Karl Plagge (pronounced [kaʁl ˈplaɡə] ; 10 July 1897 – 19 June 1957) was a German officer who rescued Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania by issuing work permits to non-essential workers. A partially disabled veteran of World War I, Plagge studied engineering and joined the Nazi Party in 1931 in hopes of helping Germany rebuild from the economic collapse following the war. 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.
During World War II, he used his position as a staff officer in the German Army to employ and protect Jews in the Vilna Ghetto. At first, Plagge employed Jews who lived inside the ghetto, but when the ghetto was slated for liquidation in September 1943, he set up the HKP 562 forced labor camp, where he saved many male Jews by issuing them official work permits on the false premise that their holders' skills were vital for the German war effort, and also made efforts to save the worker's wives and children by claiming they would work better if their families were alive. Through these efforts he was able to protect over 1250 Jews from the genocide occurring in Vilna until the final days of the German occupation. Although unable to stop the SS from liquidating the remaining prisoners in July 1944, Plagge managed to warn the prisoners of the imminent arrival of SS killing squads, allowing about 200 to successfully hide from the SS and survive until the Red Army's capture of Vilnius. Of 100,000 pre-war Jews in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived, of which the largest single group were saved by Plagge.
Plagge was tried before an Allied denazification court in 1947, which accepted his plea to be classified as a "fellow traveler" of the Nazi Party, whose rescue activities were undertaken for humanitarian reasons rather than overt opposition to Nazism. Survivors he rescued testified on his behalf. Plagge died ten years after the trial.
According to historian Kim Priemel, the success of Plagge's rescue efforts was due to working within the system to save Jews, a position that required him to enter a "grey zone" of moral compromise. In 2000, the story of his rescues was uncovered by the son of a survivor of HKP 562. In 2005, after two unsuccessful petitions, the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem recognized him as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations".
Plagge was born to a Prussian family in Darmstadt, Germany, on 10 July 1897; many of his ancestors had been military doctors. Plagge's father died in 1904, leaving Plagge, his mother, and his older sister.
After graduating from Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium, where a bust and memorial plaque honor him today, a secondary school that focused on the classics, Plagge was drafted into the Imperial German Army. He fought as a lieutenant in World War I on the Western Front, participating in the battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Flanders. Imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-war camp from 1917 to 1920, he caught polio and became disabled in his left leg.
Upon his release, Plagge studied chemical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, graduating in 1924. He had wanted to study medicine but was prevented from the longer study program required due to his family's financial problems. After graduating, he married Anke Madsen, but the couple had to live with his mother due to their finances. Unemployed, he ran a pharmaceutical laboratory from the house.
He was ideologically a national conservative, but joined the Nazi Party on 1 December 1931. Many years later, during his denazification trial, Plagge stated that he was initially drawn to the promises of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to rebuild the German economy and national pride, which suffered during the years that Germany experienced after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Between 1931 and 1933, Plagge worked as a local organizer for the party.
He came into conflict with the leadership of the party after 1933 when Hitler seized power. 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. Instead of leaving the party, he attempted to effect change from within, accepting a position as a scientific lecturer and leader of a Nazi educational institute in Darmstadt. Because he refused to teach Nazi racial ideology, he was dismissed from his position in 1935. 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. Instead, Plagge ceased his activity with the party, disenchanted with Nazism.
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. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Plagge became the godfather of Hesse's son Konrad. The same year, Plagge took over as chief engineer of the Hessenwerks.
Plagge was drafted into the Wehrmacht (German Army) as a captain in the reserve at the beginning of World War II, 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". 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.
Plagge gave 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 up to two of his children from the SS sweeps carried out in the Vilna Ghetto, in which Jews without work papers were captured and killed at the nearby Ponary execution grounds. As a work assignment, HKP 562 was particularly sought after by Jews because of Plagge's efforts to treat his workers well. Plagge also made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht. Plagge was the "quasi-sovereign" of his unit, retaining his independence so long as the repair work got done, and worked to insulate his workers from the genocide perpetrated by the SS. He reassigned antisemitic or violent subordinates so that they did not interact with Jewish workers and turned a blind eye to the smuggling and black market that kept the workers alive. During the autumn of 1941, when many Jews were rounded up and shot in "Aktions", Plagge's workshop was the fourth-largest employer of Jews in Vilnius, with 261 work permits allocated.
When his workers were captured during sweeps, Plagge attempted to free them from Lukiškės Prison before they could be executed at Ponary. If only a few Jews were arrested, he sent a subordinate. However, in late 1941, 70 Jewish workers and their families were arrested. Plagge exaggerated their importance to the war effort and managed to secure the release of all of them. In 1942, 200 Jews working for Plagge were rounded up for deportation. Plagge argued with SS-Obersturmführer Rolf Neugebauer in an attempt to secure their release, but was unable to save them. In 1943, after negotiations with the SS, Plagge was able to expand his workforce from 394 Jews in July to more than 1,000 when the ghetto was liquidated in September.
In the aftermath of the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising and an increase in Soviet partisan activity, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, decided to liquidate all Nazi ghettos, regardless of the slave labor they provided to the Wehrmacht's war effort. 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. Plagge, who had been promoted to major, secured permission from the SS to establish a Juden-KZ for HKP 562 on Subocz Street on the outskirts of Vilnius. HKP 562 was the only Wehrmacht unit allowed to retain Jewish workers. On 1 September, about 300 of Plagge's workers were seized by the SS for transportation to the Klooga concentration camp. Plagge went to the train station to argue with an SS non-commissioned officer, Bruno Kittel, who was in charge of the liquidation. Initially able to secure their release, Plagge left the Jews with subordinates, but Kittel's superior officer, SS-Obersturmführer Rolf Neugebauer, ordered them to be deported anyway. Plagge attempted to contact Neugebauer, but was unable to, and the Jews were all deported to Klooga. He then ordered his subordinates to recruit other Jewish workers to replace those who had been deported.