The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition | Michael Good

The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition | Michael Good | well researched and uplifiting

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	The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition Michael Good Fordham University Press, 2005 - 238 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"Perhaps in other places only a small amount of determination was lacking in order to prevent or decrease the atrocities. I never felt that this needed special courage. It required only the conviction and strength that anyone can draw from the depth of moral feelings that exists in all humans." --Major Karl Plagge, from a letter written in 1956

On April 11, 2005, in Jerusalem, Karl Plagge will be named a "Righteous Among the Nations" hero by the State of Israel. He joins Oskar Schindler and some three hundred eighty other similarly honored Germans who protected and saved Jews during the Holocaust.

While all "Righteous Gentiles" share the stamp of conscience, Karl Plagge?s story is of a unique kind of courage--that of a German army officer who subverted the system of death to save the lives of some 250 Jews in Vilna, Lithuania. One of those he saved was Michael Good?s mother. Karl Plagge first joined, then left, the Nazi Party. In Vilna, whose teeming ghetto held tens of thousands of Jews facing extermination, he found himself in charge of a work camp where military vehicles were repaired. Time after time, he saved Jews from prison and SS death squads, pulling whole families from the ghetto by issuing them work permits as "indispensable" laborers essential to the war effort.

In this remarkable journey of discovery, Michael Good fills the missing pages in Karl Plagge?s life. He also reminds us all of the many ways human beings can resist evil. "I guess he was just a decent man," Pearl Good said of the man who saved her life when he didn?t have to. "There are always some people who decide that the horror is not to be."

Haunted by his mother?s stories of a mysterious, benevolent officer who commanded her slave labor camp, Michael Good resolved to find out all he could about the enigmatic "Major Plagge." For five years, he wrote hundreds of letters and scoured the Internet to recover, in one hard-earned bit of evidence after another, information about the man whose moral choices saved hundreds of lives. This unforgettable book is the first portrait of a modest man who simply refused to play by the rules.

Interviewing camp survivors, opening German files that had been untouched for more than fifty years, and translating newly discovered letters by Plagge, Good weaves an amazing tale.

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Deeply Moving Book Of The Triumph Of Good Against Evil

There is so much evil when Governments attack their own people as has happened throughout history. The Nazi Government in Germany was especially evil as it attacked many millions of its own people and neighboring peoples. The Nazi Government which was, as is always the case in evil governments, run by a relatively few number of people with awesome power, was on a murderous rampage in Europe. A very few courageous people stood up in opposition. One of these people is Major Plagge. It is thrilling to read of his courage, bravery and success. Everyone should read this book. Hopefully, then more persons could stand up against evil governments before its too late. Why is it that of all the species on the Earth that Man is the most evil? It is because of the accumulation of power in the hands of a few people. That is always a recipe for disaster.

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well researched and uplifiting

a superb and engrossing investigation of a nazi who tried to protect jewish people from certain death by setting up a factory not unlike oscar schindler. the son of a survivor who always told the story of the mysterious major plagge who saved many tried to find this man and his motives. spellbinding and heartening unlike so many other holocaust stories.

Outstanding book

This is a remarkable book both for its deeply moving story and for its underlying message of how a day-to-day battle of moral choices can be waged with the strength of conviction. It begins with an existential question most people never have to ask and ends with the satisfying feeling of a debt repaid as completely as life can allow. I recommend this book to anyone.

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A story that needed telling, over and over

The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, located in Jerusalem is the largest holocause museum in the world. As you would expect it describes the terrible inhumanity the Germans imposed upon the jews and leaves you with a feeling of hoplessness. But in the museum there is one shining glory, the wall whereupon is inscribed the names of those considered to be 'Righteous among the Nations.' This term is used to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust in order to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis. There are people of all nationalities listed on the wall. Among the names are some 380 germans. Among these is the name Karl Plagge.

A low level officer in the Wehrmacht he commanded a military vehicle repair unit in Vilna, now Vilnius, Lithuania and he saved the lives of at least 250 jews, including the author's mother.

This is the story of Major Plagge, who as usual for heros would admit to no special courage.

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This is a complicated kind of heroism.

One third of this book is standard heroic stuff. A non-Jew in a position of some authority takes steps to create a haven for Jews and -- in the midst of annihilation -- saves a lot of them. You have to find your way to this by navigating the first third of the book, which tells a different story: how to find someone using multiple information sources and documentation, both scattered and (some of it) sequestered. The last third of the book is given over to appendices and afterwords, original documents that only become compelling provided the heroism of the man has taken hold with the reader.

Karl Plagge was a courageous individual in a time and place when individual courage was in short supply. His example, of a person who saw terrible things happening and took the initiative to stop them from happening within his purview to the extent he could, gives a glimmer of hope in the midst of the overwhelming despair of the Holocaust. That he had been a National Socialist very early on in its history is his initial credential as an unlikely hero, but the unfurling of his identity reveals this to be ultimately of little consequence in defining him. Yet Plagge was circumspect to a fault. Were it not for the documentation of his de-Nazification trial, there would be very little to show him revealing himself. One hopes it was not an overwhelming sense of guilt over what he could not do that made the man seem to place so little importance on what he did do (which did and does matter).

Plagge's story does not have the razor's edge of Wallenberg's. Michael Good is not primarily a writer. But all in all this is a compelling new chapter in the story of the Holocaust. Vilna was of as much consequence as Warsaw for the Jews, and its story is not as well known today. And written from the viewpoint of one who only lives thanks to Karl Plagge, this is a book worth reading.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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