The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition

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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. 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. In the novel, which was written while Camus was living under Nazi occupation in France, Rieux risks his life to save people from the plague, but his efforts cannot save very many people and often appear useless. Serving initially in Poland after the German invasion, he witnessed atrocities that caused him to decide "to work against the Nazis".

Plagge was tried before an Allied denazification court in 1947, which accepted his plea to be classified as a " fellow traveler" of the Nazi Party, whose rescue activities were undertaken for humanitarian reasons rather than overt opposition to Nazism. The account of finding out who his parents' rescuer was and how they obtained recognition for his work is told by a non-historian. I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives.

The SS arrived on July 3, 1944 and took 500 prisoners to the forest of Peneriai where they were killed. 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.

Good - persuaded his parents to accompany him on a visit to Vilna, where he met the people who saved his parents' lives during the wartime German occupation.

This is worth watching to see both the good and evil in our world that still exists today in a different form. Plagge gave work certificates to Jewish men, certifying them as essential and skilled workers regardless of their actual backgrounds. In 1943, after negotiations with the SS, Plagge was able to expand his workforce from 394 Jews in July to more than 1,000 when the ghetto was liquidated in September. She never talked to us about how she survived, but there she told me about this mysterious officer, Major Plagge, who she said saved her life and the lives of her parents and 250 other Jewish prisoners," he said.