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Karl Plagge

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Military Personnel

The Resume

    (July 10, 1897-June 19, 1957)
    Born in Darmstadt, Germany
    Engineer and German army officer
    Commanded HKP 562 (Army Motor Vehicle Repair Park 562), a forced labor camp near VIlnius, Lithuania
    Attempted to protect Jewish workers in the camp from the SS
    Approximately 200 to 250 Jewish men, women, and children from the camp survived the war
    Named Righteous Among the Nations (2005)

Why he might be annoying:

    When he married, he and his wife had to live with her parents because of his lack of a job.
    He joined the Nazi Party (1931) and worked as a local organizer.
    At HKP 562, he was responsible for the maintenance and repair of trucks used to transport Jews to concentration camps.
    As commander of HKP 562, he signed off on the execution of a worker and his family caught trying to escape the camp.
    The first petition to recognize him as Righteous Among the Nations was rejected by Yad Vashem (the official Israeli memorial to the Holocaust) with the comment, 'We fail to understand what possible risks he had to fear from his superiors.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    His left leg became disabled after he contracted polio while in a British POW camp during World War I.
    He was fired from the Nazi educational institute in Darmstadt when he refused to teach Nazi racial ideology (1935).
    He gave Jewish men, regardless of their skills, certificates identifying them as workers essential to the war effort, protecting them from roundups by the SS in the ghetto.
    When the Vilnius ghetto was liquidated (September, 1943), he arranged for 1,000 Jewish workers and their families to be transferred to barracks at HKP 562.
    He warned the workers about the imminent liquidation of HKP 562, with some 200 to 250 successfully hiding until the arrival of the Red Army (July 13, 1944).
    The survivors of HKP 562 were the single largest group of survivors from the Vilnius ghetto.
    He said, 'I have never felt that this work took special courage.... Basically, I am not a hero, but a rather timid person.'

Credit: C. Fishel


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Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 5 Votes: 60.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 12 Votes: 0% Annoying