After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, HKP 562 was deployed to Vilna, Lithuania, in early July 1941. In November 1943, a Jewish prisoner named David Zalkind, his wife and child attempted to escape from the camp and were caught by the Gestapo.

I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives. He grew up in West Covina, California, outside of Los Angeles and attended Occidental College in Los Angeles where he majored in Political Science. The Jews in the HKP camp knew, however, that before the SS retreated, the SS would most likely kill any Jewish slave laborers that might have been left behind.Michael Good has appeared on C-SPAN, as a speaker in Israel, and in Germany and in schools, libraries, churches and synagogues across the United States.

When the red army captured the Vilnius camp a few days later, the 250 missing Jewish prisoners emerged from hiding. However, the soldiers under his command and other Wehrmacht officials, including Hans Christian Hingst, the civilian administrator of German-occupied Vilnius, were aware of Plagge's rescue activities and did not denounce him. Of 100,000 pre-war Jews in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived, of which the largest single group were saved by Plagge. He was cleared of war crimes after survivors testified at his trial, but he insisted on being classified as a "fellow traveller".

Although unable to stop the SS from liquidating the remaining prisoners in July 1944, Plagge managed to warn the prisoners of the imminent arrival of SS killing squads, allowing about 200 to successfully hide from the SS and survive until the Red Army's capture of Vilnius.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Upon his release, Plagge studied chemical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, graduating in 1924. I found the most interesting parts of the book were the denazification trial (Appendix A) and whenever the author was quoting a direct source (memoir, letter, etc. The camp was to be dissolved; accused of being soft on Jews, Plagge was forbidden to take them with his unit.

By the third application, I was able to come up with cases and specific instances in which he surely was risking his life. He fought as a lieutenant in World War I on the Western Front, participating in the battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Flanders. Plagge exaggerated their importance to the war effort and managed to secure the release of all of them.I was just very struck that a Wehrmacht staff officer, a major, would be trying to save Jewish prisoners. Michael Good, a Connecticut physician, whose mother Pearl and her family were mong Major Plagge's (more than 250) lucky saved souls, in tracing an unlikely Nazi's life and assuring the rightful recognition of a mensch who was too humble to acknowledge his own uniqueness. 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. The author's parents attribute their own survival to the actions of a Wehrmacht staff officer, whom they merely knew as a `Major Plagge', who to their personal knowledge, had saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish and Polish inhabitants of their home town, the city of Vilna.