HKP 562 forced labor camp

HKP 562 was the site of a Nazi forced labor camp for Jews in Vilnius, Lithuania, during the Holocaust. It was centered around 47 & 49 Subačiaus Street, in apartment buildings originally built to house poor members of the Jewish community. The camp was used by the German army as a slave labor camp from September 1943 until July 1944.

During that interval, the camp was officially owned and administered by the SS, but run on a day-to-day basis by a Wehrmacht engineering unit, Heereskraftfahrpark (HKP) 562 (Army Motor Vehicle Repair Park 562), stationed in Vilnius. HKP 562's commanding officer, Major Karl Plagge, was sympathetic to the plight of his Jewish workers. Plagge and some of his men made efforts to protect the Jews of the camp from the murderous intent of the SS. It was partially due to the covert resistance to the Nazi policy of genocide toward the Jews by members of the HKP 562 engineering unit that over 250 Jewish men, women and children survived the final liquidation of the camp in July 1944, the single largest group of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Vilnius.

After having hired endangered Jews in the Vilna Ghetto to work in his unit's workshops from 1941 to 1943, thereby protecting the workers and their families from the murderous activities of the SS, the HKP camp was hastily erected in September 1943 when Plagge learned of the impending liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, where all inhabitants were to be killed regardless of their work papers.

Plagge first traveled to Kaunas to the Wehrmacht headquarters and then to Riga to the SS administrative offices to argue on behalf of establishing a free-standing camp outside of the Vilna Ghetto. He met considerable resistance, especially from the SS, regarding this plan and his insistence that the women and children not be separated from the men, which he said would negatively affect worker morale and productivity. He was ultimately successful and on the evening of September 16, 1943, drove a convoy of trucks into the Vilna Ghetto and loaded more than 1,200 endangered Jewish ghetto residents onto his trucks and transported them to the relative safety of the newly erected HKP camp on Subocz (Subačiaus) Street.

The camp centered around two parallel residential houses built in 1898 by baron Hirsch for poor Jewish residents. The inhabitants were evicted by the Nazis in 1941 and later executed in the Paneriai massacre.

One week later the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated by the SS and its 15,000 remaining residents were either killed in the nearby killing grounds at Ponary or transported to concentration camps across Nazi-occupied Europe. Documents found by the Jewish Museum in Vilnius show that the camp housed 1,234 Jewish men, women and children. Initially, only men were employed in vehicle repair workshops in and around the camp; however, after an attempt was made by the SS to transfer the women and children to the Kaunas concentration camp in January 1944, Plagge engaged two clothing manufacturers to set up clothing repair shops in the top two floors of one of the apartment buildings and put the women and older children to work so that they would not appear to be idle to outside observers.

Plagge also gave orders that "the civilians are to be treated with respect", and thus the camp was largely free of the abuse and brutality found in most slave labor camps. Importantly, Plagge undertook great efforts to supplement the starvation-level rations for Polish and the even smaller rations for Jewish workers. While in the ghetto in Vilnius smuggling of food was punishable by death, under Plagge's command a blind eye was turned on the black market for food in the camp. Due to these measures no prisoner died of starvation in the camp. Similarly, the work hours were relatively humane, consisting of "only" twelve hours including a one-hour break.

In spite of the generally benign attitude of the officers and men of the HKP unit, the SS did enter the camp on several occasions and committed atrocities. Most notable was the Kinderaktion (an operation against the camp's children) on 27 March 1944, during which the SS, supervised by Martin Weiss, removed the vast majority of the 250 children living in the camp, who were then taken to their deaths.