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. A local party official accused Plagge of being on good terms with Jews and Freemasons, treating Jews in his home laboratory, and opposing the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, threatening to bring Plagge before a party tribunal. After being dismissed from the position of lecturer for being unwilling to teach racism and his opposition to Nazi racial policies, he stopped participating in party activities in 1935 and left the party when the war broke out. Michael Good has appeared on C-SPAN, as a speaker in Israel, and in Germany and in schools, libraries, churches and synagogues across the United States. Moreover, it takes perhaps a bit of goodwill, occasionally a good idea, and dedication to the task at hand.

It concludes with some thought as to his motivation, and the account of how the 'Plagge group' fought for official recognition of his endeavours. This expanded edition features new photographs and a new epilogue on the impact of the discovery of Karl Plagge―especially the story of 83-year-old Alfons von Deschwanden, who, after fifty years of silence, came forward as a veteran of Plagge’s unit. This is an exceptional story of one man’s bravery and compassion in a world where six million Jews were murdered. 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. The SS arrived on July 3, 1944 and took 500 prisoners to the forest of Peneriai where they were killed.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. Later, he would come to say ”I didn’t pay any party contribution…I had come to clear opposition to the nationalist socialist methods of violence”. Apparently, approximately 40,000 members of the German army were executed during WWII for expressing similar sentiments!

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

After the trial, Plagge lived the final decade of his life quietly and died of a heart attack in Darmstadt on 19 June 1957. Major Plagge stood out from other Nazi's and that was the problem that the Allies never confronted head on. When the German army is thrown back from the East, Plagge, still following his own mandate to minimize the number of casualties, surrender his whole unit to the allied forces, with the result that not a single one of his sub-ordinates, finds the chance of a `hero's death'! With an SS officer at his side, he told the inmates that they "will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS, which, as you know, is an organisation devoted to the protection of refugees.

By the third application, I was able to come up with cases and specific instances in which he surely was risking his life. 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. The documentary tells a good story about one courageous man who found a few other good men to provide a safe haven for a few hundred Jewish prisoners who found jobs as auto mechanics even though they had to learn about auto repair starting from scratch. As the story unfolds, we come to understand why Plagge, after the war, was still conflicted and filled with guilt.After leaving Vilnius, Plagge led his unit westward and surrendered to the United States Army on 2 May 1945 without suffering a single casualty. Knowing that the camp would be liquidated before the Red Army arrived, the Jews made hiding places in the camp in secret bunkers, in walls, and in the rafters of the attic. During the post-WWI period, he became disillusioned with the political situation in Germany, and actually joined the Nazi party in 1931, believing Hitler's promises of a better future! On multiple occasions, HKP 562 loaned trucks and drivers to the SS to transport Jews to Ponary for execution.

It required only the conviction and strength that anyone can draw from the depth of moral feelings that exists in all humans.Plagge exaggerated their importance to the war effort and managed to secure the release of all of them. It seems there could have been a unifying story line more along the lines of a screen play which integrates the stories the author discovers after the story of his mother concludes. It was during this trip that he heard the story of the enigmatic officer named Major Plagge who his mother claimed had saved her life.