Plagge attempted to contact Neugebauer, but was unable to, and the Jews were all deported to Klooga. The rest of Vilna's Jews were either executed immediately at Ponary or sent to concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. In February 2006, the former Frankensteinkaserne, a Bundeswehr base in Pfungstadt, Germany, was renamed the Karl-Plagge-Kaserne. The organisation twice rejected his petitions because it was not certain why the major acted as he did. Plagge also made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht.

Michael Good is a family physician from Durham, CT and the son of two Jewish immigrants from Vilna, Poland. 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 was responsible for saving Jewish and Polish people during WWII, including the author's mother. But he could not prevent the SS from seizing 250 children from the camp and murdering them while he was on leave.A partially disabled veteran of World War I, Plagge studied engineering and joined the Nazi Party in 1931 in hopes of helping Germany rebuild from the economic collapse following the war. Rates highly amongst my reasonably extensive collection of ww2 literature which is mostly from the German perspective. As a work assignment, HKP 562 was particularly sought after by Jews because of Plagge's efforts to treat his workers well. In September 1943, rumor spread that many of the Jews in the Vilnius ghetto were to be taken by the SS regardless if they had working papers. When word reached Plagge of the impending liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto, he swiftly set up the motor repair works for army vehicles on Subocz Street and shepherded in about 1,000 Jews.

I was just very struck that a Wehrmacht staff officer, a major, would be trying to save Jewish prisoners. With an SS officer at his side, he told the inmates that they "will be escorted during this evacuation by the SS, which, as you know, is an organisation devoted to the protection of refugees. Because Plagge had no descendants, the president of the Technische Universität Darmstadt accepted the award on his behalf.The risk for Plagge was that he would be accused of favouring Jews, and this was really a very serious offence. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

In response to a question from the assembled Jews, Plagge added that there was no need to bring their luggage. In conclusion, this reader feels, that many of us have probably asked ourselves, whether - faced with a situation like Plagge's - we would have acted honorably or otherwise. On July 1st, 1944 Major Plagge entered the camp and as the prisoners gathered around him, he made an informal speech. Plagge was drafted into the Wehrmacht (German Army) as a captain in the reserve at the beginning of World War II, [4] and stopped paying Nazi Party membership fees at the same time. There he was put in command of the engineering unit HKP562 (which had the job of repairing military vehicles damaged on the eastern front).

Israel's Holocaust memorial council, Yad Vashem, will declare Major Karl Plagge righteous among the nations, alongside men such as Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, for an elaborate deception that saved about 250 Jewish lives.

According to his later testimony, Plagge refused to accept Nazi racial theories, which he considered unscientific, and was disgusted by the persecution of political opponents and the corruption of many Nazi functionaries. D.' (Sicherheits Dienst) organization, whose task it is - with the enthusiastic help of certain Lithuanians, to exterminate the local Polish and Jewish population. At first, Plagge employed Jews who lived inside the ghetto, but when the ghetto was slated for liquidation in September 1943, he set up the HKP 562 forced labor camp, where he saved many male Jews by issuing them official work permits on the false premise that their holders' skills were vital for the German war effort, and also made efforts to save the worker's wives and children by claiming they would work better if their families were alive. It seems there could have been a unifying story line more along the lines of a screen play which integrates the stories the author discovers after the story of his mother concludes. Although unable to stop the SS from liquidating the remaining prisoners in July 1944, Plagge managed to warn the prisoners in advance, allowing about 200 to hide from the SS and survive until the Red Army's capture of Vilnius.

Mordecai Paldiel, the director of the committee, thanked Pearl Good for making the trip to Vilnius with her family and sparking the chain of events that uncovered Plagge's actions during the war. It concludes with some thought as to his motivation, and the account of how the 'Plagge group' fought for official recognition of his endeavours.