Israel honours officer who was 'better than Schindler'

FOR 60 years the life-saving actions of Major Karl Plagge have gone unrecognised - an all but forgotten footnote to one of mankind's darkest chapters. His behaviour and the personal risks he took were remembered only by those who would otherwise have been killed.

FOR 60 years the life-saving actions of Major Karl Plagge have gone unrecognised - an all but forgotten footnote to one of mankind's darkest chapters. His behaviour and the personal risks he took were remembered only by those who would otherwise have been killed.

Now, following years of investigation by the son of one of the 300 Jews saved from the Nazis by the German officer, Mr Plagge will be posthumously honoured next week at a ceremony in Jerusalem by Yad Vashem, the authority created by the Israeli government to remember the Holocaust. His name will be added to a list that includes the likes of Oscar Schindler, those "righteous gentiles" who risked their "lives, freedom or safety" to save Jews from death.

The extraordinary story that has led to Mr Plagge's recognition began in 1999 when Michael Good, a family doctor from Durham, Connecticut, travelled with his parents to visit the remains of the Nazi labour camp in Vilnius, Lithuania, where his mother had been a prisoner for two years during the Second World War. Mr Good, 47, had previously had little interest in his Jewish ancestry but something his mother, Pearl, told him that day would change his life.

"We were in the camp when she said her survival was due largely to a Major Plagge. 'He was better than Schindler' she told me," said Mr Good. "I started to ask more questions about what he had done, what had happened to him. No one knew what had happened to him."

Mr Good began a worldwide search to trace other survivors of the Heeres Kraftfahr Park (KFP) - the vehicle repair park - and to try to track down the officer who had saved them.

He learned that Mr Plagge arranged to take 1,000 Jews from the Vilnius ghetto to the relative shelter of a nearby forced labour camp just one week before the ghetto was destroyed in July 1943. Once in the camp, Mr Plagge did everything in his power to try to save lives. Because the Jews first slated for extermination were those considered "unproductive", Mr Plagge lied to the SS that his workers were "skilled personnel". He also prevented the planned separation of the women and children from the men - something that placed him under intense suspicion. It is reckoned he saved around 300 people.

One of those he saved was 78-year-old William Begell, who was then aged 17. In the summer of 1944 with the Russian army about to push the Germans out of Lithuania, Mr Plagge gathered his workers and told them they would be "escorted during the evacuation by the SS which, as you know, is an organisation devoted to the protection of refugees. Thus, you have nothing to worry about".

To Mr Begell and others it was a coded but clear warning to flee because otherwise they would killed by the SS. "My memory is so vivid because I thank God for saving me every day and I think about it all the time. It is as vivid as if it happened yesterday," said Mr Begell. "I jumped out of a window and fled ... We were liberated two weeks later."

With the help of the German national archives and volunteer researchers in Germany, Mr Good, who has written the memoir The Search for Major Plagge, discovered that the officer died in 1957 and was buried in his home town of Darmstadt, south of Frankfurt. His wife is also dead and the couple had no children. But Mr Good was able to trace Mr Plagge's godson, Konrad Hesse, who will also attend the ceremony.

Speaking from his home in Schopfheim, southern Germany, he told The Independent he believed Mr Plagge would have mixed feelings about being recognised. "Every man would feel pleased to get such an honour," he said. "But all the time [he was alive] he did not want to be in the limelight."

Indeed, Mr Good discovered that at Major Plagge's "deNazification trial" in 1947, at which numerous survivors gave testimony on his behalf, the officer insisted on being classified as a mitlaufer or fellow traveller - apparently guilt-ridden that he had not done more. In a letter Mr Plagge wrote in 1956 he said: "I was not able to recognise the boundaries where the limit of guilt began or ended and in a broader sense, as a German, I myself bear this guilt. From this plague there was no refuge."

Mr Good, who will attend Monday's ceremony with his parents, said his investigation had made him think hard about human nature - about how the best and worst of human nature could coexist in such close proximity. "How is it that some people choose one path and some choose another?" he asked.

Following several requests to Yad Vashem, Mr Plagge's name will be inscribed on a remembrance wall in the Garden of Righteousness. Of the 20,205 people who have been honoured, only 410 are German and just a handful served in the military. Daniel Freankiel, a senior custodian at Yad Vashem, said: "The significance of Plagge's recognition as 'righteous' is not merely that he belongs to a very small group of German rescuers from the military, but that he provides an impressive example of the ability of an individual to preserve his moral autonomy and resist being sucked into the vortex of evil."