I finally figured out what was wrong. the php-xml package was not installed on the server. I finally found an error in one of the log files that pointed me in the right direction:
2017/10/16 22:14:07 [error] 14850#14850: *1090 FastCGI sent in stderr: “PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function simplexml_load_string() in …
Some plugins check for all required dependencies and have strong error reporting if something is missing. This plugin does not do that ??