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

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The rest of Vilna's Jews were either executed immediately at Ponary or sent to concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Plagge also made efforts to help Poles and Soviet prisoners of war forced to work for the Wehrmacht. The documentary tells a good story about one courageous man who found a few other good men to provide a safe haven for a few hundred Jewish prisoners who found jobs as auto mechanics even though they had to learn about auto repair starting from scratch. In 1934, Plagge began to work at Hessenwerks, an engineering company run by Kurt Hesse, whose wife Erica was half-Jewish.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.

Apparently, approximately 40,000 members of the German army were executed during WWII for expressing similar sentiments!This kind of work permit protected the worker, his wife, and up to two of his children from the SS sweeps carried out in the Vilna Ghetto, in which Jews without work papers were captured and killed at the nearby Ponary execution grounds. He decided it was his duty to try and work against the genocidal regime he unknowingly helped put in to power. The risk for Plagge was that he would be accused of favouring Jews, and this was really a very serious offence.