Plagge, 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. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and worked to further 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 in the local party apparatus. [2] Service in Lithuania [ ] Care for his workers [ ] Eppelbaum, L.V. Archaeological Geophysics. In Geophysical Potential Fields; Elsevier: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2019. [ Google Scholar]

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] Plagge's godson Konrad Hesse will be at today's ceremony, along with the Good family and survivors of Subocz Street. About a dozen plan to go on to the major's home town, Darmstadt, to honour him there. Pearl remembered how her blood ran cold at this message. Within those measured words, she realized, was a hidden warning to the Jews to save their lives by going into hiding. My name is Pearl (Perela) Esterowicz. My parents, Ida Gerstein Esterowicz and Samuel Esterowicz, and I survived three years of German Occupation in Vilnius that annihilated the city’s Jews. Barrera, F.B.; Pardo, J.F.J. Geoarchaeology as Geoarchaeology. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. Sci. 2020, 2, 319–321. [ Google Scholar]

After having hired endangered Jews in the Vilna Ghetto to work in his unit's workshops from 1941 to 1943, thereby protecting the workers and their families from the murderous activities of the SS, the HKP camp was hastily erected in September 1943 when Plagge learned of the impending liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, where all inhabitants were to be killed regardless of their work papers. For further information, please see enclosed denazification files of Karl Plagge, which contain many more testimonies to his rescuing help and protection of Jews, at the risk of his life. According to the testimonies of survivors, the Nazis executed hundreds of prisoners on the side of the Western building where bodies were then hastily buried in shallow pits. Good, Michael (2005). The Search For Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews. Fordham: Fordham University Press. ISBN 0-8232-2440-6.

I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives. What more did you need?" said Dr Good. Arad, Y. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Revised and Expanded Edition: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka; Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN, USA, 2018. [ Google Scholar] Unfortunately, most of us could not escape the camp. We could either hide in previously prepared malinas (hiding places) , as my parents and I did, or just await our fate. In spite of all of Plagge’s efforts, only 150-200 of us survived. March 2005 NY Times article on Karl Plagge posted by Holocaust Survivors’ Network with an additional insert from Yad Vashem And you know full well how well the S.S. takes care of their Jewish prisoners…” Plagge added carefully.

Author Contributions

After leaving Vilnius, Plagge led his unit westward and surrendered to the United States Army on 2 May 1945 without suffering a single casualty. [33] Mirwis, A. Overlooked Reference Tools for Researching the Holocaust. Ref. Libr. 1998, 29, 227–234. [ Google Scholar] [ CrossRef] After the war Plagge returned to Darmstadt where he passed away on June 19, 1957. Almost 50 years on, on April 11 2005, he was posthumously awarded the title Righteous among the Peoples by Yad Vashem for his efforts to save Jews. His names now features on a memorial tablet in the Garden of the Righteous of the Holocaust Institut

I am living now three years in the East and work together with these people. A large quantity of my heart’s blood is in my work of keeping the camp running with [Jewish] labor. It is completely my work alone and will expire when I am no more. It is a piece of my life’s fulfillment. 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. Serving initially in Poland after the German invasion, he witnessed atrocities that caused him to decide "to work against the Nazis". [10] In 1941, he was put in command of an engineering unit, Heereskraftfahrpark 562 (vehicle maintenance unit 562, or HKP 562; literally, "Army motor-vehicle park"), which maintained and repaired military vehicles. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, HKP 562 was deployed to Vilna, Lithuania, in early July 1941. Plagge witnessed the genocide being carried out against the Jews of the area. [4] [11] Good, M. The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition; Fordham University Press: New York, NY, USA, 2006. [ Google Scholar] 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.The trial investigated this political history as well as the series of events that brought Plagge to Vilna as commandant of a slave labor camp. It elicited Plagge’s admission of shame and guilt at having contributed to the rise of the Nazi regime. 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.”

Though the camp’s official role was fixing military vehicles, Major Plagge found jobs for all. Dr. Good in a speech about the book “In Search of Major Plagge,” said his grandfather, Samuel Esterowicz, “couldn’t change a light bulb,” but was deemed “essential” by Major Plagge. In September 1943 it became clear to Plagge that the Vilna 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. 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. Evidence shows that he not only tried to protect his productive male workers, but also made vigorous efforts to protect the women and children in his camp, actively overcoming considerable resistance from local SS officers. [4] [5] On September 16, 1943, Plagge transported over 1,000 of his Jewish workers and their families from the Vilna Ghetto to the newly built HKP camp on Subocz Street, where they remained in relative safety. [6] Less than a week later, on September 23, 1943, the SS liquidated the Vilna Ghetto. The rest of Vilna's Jews were either executed immediately at the nearby execution grounds in the Paneriai (Ponary) Forest, or sent to death camps in Nazi occupied Europe. [7]In 1934, Plagge began to work at Hessenwerks, an engineering company run by Kurt Hesse, whose wife Erica was half-Jewish. By hiring a nominal Nazi, Hesse hoped to prevent the " Aryanization" of his business. [7] After Kristallnacht in 1938, Plagge became the godfather of Hesse's son Konrad. [8] The same year, Plagge took over as chief engineer of the Hessenwerks. [9] Service in Lithuania [ edit ] HKP 562 [ edit ] Lithuanian collaborator with Jewish prisoners, July 1941 About 500 prisoners got the message and hid or made their escape that night. Dr Good estimates that half survived. Daniel Fraenkel, a member of the Yad Vashem committee that made the decision, said he had been persuaded by "massive and multi-layered evidence".