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1924 with a degree in engineering. Upon being drafted into the Wehrmacht 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. Plagge and his unit arrived in Vilnius in July 1941 and soon witnessed the genocide being carried out against the Jews of the area. Plagge, given his support of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, felt responsible for some of the horrors he witnessed and decided that it was his duty to try to work against the genocidal machine he had unwittingly helped put into place. He decided to do what he could to help some of Vilnius’s beleaguered Jews. He did this by giving work certificates to Jewish men, certifying them as essential and skilled workers regardless of their actual backgrounds. This kind of work permit protected the worker, his wife and two of his children from the SS sweeps carried out in the Wilna Ghetto in which Jews without work papers were captured and killed at the nearby Paneriai execution grounds. Plagge gave out 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.

In September 1943 it became apparent to Plagge that the Wilna Ghetto was soon to be liquidated: all the remaining Jews in the ghetto were to be taken by the SS, regardless of any working papers they had. During this crucial period Plagge made extraordinary bureaucratic efforts to form a free standing HKP 562 Slave Labor Camp on the outskirts of Vilnius, overcoming considerable resistance from local SS officers. On September 16, 1943, Plagge transported over 1,000 of his Jewish workers and their families from the Wilna Ghetto to the newly erected HKP camp on Subocz street, where they remained in relative safety when the Wilna Ghetto was liquidated by the SS less than ten days later. Conditions in the camp were relatively benign, with decent working conditions, adequate food, and—thanks to Plagge’s orders to treat the “civilians” with respect—almost no brutality by the German soldiers. In spite of the general benevolence of Plagge and his men, the fate of the camp’s Jews was ultimately in the hands of the SS, which did enter the camp on two occasions to commit atrocities. In November 1943, a Jewish prisoner named David Zalkind, his wife, and child attempted to escape from the camp and were captured by the Gestapo. They were publicly executed in the camp courtyard in front of the other prisoners. Most horribly, on March 27, 1944, while Plagge was away in Germany on home leave, the SS entered the camp and carried out a “Kinder Aktion”—a roundup of children in which the vast majority of the camp’s 250 children were captured and taken to their deaths. Thus both Plagge and the prisoners understood that ultimately the fate of the camp’s Jews was to be decided by the SS.

As the summer of 1944 approached, the Soviet Red Army advanced to the outskirts of Vilnius and it became clear that before too long they would capture the area from the Germans. This was a time fraught with danger for the Jews of the HKP camp, as they understood that before a German retreat, the SS would undoubtedly kill any Jewish slave laborers who might be left behind. Many of the Jews made preparations for this eventuality by creating hiding places throughout the camp in secret bunkers, hidden spaces in walls, and in the rafters of the attic. A large and crucial unknown was one of timing—the prisoners needed to know when the SS killing squads were coming so they could successfully implement plans to escape or hide. On July 1, 1944, Major Plagge entered the camp and as the prisoners gathered around him he made an informal speech. In the presence of an SS officer, he told them that he and his men were being relocated to the west, and that in spite of his requests, he could not get permission to take his skilled Jewish workers with his unit. He told them that 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.” With this covert warning from Plagge, over half the camp’s prisoners went into hiding before the SS death squads arrived on July 3, 1944. The 500 prisoners who did appear at roll call were taken to the forest of Paneriai and shot. Over the next three days the SS searched the camp and its surroundings and succeeded in finding half the missing prisoners; these 250 Jews were shot in the camp courtyard. However, when the Red Army captured Vilnius a few days later, some 250 of the camp’s Jews emerged from hiding.

Executions in Vilnius and environs occurred primarily at the Paneriai (Ponary) mass-execution site, where 100,000 people where murdered, mostly by a shot in the head, and their bodies left to fall in mass graves.^{[citation needed]} About 90,000 of these people were Jews of Lithuanian and other nationality; yet others were deported to Nazi extermination camps. Plagge attempted to spare as many as he could from this fate by purposely recruiting Jews instead of Poles for labor. His success, however, was only partial: His unit had to retreat, thereby removing the slave-labor framework that had protected them until that point. The SS murdered over 1,000^{[verification needed]} of Plagge’s slave-laborers during the last three days of the German occupation of Lithuania.^{[citation needed]}

The efficacy of Plagge’s endeavor to save Jews through the administrative cloak of employing them as slave labor manifested itself in a death rate of 80% among those he hired compared to the much higher 95–97% rate—virtual annihilation—common among the rest of Lithuanian Jewry. Though some of Vilnius’s Jews managed to escape death by fleeing into the forests, the Jews of the HKP camp constituted the largest single group of survivors of the genocide there.

Plagge’s efforts are corroborated by survivor testimony and Plagge’s own use of Camus’s story of the Plague to explain his experience. He did this through the character Dr. Rieux and his hopeless fight against an epidemic of the disease in a long letter he wrote about a year before his 1957 death.^{[citation needed]}

After the war, Karl Plagge returned home to Darmstadt, Germany, where he was put on trial in 1947 as part of the postwar denazification process. The outcome of his trial was positively influenced by the testimony of some of his former prisoners who heard of the charges against him and sent representatives to testify on his behalf. After the trial Plagge lived out the final years of his life quietly and without fanfare before dying of an apparent brain tumor in Darmstadt in July 1957.

HKP survivor Pearl Good points to Karl Plagge’s name on the Wall of the Righteous at Yad Vashem

Entrance of the Major Karl Plagge caserne

In 2005 he was bestowed the “Righteous Among the Nations” title by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.

In February 2006 the former Frankensteinkaserne, a Bundeswehr base in Pfungstadt, Germany, was renamed the Karl-Plagge-Kaserne.

• Good, Dr. Michael: The Search For Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews. Fordham University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8232-2440-6
• March 2005 NY Times article on Karl Plagge posted by Holocaust Survivors’ Network with an additional insert from Yad Vashem
• Yad Vashem press release on Karl Plagge
• BBC article on Karl Plagge
• Deutsche Welle article on Karl Plagge

• Wilna Ghetto
• HKP 562 Slave Labor Camp
• Oskar Schindler
• Wilm Hosenfeld

• Chronicles of the Vilna Ghetto: wartime photographs & documents - vilnaghetto.com
• Michael Good’s AOL Hometown page for his book The Search for Major Plagge
• German Army Major Karl Plagge, an Unlikely Hero of the Holocaust
• Letters written by Karl Plagge, English & German (Opens an MS-Word file)
• Yad Vashem: Holocaust Remembrance