Former prisoners of HKP 562 in a displaced person camp in Ludwigsburg told Maria Eichamueller [ who? You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Daniel Fraenkel, a member of the Yad Vashem committee that made the decision, said he had been persuaded by "massive and multi-layered evidence".

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. He felt he had helped create this monster and that it was his duty to try to help these imperilled Jews. I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives. After being dismissed from the position of lecturer for being unwilling to teach racism and his opposition to Nazi racial policies, he stopped participating in party activities in 1935 and left the party when the war broke out.

Another 100 Jews were smuggled in by the resistance movement with Plagge's acquiescence, and the population peaked at 1,250 early in 1944. I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone, whether or not they had a historical or Holocaust interest in the war. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. On 27 March 1944, while Plagge was away on home leave in Germany, the SS carried out a Kinderaktion ("Children Operation"): they entered the camp, rounded up about 250 children and elderly Jews, and took them to Ponary for execution.

Good became interested in Holocaust history in 1999 when he traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, with his parents to explore his family origins and hear their tales of survival during the Holocaust. Plagge also made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht. Part detective story, part personal quest, Michael Good’s book is the story of the German commander of a Lithuanian work camp who saved hundreds of Jewish lives in the Vilna ghetto ―including the life of Good’s mother, Pearl. 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. 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.

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. In a letter shortly before his death in 1958, Plagge told a friend: "I never felt that this needed special courage.