The story of the German officer Karl Plagge saving 1257 Jews, which circulated for decades after the end of World War II, was not officially recognized by Israel until 2005, and his name was engraved in the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, but the doubts did not end there, from Germany to Israel, some people insisted that it was just a legend, and the time passed another 10 years, and in 2015, historian Richard S. Professor Freund led an archaeological team to Vilnius, Lithuania, to search for the truth of more than seventy years ago according to legend.
Using scanners, thermal imaging cameras, and radar, Freud's team found the holes and tunnels of the year, and found the legendary wall mezzanines, which were scattered around Subots Street, where the chariot repair battalion commanded by Major Carl Plager was stationed on this street, and a local man in his nineties took the initiative to find them, confirming that Major Prager had indeed saved people here, however, he also pointed out that there was a mass grave near the chariot repair camp, where about 400 Jews were buried.
Who is Carl Plage
Karl Plager was born into a military family, but he was not a typical Prussian soldier, several of his ancestors were military doctors, Plager fought in World War I, graduated from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1924 with a degree in chemical engineering, after the post-war Economic Depression in Germany, Prager had to run a pharmaceutical laboratory at home, and in 1931 he voluntarily joined the Nazi Party, two years before Hitler came to power.
With the rapid expansion of the Nazi Party, Plager soon became the local leader, but when Hitler came to power, Prager's attitude became negative, and he stubbornly criticized the Nazi views from the perspective of modern science, believing that Hitler's racial theory was absurd, and in 1935 Plager was dismissed from his post and subsequently served as the chief engineer of a company.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Plag was again drafted as a reserve officer, and in 1941 he was appointed commander of the 562nd Tank Repair Battalion, stationed in Vilnius, lithuania, where the number of people in the Jewish ghetto had exceeded 100,000.
Carl Prager
Before the outbreak of World War II, Vilnius was one of the largest Jewish centers in Europe, known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania", its inhabitants were mainly composed of Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Lithuanian natives accounted for only 6% of the city's population, but became a minority, the city's high society industry and commerce were all controlled by Jews and Poles, it is obvious that there is a fuse between them.
On June 22, 1941, the day after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, a nationwide uprising broke out in Lithuania, and Lithuanians from all over the country organized to attack the Soviet army, and with their help, the German army occupied Vilnius with zero casualties.
Next, there was a sea of blood
History is still debated as to who was the first to carry out the massacre of Jews, with the first shot fired by the SS who followed the Wehrmacht, but some say it was the Lithuanian natives who took the lead.
Before the Nazi death camp system was perfected, the SS slaughtered in addition to machine-gun fire, throwing grenades, high explosives, or simply throwing people into barns and pouring gasoline.
In July 1941, shortly after the opening of Oskar Schindler's Krakow enamel factory, he had only heard of the massacres, but Plager had already witnessed what his fellow Germans were doing. He was the same as the former's ideological transformation, but because of his status, Prager was much more cautious than Schindler, first, he transferred the anti-Judean soldiers in the army on the grounds of promotion, and then he urgently demanded that his superiors increase the number of skilled workers, and when the superiors told him that he could not solve the problem for the time being, Prager mentioned the Jews.
In Vilnius at that time, Jews without work documents, who did not survive for more than a week, would be taken to the suburbs near the train station and shot.
The Germans occupied Lithuania
Prag quietly selected "skilled workers" from among Jews, but in fact, according to one Jewish survivor, his father could not change even a light bulb, her mother would only sew clothes, Prag recruited as many Jews as possible almost indiscriminately, he turned a blind eye to the smuggling of food black markets, and what was more, his attitude toward Soviet prisoners of war was so astonishing to his IDF colleagues that when these people were finished, Prager almost let them roam freely.
Before each SS operation, Prag would work overtime to issue work permits, and once he successfully issued 261 work permits, which repeatedly made Prag bold, and whenever Jews were arrested, he would send people to negotiate, and at the end of 1941 about 70 Jews were arrested in a mop-up, and Plager went straight to the Gestapo headquarters, argued with the commander for more than an hour, and finally got the other side to agree to his request.
Incidentally, in the "democratic ethos" of Nazi Germany at that time, a school-level officer could have a long debate with Himmler, and it was not uncommon for Hillert to be confronted.
However, there was a limit to this, and Prag's actions finally angered the Gestapo commander Rudolf Neugbauer, who was 15 years younger than Prag and belonged to the generation that grew up after World War I, and Newgbauer respected Plager, a World War I veteran, but the latter repeatedly violated his jurisdiction and almost blatantly defended the Jews. In 1942, Prag asked him to release another 200 Jews, this time ignoring Ituer. A few months later, however, Prag bypassed him and won over more than 800 Jews.
Newgbauer, who could change the number of Jews in Vilnius from 100,000 to 2,000, shot the Jewish leader Jacob Kings with his own hands. But he was helpless against Prag, and even though he knew that the Jews who were still alive in Vilnius were almost all hiding in Prag's barracks.
At this point, good and evil seem to have been clearly distinguished.
But one of the points of contention among postwar historians was the true relationship between Prager and Neugbauer, were they really rivals? Or is there some kind of tacit understanding in the opposition? Why did the Holocaust Memorial twice reject Prager's status as a "righteous man"?
An SS member mentioned something in the post-war trial: In November 1943, a Jewish prisoner named David Zalkingd, with his wife and children, was executed by German soldiers, and the SS member said with some contempt: "We listened to Major Plager, so we executed them."
Another event, in March 1943, Prager suddenly offered to return to His country on leave, at the height of the Nazi Holocaust, when many Jews begged him to stay, but he left flatly, and the day after he left, on March 27, the SS took away about 250 Elderly Jewish men and children, all of whom were executed near the train station.
If the above can only be regarded as an accident or an isolated case, then what happened in the summer of 1944 is a public case, as the Soviet army is approaching, Prag publicly announces the dissolution of the camp, and the Jewish survivors remember his speech at that time: "You Jews, the workers will also be transferred, you are highly specialized workers who are useful to the German army, you will be reassigned to the HKP unit, and during this evacuation, the SS will escort you, an organization dedicated to the protection of refugees." So, there's nothing to worry about. ”
It's hard to believe that Jews who had lived through three years of massacre would believe such words, but when they came out of Prager's mouth, they had an unexpected effect, and the next morning, about 500 Jews appeared at the meeting point on time, but waiting for them was not trucks, but SS machine gun fire.
After the war, witnesses recalled that Prager had specifically told them: "No luggage".
With the death of Gestapo commander Neugbauer in December 1944 in Budapest, Hungary, the truth of the tragedy became headless.
After the war, Plager was arrested by the Allies, but was soon released, and he died of illness in his hometown of Darmstadt in 1957 at the age of 60.
Since then, few people have spoken about what happened in this small Baltic country, and as for Major Plage, there are only some sporadic legends.
Enigmatic Plage
Nearly fifty years later, in 1993, when the movie "Schindler's List" was released, a Jewish survivor in Vilnius, Perl Goode, could not calm down after watching it, she told her family the story of Major Prag, her son Mike wanted to know what really happened, they went to Vilnius, interviewed the local elderly, these people only know that there was a Major Prag, but what it is called, which unit, almost no one can say clearly. Mike rushed to Germany again, consulted the personnel files of the Wehrmacht, and finally found Prager.
Mike and his mother formed an organization called the Prager Group, and together with the survivors of the year, petitioned the Israeli Holocaust Memorial to declare Prag the "International Righteous."
The application was quickly rejected.
When they applied for the second time, the memorial gave reasons, and they suspected that Prag's actions were most likely purely to improve the productivity of the German logistics department, and his motives to protect the Jews were not as great as they thought, although there was no direct evidence that he had participated in the massacre, but it was certain that he had compromised and acquiesced to the atrocities of the SS.
It can only be said that he is a not-so-bad German.
However, to judge whether Prag was fair in today's eyes, let's go back to 1941.
Lithuania's population was 4.25 million in 1941 and has recovered to 2.79 million by 2020, thanks in large part to Hitler.
More than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were exterminated, and the method of slaughter was different from the gas chambers in the Schindler's List, not only the SS execution team, but also a large number of local Lithuanian volunteers, who armed with wooden sticks, knives, axes and other cold weapons, and the blood on the hands of the murderers was so great that it was difficult to separate from the murder weapons.
While the SS firing squads attacked only men, the Lithuanian Volunteers, men, women and children, even deliberately demonstrated the slaughter to SS soldiers to prove that their courage surpassed that of the Germans.
Let's take a look at an eyewitness testimony
"A Jewish woman with two children was walking down the street, the children clutched the corners of her clothes, and suddenly a Lithuanian rushed out of the crowd, he raised a wooden stick and beat them hard, a Jewish man tried to stop him, a gunshot, he fell, and then the Lithuanians grabbed the two children and threw them into the pit, their mother chased them up like crazy, and I heard three gunshots."
In a high-level meeting record left by the German command, it can be seen that the German generals could not look at it anymore, and they suggested that the massacre should be stopped immediately, and what happened in Lithuania was really disgusting.
Persecution of Jews in Lithuania
The Japanese vice-consul in Lithuania, Chiba Sugihara, who had a premonition that the situation was not good a year ago, began to secretly issue visas to the Jews, and a month before he left his post, Sugihara hand-wrote visas day and night, and finally simply handed over the official seal to the Jews, and on the day of his departure, a large number of Jews flocked to the train station, which was their last chance, Sugihara threw the blank form with his signature out of the window, and threw a copy until the train started.
At the same time, in the most notorious massacre in Vilnius, several "celebrities" were born, some of which were put on the screen after the war.
SS officer Bruno Kittel, once he went to shave, after shaving he handed the Jewish barber a cigarette, and then kindly asked the other party if he wanted a fire, the barber nodded happily, and Kitel pulled out his pistol and fired a shot in the man's face. Another time Kitter was sitting in the courtyard playing the piano, a Jewish boy passed by, Kittel did not stop playing, he played the piano with his left hand, raised the gun in his right hand, the Jewish boy begged him for forgiveness, Kittel laughed and shot him.
SS officer Martin Weiss, nicknamed "Black and White Martin", has similarities with the black and white impermanence of China, commanded by him, and was witnessed by the survivors at least 15 times, Martin killed people completely depending on the mood, when in a good mood turned a blind eye to smuggling activities in the quarantine area, when he was in a bad mood, he would suddenly pull out his gun and kill a man with potatoes or fish, he was known for his cruelty and moodiness, even his subordinates were afraid, When the Nazi hierarchy ordered in 1943 that thousands of decomposing bodies buried be exhumed and burned, they first thought of Martin, a job that ordinary SS members had difficulty doing.
The Germans cleared the ghetto
SS officer Franz Müller, known as the "Butcher of Vilnius", who managed 80,000 Jews and only 250 remained at the end of the war, Mueller was arrested by the British after the war, then handed over to the Soviets, released in 1955, and tried Müller in an Austrian court in 1963, becoming one of the largest judicial scandals in the history of the country, even though dozens of survivors testified in court, Müller was eventually acquitted, and this trial was adapted into the 2018 film "Mueller, Trial Unchained".
There is evidence that Prager and all three had "intimate" contact, even acquaintances or friends, and it was through them and the Gestapo commander Neugbauer that Plage rescued 1257 Jews, and on September 1, 1943, Bruno Kittel arrested 300 Jews, who would soon be sent to death camps, and Plager rushed to the train station to temporarily leave them behind.
Some Jewish historians argue that Prag lacked a clear stand, was ambiguous with the Nazi executioners, and did not take a clear stand against the Holocaust, but could he behave in such a time, in that place, in that "German comrade-in-arms"?
Speaking of which, it is necessary to mention one more person, Jacob Kings, the Jewish leader of Vilnius, who, like Prag, was not allowed to enter the Holocaust Memorial in Israel.
Jacob Kings's actions toward his fellow Jews are still hard for israelis to let go of, and he assists the Germans in arresting, interrogating, torturing, betraying the leaders of underground resistance groups, and sending the old, sick, sick and disabled to the Germans for massacre.
For decades after the war, Jacob Kings was considered the Nazis' most loyal lackey, synonymous with treachery, but survivors seem to be avoiding the fact that in September 1943, Jacob Kings was shot dead by the Gestapo.
Lithuanian police and Jews
Until recent years, when holocaust survivors had died, and the rest were in their nineties, some people began to whisper that Kings was not actually a bad person, that he had protected the underground resistance, secretly delivered weapons to them, and ordered the police to beat up the smuggled food, but as long as the Germans were not present, he pretended not to see it.
Kings handed over some of the old, sick and disabled, and if he didn't, the Germans would kill everyone.
Everything Kings did, he was trying to preserve as many of his fellow Jews as possible,
The Gestapo saw through his motives and killed him.
However, Kings was not rehabilitated, and some commented that he was arbitrary, abusive, and selfish, and some survivors still grumbled that they remembered that Kings wore different armbands than they did, did not have to live in a harsh quarantine area, and ate much better than they did.
They seem to have forgotten that without Kings, they wouldn't have had the opportunity to criticize him today.
Kings and Prager, two people who can't be remembered because they didn't sacrifice themselves to save others.
In 2004, the "Prager Group" launched the third petition, and the memorial held a lengthy discussion, and finally, by way of voting, somewhat reluctantly, recognized Prag's "righteous" status.
Former site of the Ghetto of Vilnius
Prag may be relieved in heaven, but is he a hero? There are still doubts about his motives and whether he has enough conscience, and it has been revealed that Prager's tank repair battalion has long supplied vehicles for the Holocaust. Conscience, however, can be defined differently, and in 1942, in Vilnius, where Plage was stationed, Wehrmacht Sergeant Anton Schmid was executed for aiding the Jews, on the charge of "lack of loyalty and conscience to the Third Reich."
Most SS executioners did not like their jobs, and before the war they were workers, peasants, students, intellectuals with no criminal record, who, out of "loyalty and conscience" to the Third Reich and the Fuehrer, did this dirty work with their noses pinched. Even Himmler had worried about the mental problems of these people.
Prager did not consider himself a hero either, and in a letter to a friend a year before his death, he described himself as Dr. Michael, the master of the French novel The Plague, who tried his best to save the sick, but often felt useless and had to watch the patients die one by one, just like himself.
Prager is the last of more than eight hundred "righteous" names enshrined in the Holocaust Memorial Hall in Jerusalem today, and he is known as the "Schindler of Lithuania", but the name of Jacob Kings is still rejected.