How do you save people when you are wearing the uniform of the very regime that wants them dead?
Today I want to find out a little bit about Karl Plagge, a German army officer who used his position in the Second World War to protect Jewish men, women and children in occupied Lithuania.
Karl was born in Darmstadt, Germany, on the 10th of July 1897. During the First World War, he served on the Western Front and was later held as a prisoner of war. While he was in captivity he contracted polio, which left him with a permanent disability in his left leg.
After returning home, Karl studied engineering and qualified in 1924. Like many Germans struggling through the difficult years that followed the First World War, he became attracted to the promises of national recovery. In 1931, he joined the National Socialist Party.
It was a decision he would later question.
Karl increasingly rejected the racial beliefs. He refused to teach their racial ideology while working as a lecturer and he eventually withdrew from active involvement with the party.
When the Second World War started, Karl was called into the German Army. By 1941 he was commanding HKP 562, an army vehicle repair unit that was eventually based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
There he witnessed the brutal persecution of Jewish people.
Karl realised that his position gave him something incredibly valuable: the ability to declare people essential workers.
He began issuing work certificates to Jewish men, sometimes claiming they possessed specialist skills they did not actually have. These documents could offer temporary protection not only to the men themselves but also to members of their families.
Karl repeatedly tried to keep his Jewish workers away from the authorities. When workers were arrested, he sometimes intervened and attempted to have them released. He also tolerated activities that helped prisoners obtain desperately needed food.
By 1943, the situation in Vilnius had become even more dangerous. The Germans were preparing to destroy the Vilna Ghetto.
Karl managed to establish a separate forced labour camp for his unit at HKP 562. More than 1,000 Jewish workers and family members were transferred there before the ghetto was liquidated.
Life inside the camp was still frightening and dangerous. Karl did not have complete control, and killings were still carried out. In March 1944, while Karl was away, approximately 250 children and elderly prisoners were taken from the camp and murdered.
He could not save everyone.
But he continued trying to protect as many people as his position allowed.
Then, during the summer of 1944, the Soviet Red Army began approaching Vilnius. Karl understood what was likely to happen next. The authorities would not simply abandon the remaining Jewish prisoners.
On the 1st of July, he spoke to the people in the camp while an officer was present. He could not openly tell them to hide, so his warning had to be carefully disguised.
He explained that the camp would soon be evacuated and that the prisoners would be accompanied by the authorities.
The meaning was clear.
Many prisoners immediately prepared hiding places in walls, attics and concealed rooms.
When the authorities arrived several days later, hundreds of prisoners were taken away and murdered. Others remained hidden.
Around 150 to 200 people survived long enough to be liberated when Soviet forces reached the area.
After the war, Karl faced a denazification court because of his earlier Party membership and his wartime position. Jewish survivors came forward and spoke about what he had done for them.
Karl never considered himself a hero. He believed that other people could also have chosen to act if they had been determined enough to do so.
He died in Darmstadt on the 19th of June 1957, at the age of 59.
For many years his actions were little known outside the families of those he had helped. Eventually, survivors and their descendants worked to bring his story to wider attention.
In 2005, Karl Plagge was posthumously honoured at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, following the decision to recognise him the previous year.
His story is particularly complicated because Karl had once joined the National Socialist Party and later served in the German Army. But when confronted with persecution and murder, he chose to use the authority that uniform gave him to protect people instead.
Perhaps that is what makes his story so powerful.
When the system around him demanded obedience, Karl Plagge found ways to disobey it - and because he did, people survived.
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