Karl Plagge (10 July 1897 – 19 June 1957) was a German military officer who saved Jews from being exterminated during the Holocaust.
Biography[]
Plagge was born in the German city of Darmstadt in 1897. His father died when he was around seven years old, leaving behind Karl, his mother and his sister. On graduating from school, Plagge was drafted into the German army and served in the First World War, during which he was captured by the British and became disabled in his left leg from a polio infection.
After being released from British custody in the 1920s Plagge attended the Darmstadt Technological University for four years and attained a degree in chemical engineering. He married a woman named Anke Madsen but the two of them had a poor financial situation due to both being unemployed and were forced to live with Plagge's mother.
Plagge was deeply concerned about the state of the German economy and in 1931, despite his moderate political views, he joined the far-right group known as the Nazi Party after being drawn to its seeming patriotism and promises to rebuild the economy. He worked as a local organiser for the party until 1933, when the party's leader Adolf Hitler seized control of Germany. Plagge was disgusted by the new regime's racism, corruption and killing of its political opponents and decided to try and change the system from within. He accepted a position as scientific lecturer at a Nazi school in Darmstadt, but was fired in 1935 because he refused to teach that non-white people were inferior. Plagge later left the party altogether after it was discovered that he opposed the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.
When Hitler's invasion of Poland led to the start of the Second World War in 1939, Plagge was again drafted into the German army. Witnessing Nazi atrocities against the Jewish populations of Poland and Lithuania, he decided that he needed to actively work against the Nazis. In 1941 he was placed in charge of HKP 562, an engineering unit that repaired military vehicles. While in charge of the unit, Plagge regularly issued papers to Jewish prisoners in the Vilna Ghetto that stated they were doing essential work as part of HKP 562. These papers protected the holders and their families from being killed, and Plagge's superiors didn't care how many he issued as long as work was done. Whenever one of Plagge's workers was rounded up by the Nazis, Plagge would intervene and persuade the authorities to spare them. On one occasion he was able to free a group of seventy Jewish men and their families by claiming that they were vital to the war effort.
In September 1943 the Nazis decided to exterminate all inmates of the Vilna Ghetto regardless of their importance due to Vilna's extensive underground resistance movement. Three hundred of Plagge's workers were arrested and deported to concentration camps, despite Plagge negotiating with the officers in charge of the operation. As the ghetto was being liquidated, however, Plagge was able to negotiate with the Nazis to expand HKP 562's workforce to include thousands of Jews, who he relocated from the ghetto to a newly-built prison camp specifically for them. He was also able to get the worker's families transferred there by arguing that separating workers from their wives and children would demoralise them. A week after the transfer, the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated and the Jews imprisoned there were wiped out. Shortly afterwards, one hundred Jews who had survived were captured. Although the Nazis planned to kill them, Plagge claimed that HKP needed more workers and was able to get them brought into the HKP camp. Other Jews who had avoided capture were secretly smuggled in and passed off as workers by Plagge. At its peak, the population of the facility was 1,250. Only 60% of these prisoners actually did any real work; Plagge established other roles for the remainder while still insisting that all of them were essential to the war effort.
Many of the Jews held at HKP did not survive the war, as the Nazi paramilitaries known as the SS would sometimes execute them, and Plagge was unable to do anything to prevent this. On one occasion 250 Jews (many of them children) were rounded up and killed by the SS while Plagge was absent on home leave. Plagge said on learning this that he would have tried to prevent it if he had known it was happening.
In 1944 the Russian army advanced towards Vilnius and the Germans were forced to retreat. The HKP camp was declared dissolved, and Plagge was refused permission to take the inmates elsewhere as he was known to be sympathetic to them. The inmates of the camp were forced to make hiding places inside the camp so that the SS would not be able to find them. Although the Nazis were able to find and execute most of them, between 150 and 200 Jews managed to survive until the Russians liberated them.
When they departed from Vilnius, Plagge led his unit east and surrendered to the American army on May 2, 1945, just a few days before Germany officially surrendered. After the war, Plagge's early association with the Nazis and former status as commander of the HKP camp led him to be arrested and put on trial in Germany in 1947. After survivors of HKP revealed Plagge's actions in a local newspaper, the court classed Plagge as a "fellow traveller" and he was released. Plagge lived out the rest of his life peacefully and ultimately died at his home in 1957.
Trivia[]
- Plagge was formerly a Christian, but stopped believing in God after witnessing the brutality of the Nazis.