The camp was to be dissolved; accused of being soft on Jews, Plagge was forbidden to take them with his unit. After the trial, Plagge lived the final decade of his life quietly and died of a heart attack in Darmstadt on 19 June 1957. When the red army captured the Vilnius camp a few days later, the 250 missing Jewish prisoners emerged from hiding. But he could not prevent the SS from seizing 250 children from the camp and murdering them while he was on leave. Plagge's godson Konrad Hesse will be at today's ceremony, along with the Good family and survivors of Subocz Street.

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. In 1941, he was put in command of an engineering unit, Heereskraftfahrpark 562 (vehicle maintenance unit 562, or HKP 562; literally, "Army motor-vehicle park"), which maintained and repaired military vehicles. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in this era or in the way people treat each other. Jewish men, women, and children, including Good’s mother, by refusing to follow protocol and outwitting his superiors.In 2005, following two unsuccessful petitions, the Holocaust Institution of Yad Vashem, recognized Karl Plagge, as a 'Righteous Among the Nations. Another 100 Jews were smuggled in by the resistance movement with Plagge's acquiescence, and the population peaked at 1,250 early in 1944. 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.

Of a pre-war Jewish population in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived, of which the largest single group, were saved by Plagge.

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.

Because Plagge had no descendants, the president of the Technische Universität Darmstadt accepted the award on his behalf.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.

A local party official accused Plagge of being on good terms with Jews and Freemasons, treating Jews in his home laboratory, and opposing the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, threatening to bring Plagge before a party tribunal. In Yad Vashem's view, Plagge's efforts to save Jewish workers and treat them humanely were probably related to serving the German war effort. Later, he would come to say ”I didn’t pay any party contribution…I had come to clear opposition to the nationalist socialist methods of violence”. The risk for Plagge was that he would be accused of favouring Jews, and this was really a very serious offence. By the third application, I was able to come up with cases and specific instances in which he surely was risking his life.During WWII, The city had approximately 200,000 inhabitants, of which so many were Jewish, (80,000), that it was known, at least by the self-mocking Jews, as the `Jerusalem of Lithuania'! I felt, there were these Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and they said this man saved their lives. After reading about the trial in a local newspaper, Eichamueller testified on Plagge's behalf, which influenced the trial result in his favor.