After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, HKP 562 was deployed to Vilna, Lithuania, in early July 1941. Serving initially in Poland after the German invasion, he witnessed atrocities that caused him to decide "to work against the Nazis".

Michael Good is a family physician from Durham, CT and the son of two Jewish immigrants from Vilna, Poland. 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.Through these efforts he was able to protect over 1250 Jews from the genocide occurring in Vilna until the final days of the German occupation. 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. During the summer of 1944, the Red Army advanced to the outskirts of Vilnius and the Wehrmacht withdrew abruptly in early July. 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.

And in April 2005 Karl Plagge joined Oskar Schindler and 380 other Germans as a “Righteous among Nations,” honored by the State of Israel for protecting and saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. After being dismissed from the position of lecturer, for being unwilling to teach racisim, and his opposition to the Nazi policy against the Jews, he stopped participating in Nazi Party activities in 1935, and four years later when the Second World War broke out, he left the Nazi Party. 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'! It was during this trip that he heard the story of the enigmatic officer named Major Plagge who his mother claimed had saved her life.Jewish men, women, and children, including Good’s mother, by refusing to follow protocol and outwitting his superiors. In the aftermath of the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising and an increase in Soviet partisan activity, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, decided to liquidate all Nazi ghettos, regardless of the slave labor they provided to the Wehrmacht's war effort. Plagge's godson Konrad Hesse will be at today's ceremony, along with the Good family and survivors of Subocz Street.