Former prisoners of HKP 562 in a displaced person camp in Ludwigsburg told Maria Eichamueller [ who? The outcome of his trial was positively influenced by the testimony of his many prisoners who heard of the charges being brought against him and sent representatives to testify on his behalf. Plagge and his unit arrived in Vilnius in July 1941 and soon they witnessed the genocide being carried out against the Jews of that area.

In response to a question from the assembled Jews, Plagge added that there was no need to bring their luggage. The camp, which consisted of two multistory tenements originally constructed to house Jews on welfare, was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Lithuanian collaborators and SS men. The account of finding out who his parents' rescuer was and how they obtained recognition for his work is told by a non-historian. He told them that he and his men were relocated to the west and he asked for permission to take his skilled workers with them but was not granted permission.Rates highly amongst my reasonably extensive collection of ww2 literature which is mostly from the German perspective. In 1934, Plagge began to work at Hessenwerks, an engineering company run by Kurt Hesse, whose wife Erica was half-Jewish. When the German army is thrown back from the East, Plagge, still following his own mandate to minimize the number of casualties, surrender his whole unit to the allied forces, with the result that not a single one of his sub-ordinates, finds the chance of a `hero's death'! Of 100,000 pre-war Jews in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived, of which the largest single group were saved by Plagge.

After reading about the trial in a local newspaper, Eichamueller testified on Plagge's behalf, which influenced the trial result in his favor.

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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. By the third application, I was able to come up with cases and specific instances in which he surely was risking his life.

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. According to historian Kim Priemel, the success of Plagge's rescue efforts was due to working within the system to save Jews, a position that required him to enter a "grey zone" of moral compromise. Michael Good will lead you to ''ponder humanity's dual nature--our propensity to act violently out of fear and bigotry, juxtaposed against our often unexpected capacity for acting with nobility and moral courage.The SS arrived on July 3, 1944 and took 500 prisoners to the forest of Peneriai where they were killed.

Because he had joined the Nazi Party so early and commanded a labor camp where many prisoners were murdered, he was tried in 1947 as part of the postwar denazification process; he hired a lawyer to defend him. This is worth watching to see both the good and evil in our world that still exists today in a different form. Outside of the world of medicine and Holocaust history, he enjoys open water swimming, inline skating, vegetable gardening and geocaching. Of a pre-war Jewish population in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived, of which the largest single group, were saved by Plagge.As a work assignment, HKP 562 was particularly sought after by Jews because of Plagge's efforts to treat his workers well. Plagge once took an ailing Jewish prisoner to a hospital reserved for non-Jews, where she stayed until the end of the war. The historian Kim Priemel, examining Wehrmacht rescuers in Vilnius, concludes that Plagge "remained within a 'grey zone' of moral compromise, which, however, was vital to the success of [his] rescue efforts". The rest of Vilna's Jews were either executed immediately at Ponary or sent to concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. In particular, the Vilna Ghetto was seen as a threat because of its extensive underground movement and the proximity of partisans in the woods around the city.