Karl Plagge - The German Soldier Who Saved the Jews | Free Documentary History

in 1947 major carl plaguei a former commander of a nazi forced labor camp was tried for his part in the german occupation of vilnius during which one hundred thousand lithuanian jews were murdered [Applause] to everyone's surprise a few jewish survivors of the labor camp came to testify on his behalf what they revealed was a covert operation set up to save the lives of the last jews of vilnius [Music] [Music] in modern vilnius commuters are oblivious to this low-rent building complex it was once called hkp and it's the only holocaust labor camp in europe that hasn't been destroyed or turned into a memorial [Music] during the second world war hundreds were saved here hundreds more were murdered and buried here before these old buildings are torn down a team of scientists historians and survivors converge here to revive the story that was almost forgotten using the latest non-invasive technologies basing themselves on survivors testimonies and sketches they hope to unearth the mass grave of those who didn't make it and the hiding places of those who did these old buildings on the outskirts of vilnius conceal a dark secret the current residents may very well be living on top of the bones of the previous occupants they were jews imprisoned by the nazis during the holocaust they fought for their lives in the very rooms these people live in today at the time one nazi major called carl plaguei risked his life lying to the nazi command in order to carry out a daring operation to save the jews imprisoned here their story and major ploggers actions were largely unknown until michael good an american family doctor found out that his mother was one of those saved by major plugging and so i just kept on having these questions pop into my head you know who who was this major plague why would a nazi major be running around and protecting and saving jews when the rest of the germans in vilna were committed to slaughtering them dr good's ensuing research finally brought to light one of the most remarkable stories of the holocaust about a nazi who decided to save jews by creating workshops to fix german army vehicles and demanding jewish workers to labor in them [Applause] this vehicle repair shop was different than all of those other places because families men women and children were housed together plague argued to his superiors that they had to be together to make them more enthusiastic workers so that they would do really good work so his vision of what this hkp was was more than just a repair shop for many of these people this was their permit for life [Music] to really appreciate what carl plague did you need to go to his workshops for the workers they were totally without skills they were shopkeepers school teachers accountants businessmen and they had absolutely no automotive skills even though plague had certified them as being skilled mechanics but very quickly they started to learn more and more skills and before too long they actually were the skilled workers that bloggie claimed them to be but then the ss wanted to take the women and children and kill them because they were idle so he made arrangements to set up clothing workshops in the camp and imported sewing machines and put the women and older children to work on the one hand you have plugger trying to keep a jewish workforce alive on the other side you have the ss who are committed to the destruction of all the jews in this vicinity so what that represents the permanent conflict that exists between plaggar in particular and the ss in vilna who would seek to destroy as many jews as possible but plaguey's plan didn't always work before hkp is torn down for urban renewal scientists armed with the latest in archaeological technology are here to identify mass graves [Music] hkp is unique in the history of the holocaust it's still in the same form as it was 75 years ago a killing field where people are still living [Music] so this is the target that we're looking for this is the original place where this group from july 2nd and july 3rd were basically killed that's right according to survivor's testimonies the nazis executed hundreds of prisoners on the side of the western building the bodies were then hastily buried in shallow pits and then they moved the bodies from the original killing trench to another place that's right after the liberation of vilnius the corpses were exhumed and reburied in a mass grave somewhere in the courtyard between the buildings first thing is before we start anything we're going to drone the whole area right we've sort of cornered the market on doing really good science in areas where you cannot do traditional archaeology non-invasive archaeology means that you can identify locations of where things happened without having to excavate them first we'll be taking high resolution aerial imagery using a drone so we'll be taking hundreds of photos over the site putting them together in a composite image with a with a resolution on the order of one centimeter per pixel the scientists now discover a patch of grass that looks different from the surrounding vegetation here we clearly see this area of stress vegetation this might indicate that an excavation took place in the area maybe to dig a mass grave okay so 40 meter line they now deploy ground penetrating radar or gpr to see what lies underneath we're trying to locate a mass burial site the hypothesis we have here is that bodies removed here potentially around this building placed in here and then covered up for their final burial and so what we're doing here is using ground penetrating radar to image into the subsurface fm radio waves are transmitted from the device into the soil by measuring how quickly the signals are reflected back to the unit gpr can reveal figures in the ground that don't look natural [Music] the gpr data will take several days to analyze only then will they know if they've located the victims of hkp karl plague was born in darmstadt germany he grew up here as a german nationalist there is a tradition in the family to be in the military and to be a very loyal subject to the government and to do what's best for the country he was old enough to serve in the first world war he was captured by the british becomes a pow for three years sent home in 1920 and then in the 1920s his family undergo exactly the same privations as most german families do during the german inflation where their savings were more than likely wiped out he wanted to be a doctor but he couldn't pay the fee and therefore he was engineer he didn't want to construct things he wanted to cure people to help people he's unusual in the sense that he joins the nazi party in 1931 which is very early for somebody taking that step he was convinced that hitler and his promise to bring peace would be a kind of solution he was also unemployed and hitler also promised to bring those thousands and thousands of unemployed back to work when we get to 1940 he's drafted in to form part of this engineering facility which ultimately brings him to vilnius it was here that he stopped identifying with the nazis at the time the ss was in the process of murdering the one hundred thousand jews of vilnius carl plague was horrified by the atrocities committed by his people and their local lithuanian helpers he decided that he must do something to help the jews as he wrote i decided to work against the nazis i saw unbelievable things i was ashamed [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so we came here in september of 43. dr goode now invites sydney handler to join him at the site sydney is 84 years old he was nine when he moved into hkp some parts of these buildings haven't been explored since 1944. we lived around here some place yeah so i was nine and there were there were other children in the camp were you aware that there were any other children who survived no i had no knowledge of that see the hallways michael yeah it's exactly what we had before let's try a door here maybe we can see one of these okay [Music] it doesn't look like anybody's home let's see if we can get in here michael hi dress here can maybe come in this was that michael this was it huh about four families here four families four families and how did that eight people they had bunk beds yeah yeah yeah yeah it was all tiny tiny do you know what happened here during the war to find evidence of the execution pits the scientists now deploy another scanning technology known as electrical resistivity tomography or ert so this box connected to our array of 81 electrodes will measure the resistivity of the ground along the entire length of 40 meters to a depth of six or seven meters the control unit powered by an electrical car battery fires hundreds of electrical pulses through the metal spikes into the ground it measures the way soil conducts electricity and creates a map distinguishing natural soil and man-made disturbances like killing pits there is an eyewitness testimony that there was a trench that was dug in this general area behind this building here and we want to see evidence of that trench so we want to see where the ground was dug into and where it was backfilled and we have that information from testimony and we also have it from the bullet holes at head height behind me and all along the walls of this building for years major plugin worked to make sure no harm befell his jewish workers for the most part he was successful page had really set up a very unusual atmosphere here he gathered around him a group of officers who were like-minded and he gave them orders that the civilians should be treated with respect so there was no brutality there are no tales of jewish workers being beaten or savaged within the plague workshops he went to great efforts to try to get more food because the ss was allowing only starvation rations he got firewood from them so they didn't freeze to death during these winters they actually found doctors so that they wouldn't get diseased i mean he thought of a lot of details plaguey feared that one day the ss would get the better of him and remove him from his post to prepare for that moment he allowed the inmates to build secret spaces called molinas in which they would be able to hide and survive the archaeologists have expanded their work they're now not only looking for the mass graves but for the molinas as well paul and alistair are in one of the apartments on the ground floor looking for remnants of one of these hiding places so we're going to use radar to look through the floor inch by inch to see if there's a shaft leading into the molina below how familiar according to survivor's testimony it was underneath what is now a kitchen 15 centimeters below the surface here to see below the floor they deploy a conquest 100 concrete imaging device using radio waves it works in the same way as the larger ground penetrating radar concrete imaging is used to scan smaller surfaces and provides a detailed view inside walls and floors so here we have a feature that's about what 15 inches 18 inches by by 18 inches so on the grid there that's that's pretty small it's small it's big enough big enough to get your hips through well we don't have anything that definitively looks like a shaft but we do have what clearly looks like some square framing big enough for an adult to fit in it's not to say that this was the entrance to the shaft but but it could be the result is not conclusive but it suggests that there might still be spaces beneath the building that haven't been filled with concrete it's exactly at this location on the template on the floor for over two years flag his plan worked both he and the jews of hkp began to believe that the families under his protection would survive that's when he allowed himself to go on leave to see his family a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life there was a kinder accion a child capture it actually occurred in all the camps across lithuania it was march 27 1944 early in the morning after the men had gone to work the ss surrounded the camp with lithuanian ss troops and then began coming into the buildings yelling that the children uh must present themselves uh for vaccinations [Music] the ss take advantage of karplagger's absence to mount a raid on these premises on these buildings to roust out all the children we knew that the trend wasn't going well and by that time my father was not my father everybody was born and everybody had lost family here already in the champs so it was nothing that we didn't expect except the final finish to our lives [Music] the mothers were just frantic fighting uh they were being beaten off and smashed with rifles the ss men took the the children by their feet and flung them into the truck so that they landed head down and smash their heads and they could hear the children crying in pain my mother and i came down the stairs and there was a guard up there there was a guard thing here my mother saw the closet open and she just pushed me and there was a push and i stayed in this closet all day long including the time some german soldier came by here and shoved the bayonet into that closet playing that one right by me and i was so scared i didn't utter a word i defecated my pants [Music] my father used to go out to work every morning and that morning when the kinder actor was on he didn't go out to work he had a feeling that he has to stay home and take care of me and he hit me on the top of the roof jadan is [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] he put me on the roof and i held myself up on the entrance of the of the of the roof and i sat on the roof when the oxy was going on when they were taking the children to be killed and i was saved on top of the roof and i laid there from the morning till the evening and the door stayed open and i heard every child that came down the stairs every mother came down the stairs i haven't i heard them and that's all i remember is the mothers crying crying crying crying because the kids were taken away from them [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] my the men had no idea what was happening at the camp and so at the end of the day when they returned home they came home to just a horrible scene the women were wailing and crying and weeping the survivors described this horrible cry emanating from the camp that you could hear from every corner of the neighborhood and uh this clan went on for days and days [Music] this traumatic event was so horrific that the parents were just unable just unable to bring themselves to get up and come to work and i think that these women wouldn't have cared if the ss threatened to shoot them they just they just could not go on and so for three days after march 27th the workshops were empty in the evening when the germans already left i i went down my father came up to to take me and then my father looked for a place to hit me so they wouldn't take me away after the kinder action any child who remained had to be hidden from view they couldn't let them be seen by any germans because there were supposed to be no children in the camp anymore [Music] my [Music] carl black felt guilty that he was in darmstadt at the time when the kinder accion took place there and he thought that if he had been there he could have done something he did not know what but he thought he could have done something plugin returned to hkp with a situation continue to unravel with the ss gaining ground it was apparent that the molinas would be the last resort for the jews of hkp paul and alistair continue to search for these hiding places this time they are looking in the basement underneath the old buildings that's all newspapers using a micro c825 inspection camera commonly called plumber's camera paul can see through cracks in the basement walls anything behind the walls no yeah it's pretty uh constant temperatures alistar uses a thermal imaging camera in an attempt to detect voids behind the walls if there is a melina in there it will show up as a different color on the device yeah i'm gonna i got a gap in the wall here paul yeah it drops a couple of degrees look at look at that oh it's a bolt it's a bulb just sitting on the floor but that's um brickwork in there i think this is the real thing actually yeah yes i think there's a whole other room back there seriously look it keeps going way back and you can see brickwork and yeah so this is really interesting there's no entrance into this room oh so i think we found a molina i can't believe i'm going after you i haven't been here i have not been here since 44. [Music] the beginning of the end started on july 1st the soviets were coming in and it was clear that the battle for vilnius was going to take place and the nazis had to leave as little evidence of what happened here the ss tightened the guards around the camp and at a certain point none of the men were allowed to leave the camp to go to work anymore everybody was just trapped in the camp so they knew that they were pinned up you know like animals awaiting slaughter in the end with germany losing the war with the front coming closer and closer whatever efforts plugger has put into this environment and into this site are going to be lost anyway all he can hope for is that some of the people that are still sheltering in these buildings somehow find a way to stay out of the hands of the ss for long enough to be liberated by the red army under the watchful eye of the ss plagueis now told the inmates that he was being sent away and that the ss was going to take over the camp and he says well we had wanted to take you our very skilled workers with us but unfortunately this is not possible but you shouldn't worry because you too will be evacuated and during your relocation you will be escorted by the ss which as you know is an organization devoted to the protection of refugees when the jews heard this they understood the coded message the ss was coming for them on monday and the time to go into hiding was now [Music] about half of the 1 000 prisoners that were left went into their hiding places the other half showed up for roll call hoping the ss wouldn't murder them with the red army about to roll into vilna but everyone who showed up was executed in the panara forest where the nazis were in the process of murdering the last of the 100 000 jews of vilna now 500 prisoners were missing and so the ss began to search and tear apart the camp looking for their missing jews so they could murder them [Applause] [Music] michael it hasn't changed in 73 years so where were you guys hiding we were hiding uh underneath the floor so there are floorboards there are floorboards here okay okay and there was a space under the floor and there was a space it was cut out it was about this high and we just lay there the door was open when we heard anybody coming up here we just lift up the boards and put them over us other than that we just lay there and lay there and lay there for days [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] in the attic it was hot as hell must have been 110 145 degrees here [Music] every minute that we could uncover the boards we would because just to get the fresh air what could you hear what was going on we could hear everything that was going on downstairs don't forget the door was open we could hear people speaking we could hear what was going on in the courtyard mostly what we heard in the courtyard was the machine gun being fired constantly it sounds like as they discovered people in their hiding places they would watch them they would hull them out that's all we could hear was crying screaming machine gun silence we heard somebody running up the steps the guy ran up we had no idea who it was looked out the window and he got a bullet hole right in his head dropped down right here where again the steps now these were boots running up the stairs we covered up the thing again the wood and we we could see it was a german soldier [Music] and we could see the guy's boots came up ran up here looked at the body looked around nobody else was here left we could smell the body for days afterwards [Music] [Music] [Music] this was my language i remember these [ __ ] stairs every day every [ __ ] day i remember these things i'm in the car alone i think about it i'm in the shower i think about it it just goes on and on and on and on there's no closure that's a word invented by people that never experienced bad times the russians came in were in the shock i mean absolutely in the shock you didn't know what to do you didn't know where to turn what to do just shocked [Music] when the jews did emerge they found that there was a trench that was filled with dead bodies and had a very thin layer of dirt on them but you could actually see arms and legs sticking out and people could recognize some of their friends and relatives in that trench and then there were bodies and corpses just strewn throughout the courtyard the germans didn't have enough time to dig a deep grave so after the russians came in we came back here to rebury them the bodies were swollen from the from the heat pulled them out dug a deeper grave and pulled them back in i was 10 years old i've seen more dead people than than you can imagine [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello michael now gets his son jonathan to join him maybe they can find the actual hiding place of michael's mother pearl armed with homemade sketches based on the memory of family members they now embark on their own personal search this is building number two yeah the memoirs say that grandma's apartment was on the first floor which for europeans means the first floor above the ground floor so if we want to find mom's molina interest that's underneath the stairs that's under the stairs well let's go find the staircase all right this is all new down here that's not new holy [ __ ] looks like there's a light switch here all right watch your step johnny thank you pop [Music] all right let's try to figure out what's going on here so well i mean it might have been this if if this pipe wasn't here this could be it this is like a space so according to the drawing this wall was solid read to me what grandpa had to say working diligently we blocked off the farthest room in the basement by a brick wall and excavated an underground passage to gain access to this isolated space for this we had to chisel a large hole through the stone foundation of the house so well is it hollow let's see listen to that yeah this could be where the hole was that would extend it down under the foundation and into this space so let's go take a walk and see what we find down here okay now it's this way okay this is like indiana jones and son so this whole space in here must have been the molina keep the light right there okay but move the light [Music] oh yeah yeah that's totally it okay [Music] [Music] so if we imagine that this is a solid wall i mean how is an ss man gonna ever get in there so the key was the trap door yeah this is a good target we could do a small localized radar survey to see if remnants of the shaft are still there and going through this hole to the other side okay i think these pipes seem to carry through to the next room we're using ground penetrating radar we use fm radio waves or electromagnetic waves just like we have on our radios to look into the ground using a plumber's inspection camera to poke into all the little cracks and spaces and behind bricks and through debris to see what might be there what we might find [Music] so what we're seeing is a cut coming through here if layering does not connect up or gets broken we can indicate that something human has caused that in those areas based on the descriptions this would be that site it would match up to those descriptions of having a shaft or a hole at the site [Music] [Applause] wow looks like an old shoe feels like a wooden shoe but it's a it's a shoe mold huh wow what's that it's a wagon and it is so primitive looks like scrap pieces of wood punched out of maybe for some piping that some kid pulled together a rusty nail for an axle some copper wire to bind it together and the wheels still spin this is definitely something a kid stuck in a hole for a few days would have taken with him this is really a significant find it really speaks to a very specific time period when people were making these types of cards for children to play with in a very specific place inside the molina and it may be that it was actually constructed in this place where they had workshops we have very little of the types of things that we call toys for children would play during the holocaust their toys tell us more about their lives than any of the other bigger issues that we find at these sites so this is it jonathan this is uh this is where they hid they originally planned to have about 35 people hiding in this space but desperate neighbors and people looking for a hiding place forced their way in and there were a hundred people packed into these footings they couldn't breathe people were hallucinating people were attacking each other it was just this horrible scene so in the end when the russian army liberated vilna from the germans and occupied the town about 250 jews emerged from their hiding places in this building and they represent the single largest group of survivors of the holocaust in vilna i mean just think jonathan this hole that they managed to find and secure is what allowed us to live [Music] [Music] after days of data analysis the scientists conclude their investigation in the search for the mass graves they've combined the results from different scans and incorporated them into one 3d map of the area first they address the findings at the western building where executions reportedly took place along with temporary burials and shallow pits incredibly science confirms the oral history we investigated where there were rumored to be two pits where people were either lined up and shot into these pits or dead bodies were dragged into these pits here is the color tomography model we can see the dark red areas here are where you have the natural sand but we can see where that sand has been cut into to a depth of about two and a half to three meters so we have two distinct pits here okay one that's about 15 meters long here and another one about 10 meters long here we also have evidence that there are bullet holes there alistair now addresses the ground penetrating radar results in the courtyard where they were searching for the mass grave in the area between the buildings we see the same features that we saw on building two and that is the sand has been cut into it's been backfilled with some other material in the same location we have anecdotal evidence of bones that were uncovered during um the installation of the heating pipes just 15 years ago combining those two pieces of information we think we are looking at a mass grave it's highly likely that there are still bodies in that area [Music] carl player came back to a totally destroyed and damaged that [Music] and he was quite sure that everybody died in vilnius and that was really on his on his mind and on his conscience after the war plague was tried as an accomplice in war crimes he didn't defend himself but some jewish survivors of hkp came forward to testify in his behalf as a result he was acquitted but unlike others he did not feel absolved [Music] never spoke about what happened during the war and he never spoke about what he did he thought it was his duty and he didn't do it well enough because so many died [Music] conrad commemorates his godfather who went to his grave never knowing that he had saved hundreds [Music] we are always told that a single ordinary man cannot make any difference and of course that is true if you see it from the global perspective but it is also true that a single person can make a big difference as my grand uncle carl plugged it when he saved here the life of over 250 people investigators and survivors now commemorate the hundreds buried here [Music] i want to thank my mother who guided me the whole life through my mother got me into acapella which was a lifesaver she saved me during the kinder actor she saved me after they came directly she carried me down the stairs over here on the shoulders and she got me out of vilna and then we into the united states my mother survived and i survived my father brother other members of the family no [Music] very mixed emotions come here after 70 odd years [Music] and i can't say i'm glad to be here but i'm i'm glad i can so thank you maya for everything [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 200,178

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, History Documentary, Second World War, World War II Documentary, World War II, Third Reich, Holocaust Documentary, Karl Plagge, The Good Nazi, Schutzstaffel, Oskar Schindler, Schindler's List, Holocaust in Lithuania, Lithuania, HKP 562 forced labor camp, HKP 562, Forced Labour Camp, world war 2, John Rabe

Id: jTkmMBi8inc

Length: 50min 4sec (3004 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021