Using Internet, Man Tracks Nazi Officer Who Saved His Parents

DURHAM, Conn. — Michael Good knew only fragments of his family’s struggle to survive in Nazi-occupied Lithuania--his mother’s hiding place, how his father stumbled out of range of a German firing squad.

But a trip to Lithuania years later led the physician on a two-year Internet search for information about Karl Plagge, a German army major who helped his parents and hundreds of other Jews in a slave labor camp escape slaughter by the Third Reich.

Through the German government archive and Plagge’s alma mater, Darmstadt University, Good learned that Plagge enlisted in the Nazi Party in 1932--and quit seven years later.

He discovered how the engineer from Darmstadt, a World War I veteran and polio victim who died the year Good was born, first accepted Adolf Hitler’s promise to transform Germany, then surreptitiously moved against his leader’s racial theories and dreams of conquest.

“There’s a side to this story that’s attractive and that we should try to emulate,” Good said.

Plagge later served as commander of a slave labor camp in Vilnius, Lithuania, using coveted work permits to shield Jews from German death squads. During a trip to Vilnius, Good watched his parents’ reunion with Lithuanians who had helped protect Jews.

“I was struck by how important their stories were and the fruits it had borne,” he recalled recently at his home in Durham. “We were all there because of their bravery.”

In “denazification” files compiled by the Allies after the war to trace the history of the Third Reich and who was involved, colleagues and German soldiers describe Plagge as someone who softened the blows of the Nazi hammer.

Like Oskar Schindler, the German businessman famous for his efforts on behalf of threatened Jews, Plagge argued that his workers were essential to the war effort, sparing them the death camps.

“I did that because I thought it was my duty,” Plagge testified. “There needed to be people who were doing something good for the German reputation in foreign countries. I was ashamed.”

Plagge himself wanted to be classified after the war as a “fellow traveler,” rather than innocent, in recognition of his involvement in the Nazi Party.

Severin Hochberg of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., cautioned that Holocaust rescues were often tied to personal calculations, historical forces, geography, even a region’s dominant religion and social class.

“The war was lost,” Hochberg said. “It was good to have on your record that you saved Jews.”

Good’s parents, William and Pearl Good of West Covina, had told their three children a little about Plagge.

Pearl Good remembers Plagge’s carefully worded speech to 250 prisoners in July 1944 as Nazi storm troopers approached.

“ ‘You will not need our protection anymore,’ ” she recalled him saying. “ ‘Of course, you know how well the SS takes care of their Jewish prisoners.’ Then we knew we had to run to our hiding places.

“I was 14 1/2,” she said. “A 14 1/2-year-old knows very, very well we were about to be killed, and I wanted to live.”

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Good’s site:

www.hometown.aol.com/michaeldg

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: www.ushmm.org

Nazi hunters:

www.wiesenthal.com