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

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The front line is moving west and HKP's assignment is to always be a certain number of miles behind the front line. He did this by giving working certificates to Jewish men certifying them as essential and skilled workers regardless of their backgrounds.

In response to a question from the assembled Jews, Plagge added that there was no need to bring their luggage.On September 6th 1943, Plagge transported over 1000 of his Jewish workers and their families from the Vilnius ghetto to the new labor camp. On certain occasions, Plagge's policy of non-confrontation with the SS put him "in a catch-22 situation with serious moral implications", according to historian Kim Priemel.

Good became interested in Holocaust history in 1999 when he traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, with his parents to explore his family origins and hear their tales of survival during the Holocaust. Plagge's godson Konrad Hesse will be at today's ceremony, along with the Good family and survivors of Subocz Street. He then earned a medical degree at the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine, completed training in Family Medicine at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown CT and has practiced family medicine for over 25 years.However, they needed to know when the camp would be liquidated so they could implement their plans to escape or hide. After graduating, he married Anke Madsen, but the couple had to live with his mother due to their finances.

Another 100 Jews were smuggled in by the resistance movement with Plagge's acquiescence, and the population peaked at 1,250 early in 1944. The judges may have been reluctant to recognize the extent of Plagge's humanitarian achievements because they cast a bad light on the indifference of ordinary Germans to the Holocaust and the retention of Nazi judges in the postwar judicial system. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in this era or in the way people treat each other. The ceremony, held in Jerusalem on 11 April 2005, was attended by many survivors, Konrad Hesse, and a few members of Plagge's extended family.According to his later testimony, Plagge refused to accept Nazi racial theories, which he considered unscientific, and was disgusted by the persecution of political opponents and the corruption of many Nazi functionaries. 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. Following archaeological work done at the HKP 562 site in 2017, a documentary about Plagge and the camp, The Good Nazi, premiered in Vilnius the following year.

The SS wing of the Nazi party were particularly brutal and heartless and their behavior is chronicled here as well. He felt he had helped create this monster and that it was his duty to try to help these imperilled Jews. In particular, the Vilna Ghetto was seen as a threat because of its extensive underground movement and the proximity of partisans in the woods around the city. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The camp, which consisted of two multistory tenements originally constructed to house Jews on welfare, was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Lithuanian collaborators and SS men.Some of the men were genuine workers, but Plagge also took in hairdressers, academics, kitchen staff and the elderly. You will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS which, as you know, is an organization devoted to the protection of refugees. On multiple occasions, HKP 562 loaned trucks and drivers to the SS to transport Jews to Ponary for execution.