1. At first, Karl 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 made efforts to save the worker's wives and children by claiming they would work better if their families were alive.
Karl 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.
Karl Plagge was born to a Prussian family in Darmstadt, Germany, on 10 July 1897; many of his ancestors had been military doctors.
Karl Plagge's father died in 1904, leaving Karl Plagge, his mother, and his older sister.
Karl Plagge fought as a lieutenant in World War I on the Western Front, participating in the battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Flanders.
Karl Plagge had wanted to study medicine but was prevented from the longer study program required due to his family's financial problems.
Karl Plagge was ideologically a national conservative, but joined the Nazi Party on 1 December 1931.
Many years later, during his denazification trial, Karl 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, Karl Plagge worked as a local organizer for the party.
Karl Plagge came into conflict with the leadership of the party after 1933 when Hitler seized power.
In 1934, Karl Plagge began to work at Hessenwerks, an engineering company run by Kurt Hesse, whose wife Erica was half-Jewish.
Karl Plagge was drafted into the Wehrmacht as a captain in the reserve at the beginning of World War II, and stopped paying Nazi Party membership fees at the same time.
Karl Plagge witnessed the genocide being carried out against the Jews of the area.
Karl Plagge gave work certificates to Jewish men, certifying them as essential and skilled workers regardless of their actual backgrounds.
Karl Plagge made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht.
Karl 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.
Karl Plagge 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.
When his workers were captured during sweeps, Karl Plagge attempted to free them from Lukiskes Prison before they could be executed at Ponary.
In 1942,200 Jews working for Karl Plagge were rounded up for deportation.
Karl Plagge argued with SS-Obersturmfuhrer Rolf Neugebauer in an attempt to secure their release, but was unable to save them.
In 1943, after negotiations with the SS, Karl Plagge was able to expand his workforce from 394 Jews in July to more than 1,000 when the ghetto was liquidated in September.
Karl 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.
Karl Plagge went to the train station to argue with an SS non-commissioned officer, Bruno Kittel, who was in charge of the liquidation.
Karl Plagge attempted to contact Neugebauer, but was unable to, and the Jews were all deported to Klooga.
Karl Plagge then ordered his subordinates to recruit other Jewish workers to replace those who had been deported.
On 16 September 1943, Karl Plagge transported over 1,000 of his Jewish workers and their families from the Vilna Ghetto to the newly built HKP camp at 37 Subocz Street, where they remained in relative safety.
Karl Plagge saved not only skilled male workers but their wives and children, arguing that the workers would not be motivated without their families.
Karl Plagge established various industries for the rest of his workers, including a rabbit farm, a nursery, and a carpenter's shop, declaring all of his workers essential to the war effort.
Karl Plagge strongly resisted the SS's efforts to remove these nonessential workers.
On 27 March 1944, while Karl Plagge was away on home leave in Germany, the SS carried out a Kinderaktion : they entered the camp, rounded up about 250 children and elderly Jews, and took them to Ponary for execution.
However, Karl Plagge's collaboration was "arguably a rational choice", because he was able to save more Jews than any other Wehrmacht rescuer in Vilnius.
The camp was to be dissolved; accused of being soft on Jews, Karl Plagge was forbidden to take them with his unit.
Originally a Lutheran, Karl Plagge lost his belief in God because of the atrocities that he witnessed during the Holocaust.
Karl Plagge eventually published the results of his research in 2005 as The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews.
The Karl Plagge Group disagreed, pointing out that Wehrmacht soldiers associating with Jews were threatened with being treated as Jews; indeed, Wehrmacht Sergeant Anton Schmid had been executed in 1942 for helping Jews in the Vilna Ghetto.
In 2004, the letter that Karl Plagge had written in 1956 to Strauss was discovered.
Karl Plagge's actions were very unusual: very few Wehrmacht soldiers helped Jews during the Holocaust.
The historian Kim Priemel, examining Wehrmacht rescuers in Vilnius, concludes that Karl Plagge "remained within a 'grey zone' of moral compromise, which was vital to the success of [his] rescue efforts".