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- [Narrator] In 1947 Major Karl Plagge,

a former commander of a Nazi forced labor camp

was tried for his part in the German occupation of Vilnius

(gunshots banging)

during which 100,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered.

(gunshot bangs)

To everyone's surprise, a few Jewish survivors

of the labor camp came to testify on his behalf.

What they revealed was a covert operation

set up to save the lives of the last Jews of Vilnius.

(dramatic music)

In modern Vilnius commuters are oblivious

to this low rent building complex.

It was once called HKP,

and it's the only Holocaust labor camp in Europe

that hasn't been destroyed or turned into a memorial.

During the second world war hundreds were saved here.

Hundreds more were murdered and buried here.

Before these old buildings are torn down

a team of scientists, historians and survivors converge here

to revive the story that was almost forgotten.

Using the latest noninvasive technologies,

basing themselves on survivors' testimonies and sketches,

they hope to unearth the mass grave

of those who didn't make it

and the hiding places of those who did.

These old buildings on the outskirts of Vilnius,

conceal a dark secret.

(ominous music)

The current residents may very well be living

on top of the bones of the previous occupants.

They were Jews imprisoned by the Nazis.

During the Holocaust, they fought for their lives

in the very rooms these people live in today.

At the time one Nazi major called Karl Plagge

risked his life, lying to the Nazi command

in order to carry out a daring operation

to save the Jews imprisoned here.

Their story and Major Plagge's actions

were largely unknown until Michael Good,

an American family doctor, found out that his mother

was one of those saved by Major Plagge.

- And so I just kept on having these questions

pop into my head, who was this Major Plagge?

Why would a Nazi major be running around

and protecting and saving Jews?

When the rest of the Germans in Vilna

were committed to slaughtering them?

- [Narrator] Dr. Good's ensuing research

finally brought to light

one of the most remarkable stories of the Holocaust,

about a Nazi who decided to save Jews

by creating workshops to fix German army vehicles

and demanding Jewish workers to labor in them.

- This vehicle repair shop was different than all of those

other places because families, men, women

and children were housed together.

Plagge argued to his superiors that they had to be together

to make them more enthusiastic workers

so that they would do really good work.

So his vision of what this HKP was,

was more than just a repair shop.

For many of these people this was their permit for life.

- To really appreciate what Karl Plagge did

we need to go to his workshops.

The workers, they were totally without skills.

They were shopkeepers, school teachers, accountants,

businessman, and they had absolutely no automotive skills,

even though Plagge had certified them

as being skilled mechanics.

But very quickly,

they started to learn more and more skills.

And before too long,

they actually were the skilled workers

that Plagge claimed them to be.

But then the SS wanted to take the women and children

and kill them because they were idle.

So he made arrangements to set up clothing workshops

in the camp and imported sewing machines

and put the women and older children to work.

- On the one hand, you have Plagge

trying to keep a Jewish workforce alive.

On the other side, you have the SS who are committed

to the destruction of all the Jews in this vicinity.

So what that represents the permanent conflict

that exists between Plagge in particular and the SS in Vilna

who would seek to destroy as many Jews as possible.

- [Narrator] But Plagge's plan didn't always work.

Before HKP is torn down for urban renewal,

scientists armed with the latest in archeological technology

are here to identify mass graves.

- HKP is unique in the history of the Holocaust.

It's still in the same form as it was 75 years ago,

a killing field where people are still living.

So this is the target that we're looking for.

This is the original place where this group from July 2nd

and July 3rd, were basically killed?

- That's right?

- [Narrator] According to survivors' testimonies,

the Nazis executed hundreds of prisoners

on the side of the Western building.

The bodies were then hastily buried in shallow pits.

- And then they moved the bodies

from the original killing trench to another place.

- That's right.

- [Narrator] After the liberation of Vilnius,

the corpses were exhumed and reburied in a mass grave

somewhere in the courtyard between the buildings.

- First thing is before we start anything,

we're going to drone the whole area, right?

We've sort of cornered the market on doing really good

science in areas where you cannot do traditional archeology.

Noninvasive archeology means that you can identify locations

of where things happened without having to excavate them.

- First, we'll be taking high resolution,

aerial imagery using a drone.

So we'll be taking hundreds of photos over the site,

putting them together in a composite image

with a resolution on the order of one centimeter per pixel.

(camera clicking)

- [Narrator] The scientists now discover a patch of grass

that looks different from the surrounding vegetation.

- Here we clearly see this area of stressed vegetation.

- [Narrator] This might indicate that an excavation

took place in the area, maybe to dig a mass grave.

- Okay so 40 meter line.

- [Narrator] They now deploy ground penetrating radar

or GPR, to see what lies underneath.

- We're trying to locate a mass burial site.

The hypothesis we have here is that bodies were moved here,

potentially around this building, placed in here

and then covered up for their final burial.

And so what we're doing here is using ground penetrating

radar to image into the subsurface.

- [Narrator] FM radio waves are transmitted

from the device into the soil.

By measuring how quickly the signals

are reflected back to the unit, GPR can reveal figures

in the ground that don't look natural.

The GPR data will take several days to analyze,

only then will they know if they've located

the victims of HKP.

Karl Plagge was born in Darmstadt Germany.

He grew up here as a German nationalist.

- There is a tradition in the family to be in the military

and to be a very loyal subject to the government

and to want best for the country.

- He was old enough to serve in the first world war.

He was captured by the British, becomes a POW

for three years, was sent home in 1920.

And then in the 1920s, his family undergo

exactly the same privations as most German families

do during the German inflation,

where their savings were more than likely wiped out.

- He wanted to be a doctor but he couldn't pay the fee

and therefore he was engineer.

He didn't want to construct things,

he wanted to cure people, to help people.

- He's unusual in the sense that he joins the Nazi party

in 1931, which is very early for somebody taking that step.

- He was convinced that Hitler and his promise

to bring would be a kind of solution.

He was also unemployed and Hitler also promised

to bring those thousands and thousands

of unemployed back to work.

- When we get to 1940,

he's drafted in to form part of this engineering facility,

which ultimately brings him to Vilnius.

- [Narrator] It was here that he stopped identifying

with the Nazis.

(gunshots banging)

At the time, the SS was in the process of murdering

the 100,000 Jews of Vilnius.

Karl Plagge was horrified by the atrocities committed

by his people and their local Lithuanian helpers.

He decided that he must do something to help the Jews.

As he wrote, "I decided to work against the Nazis.

I saw unbelievable things. I was ashamed."

- [Sidney] So we came here in September of '43.

- [Narrator] Dr. Good now invites Sidney Handler

to join him at the site.

Sydney is 84 old. He was nine when he moved into HKP.

Some parts of these buildings

haven't been explored since 1944.

- We lived around here someplace.

So I was nine and there were other children in the camp.

- Were you aware that there were

any other children who survived?

- No. I had no knowledge of that.

See the hallways, Michael?

That's exactly what we had before.

Let's try a door here, maybe we can see one of these.

(knocking on door)

- Doesn't look like anybody's home.

- Let's see if we can get in here Michael.

(knocking on door)

Hi. Gracia?

May we come in.

(woman speaking foreign language)

This was it Michael, this was it.

About four families here.

- Four families? - Four families.

Eight people, they had bunk beds.

- Bunk beds. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was all tiny, tiny.

Do you know what happened here during the war?

- [Narrator] To find evidence of the execution pits

the scientists now deploy another scanning technology

known as electrical resistivity tomography, or ERT.

- This box connected to our array of 81 electrodes

will measure the resistivity of the ground

along the entire length of 40 meters

to a depth of six or seven meters.

- [Narrator] The control unit powered by an electrical car

battery fires hundreds of electrical pulses

through the metal spikes into the ground.

It measures the way soil conducts electricity

and creates a map, distinguishing natural soil

and manmade disturbances like killing pits.

- There is an eye witness testimony that there was a trench

that was dug in this general area behind this building here.

And we want to see evidence of that trench.

So we want to see where the ground was dug into

and where it was backfilled.

- And we have that information from testimony.

And we also have it from the bullet holes at head height

behind me and all along the wall of this building.

- [Narrator] For years, Major Plagge worked

to make sure no harm befell his Jewish workers.

For the most part, he was successful.

- Plagge had really set up a very unusual atmosphere here.

He gathered around him a group of officers

who were like minded, and he gave them orders

that the civilians should be treated with respect.

So there was no brutality.

There are no tales of Jewish workers being beaten

or savaged within the Plagge workshops.

He went to great efforts to try to get more food

because the SS was allowing only starvation rations.

He got firewood for them so they didn't freeze to death

during these winters, and he actually found doctors

so that they wouldn't get disease.

He thought of a lot of details.

- [Narrator] Plagge feared that one day the SS

would get the better of him and remove him from his post.

To prepare for that moment he allowed the inmates

to build secret spaces called malinas

in which they would be able to hide and survive.

The archeologists have expanded their work.

They're now not only looking for the mass graves,

but for the malinas as well.

Paul and Alastair are in one of the apartments on the ground

floor, looking for remnants of one of these hiding places.

- So we're going to use radar to look through the floor

inch by inch to see if there's a shaft

leading into the malina below.

- [Narrator] According to survivors testimony

it was underneath what is now a kitchen.

- 15 centimeters below the surface here.

- [Narrator] To see below the floor,

they deploy a Conquest 100 concrete imaging device.

Using radio waves it works in the same way

as the larger ground penetrating radar.

Concrete imaging is used to scan smaller surfaces

and provides a detailed view inside walls and floors.

- So here we have feature that's, about 15 inches,

18 inches by 18 inches.

- So on the grid there that's pretty small.

- It's small, but it's big enough.

- Big enough to get your hips through.

- Well we don't have anything that definitively looks

like a shaft, but we do have what clearly looks

like some square framing, big enough for an adult to fit in.

It's not to say that this was the entrance to the shaft,

but it could be.

- [Narrator] The result is not conclusive,

but it suggests that there might still be spaces

beneath the building that haven't been filled with concrete.

- It's exactly at this location on the template,

on the floor.

- [Narrator] For over two years, Plagge's plan worked.

Both he and the Jews of HKP began to believe

that the families under his protection would survive.

That's when he allowed himself to go on leave

to see his family,

a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

- There was a Kinder Action, a child capture.

- It actually occurred in all the camps across Lithuania.

It was March 27th, 1944.

(ominous music)

Early in the morning, after the men had gone to work,

the SS surrounded the camp with Lithuanian SS troops,

and then began coming into the buildings,

yelling that the children

must present themselves for vaccinations.

- The SS take advantage of Karl Plagge's absence

to mount a raid on these premises, on these buildings

to roust out all the children.

- We knew that the front wasn't going well.

And by that time my father was gone,

my brother was gone, everybody was gone.

Everybody had lost family here already in the camp.

So it was nothing that we didn't expect exactly.

The final finish to our lives.

(tense music)

- The mothers were just frantic, fighting.

They were being beaten off and smashed with rifles.

The SS men took the children by their feet

and flung them into the truck so that they landed head down

and smashed their heads

and they could hear the children crying in pain.

- My mother and I came down the stairs

and there was a guard up there, there was a guard down here.

My mother saw the closet open

and she just pushed me in there with her tush.

And I stayed in this closet all day long,

including the time some German soldier came by here

and shoved their bayonet into that closet.

The bayonet went right by me.

And I was so scared. I didn't utter a word.

I defecated my pants.

- My father used to go out to work every morning.

That morning when the Kinder Action was on

he didn't go out to work.

He had a feeling that he has to stay home

and take care of me.

And he hid me on the top of the roof.

- He put me on the roof and I held myself up

on the cantements of the roof.

And I sat on the roof when the Action was going on,

when they were taking the children to be killed.

And I was saved on top of the roof.

And I laid there from the morning till evening.

- And the door stayed open.

I heard every child that came down the stairs.

Every mother came down the stairs I heard them.

And that's all I remember is the mother's crying, crying,

crying, crying, because the kids were taken away from them.

(distant shouting)

- The men had no idea what was happening at the camp.

And so at the end of the day, when they returned home,

they came home to just a horrible scene.

The women were wailing and crying and weeping.

The survivors describe this horrible cry

emanating from the camp that you could hear

from every corner of the neighborhood.

And this crying went on for days and days.

This traumatic event was so horrific

that the parents were just unable,

just unable to bring themselves to get up and come to work.

And I think that these women wouldn't have cared

if the SS threatened to shoot them,

they just could not go on.

And so for three days after March 27th,

the workshops were empty.

- In the evening when the Germans already left,

I went down and my father came up to take me.

And then my father looked for a place to hid me.

So they wouldn't take me away.

- After the Kinder Action, any child who remained,

had to be hidden from view,

they couldn't let them be seen by any Germans,

because there were supposed to be no children

in the camp anymore.

- Karl Plagge felt guilty that he was in Darmstadt

at the time when the Kinder Action took place there.

And he thought that if he had been there,

he could have done something.

He did not know what,

but he thought he could have done something.

- [Narrator] Plagge returned to HKP

where the situation continued to unravel.

With the SS gaining ground it was apparent that the malinas

would be the last resort for the Jews of HKP.

Paul and Alister continue to search

for these hiding places.

This time they're looking at the basement

underneath the old buildings.

- That's old newspapers.

- [Narrator] Using a micro CA-25 inspection camera,

commonly called plumber's camera

Paul can see through cracks in the basement walls.

- Anything behind the walls?

- Not yet, it's pretty constant temperatures.

- [Narrator] Alastair uses a thermal imaging camera

in an attempt to detect voids behind the walls.

If there is a malina in there, it will show up

as a different color on the device.

- I got a gap in the wall here Paul.

Drops a couple of degrees.

- Look at that. - Oh, it's a bolt.

- It's a bolt just sitting on the floor,

but that's brickwork in there.

I think it's the real thing.

Yes. I think there's a whole lot of room back there.

Seriously. Look.

It keeps going way back and you can see brickwork.

So this is really interesting.

There's no entrance into this room.

Oh, so I think we found a malina.

- I can't believe I'm going up to the attic.

I haven't been there since '44.

(tense music)

- The beginning of the end started on July 1st.

The Soviets were coming in and it was clear

that the battle for Vilnius was going to take place.

And the Nazis had to leave as little evidence

of what happened here.

- The SS tightened the guards around the camp.

And at a certain point, none of the men were allowed

to leave the camp to go to work anymore.

Everybody was just trapped in the camp.

So they knew that they were penned up,

like animals awaiting slaughter.

- In the end with Germany losing the war,

with the front coming closer and closer,

whatever efforts Plagge has put into this environment

and into this site are going to be lost anyway.

All he can hope for is that some of the people

that are still sheltering in these buildings

somehow find a way to stay out of the hands of the SS

for long enough to be liberated by the red army.

- [Narrator] Under the watchful eye of the SS,

Plagge now told the inmates that he was being sent away

and that the SS was going to take over the camp.

- And he says, well, we had wanted to take you

our very skilled workers with us,

but unfortunately this is not possible,

but you shouldn't worry because you too will be evacuated.

And during your relocation, you will be escorted by the SS,

which as you know, is an organization devoted

to the protection of refugees.

When the Jews heard this, they understood the coded message.

The SS was coming for them on Monday.

And the time to go into hiding was now.

- [Narrator] About half of the 1000 prisoners

that were left, went into their hiding places.

The other half showed up for roll call,

hoping the SS wouldn't murder them

with the red army about to roll into Vilna.

But everyone who showed up was executed

in the Ponary forest, where the Nazis were in the process

of murdering the last of the 100,000 Jews of Vilna.

- [Michael] Now 500 prisoners were missing.

And so the SS began to search and tear apart the camp

looking for their missing Jews so they could murder them.

- Michael, it hasn't changed in 73 years.

- So where were you guys hiding?

- We were hiding underneath the floor.

There were floorboards here.

- There was a space under the floorboards-

- There was space that was cut out.

It was about this high and we'd just lay there.

The door was open. When we heard anybody come up here,

we'd just lift up the boards and put them over us.

Other than that, we just lay there and lay there for days.

- In the attic it was hot as hell.

Must have been 110, 145 degrees.

I recommended we uncover the boards with wood

just to get the fresh air.

- What could you hear?

What was going on?

- We could hear everything that was going on downstairs.

Don't forget the door was open.

We could hear people speaking.

We could hear what was going on in the courtyard.

Mostly what we heard in the courtyard

was the machine gun being fired constantly.

- It sounds like as they discovered people

in their hiding place, they would haul them out.

- That's all we could hear was crying, screaming,

machine gun, silence.

(somber music)

We heard somebody running up the steps.

Guy ran up. We had no idea who it was.

Looked out the window and he got a bullet hole

right in his head. Dropped down right here.

We heard again, the steps.

Now, these were boots running up the stairs,

we covered up again with the wood.

We could see it was a German soldier.

We could see the guy's boots.

Came up, ran up here, looked at the body.

Looked around. Nobody else was here, left.

We could smell the body for days afterwards.

- I remember these, excuse my language,

I remember these fucking stairs everyday.

Every fucking day I remember these stairs.

I'm in the car alone. I think about it.

I'm in the shower, I think about it.

It just goes on and on and on.

There's no closure.

That's a word invented by people

that never experienced bad times.

The Russians came in.

We were in a shock.

I mean, absolutely in a shock, you didn't know what to do.

You didn't know where to turn, what to do.

Just shocked.

- When the Jews did emerge,

they found that there was a trench that was filled with dead

bodies and had a very thin layer of dirt on them.

But you could actually see arms and legs sticking out

and people could recognize some of their friends

and relatives in that trench.

And then there were bodies and corpses

just strewn throughout the courtyard.

- The tremors didn't have enough time to dig a deep grave.

So after the Russians came in,

we came back here to rebury them.

The bodies were swollen from the heat.

Pulled them out, dug a deeper grave and pulled them back in.

I was 10 years old.

I've seen more dead people than you can imagine.

- Hello.

- [Narrator] Michael, now gets his son Jonathan to join him.

Maybe they can find the actual hiding place

of Michael's mother, Pearl.

Armed with homemade sketches based on the memory of family

members, they now embark on their own personal search.

- [Michael] This is building number two.

The memoir say that grandma's apartment

was on the first floor,

which for Europeans means the first floor

above the ground floor.

- So if we want to find mom's malina entrance,

that's underneath the stairs.

Well, let's go find the staircase.

- [Jonathan] Alright. This is all new down here.

That's not new.

- Holy shit.

It looks like there's a light switch here.

Watch your step, Johnny.

- [Jonathan] Thank you, Pop.

- Alright. let's try to figure out what's going on here.

- Well, I mean, it might've been this,

if this pipe wasn't here.

- This could be it. This is like a space.

So according to the drawing, this wall was solid.

Read to me what grandpa had to say.

- Working diligently we blocked off the farthest room

in the basement by a brick wall and excavated an underground

passage to gain access to this isolated space.

For this we had to chisel a large hole

through the stone foundation of the house.

Well, is it hollow?

- Let's see.

(thudding)

Listen to that.

This could be where the hole was that extended

down under the foundation and into this space.

So let's go take a walk and see what we find down here.

- How's this way.

- This is like Indiana Jones and son.

So this whole space in here must've been the malina.

- Keep the light right there.

Move the light.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's totally it.

- So if we imagine that this is a solid wall,

how was an SS man going to ever get in there right?

So the key was the trap door.

- Yeah. This is a good target.

We could do a small localized radar survey

to see if the remnants of the shaft are still there.

And going through this hole to the other side.

I think these pipes seem to carry through to the next room.

- We're using ground penetrating radar.

We use FM radio waves or electromagnetic waves,

just like we have on our radios to look into the ground.

- Using a plumbers inspection camera,

to poke into all the little cracks and spaces

and behind bricks and through debris

to see what might be there, what we might find.

- So what we're seeing is a cut coming through here.

If layering does not connect up or gets broken,

we can indicate that something human has caused that

in those areas, based on the descriptions,

this would be that site.

It would match up to those descriptions

of having a shaft or a hole at the site.

- Wow. Looks like an old shoe.

Feels like a wooden shoe, but it's a shoe mold.

Wow. What's that?

It's a wagon and it is so primitive.

It's like scrap pieces of wood punched out of,

maybe for some piping that some kid pulled together,

a rusty nail for an axle,

some copper wire to bind it together.

And the wheels still spin.

This is definitely something a kid stuck in a hole

for a few days would have taken with him.

- This is really a significant find.

It really speaks to a very specific time period

when people were making these types of carts

for children to play with

in a very specific place inside the malina.

And maybe that it was actually constructed

in this place where they had workshops.

We have very little of the types of things

that we call toys for children

would play during the Holocaust,

Their toys tell us more about their lives than any

of the other bigger issues that we find at these sites.

- So this is it, Jonathan, this is where they hid.

They had originally planned to have about 35 people

hiding in this space, but desperate neighbors

and people looking for a hiding place forced their way in.

And there were a hundred people packed into these footings.

They couldn't breathe. People were hallucinating,

people were attacking each other.

It was just this horrible scene.

So in the end, when the Russian army liberated Vilna

from the Germans and occupied the town

about 250 Jews emerged

from their hiding places in this building.

And they represent the single largest group of survivors

of the Holocaust in Vilna.

Just think, Jonathan, this hole that they managed

to find and secure is what allowed us to live.

- [Narrator] After days of data analysis,

the scientists conclude their investigation

and the search for the mass graves.

They've combined the results from different scans

and incorporated them into one 3D map of the area.

First, they address the findings at the western building

were executions reportedly took place

along with temporary burials in shallow pits.

Incredibly science confirms the oral history.

- We investigated where their were rumored to be two pits

where people were either lined up and shot into these pits

or dead bodies were dragged into these pits.

Here's the Keller tomography model.

We can see the dark red areas here

are where you have the natural sand,

but we can see where that sand has been cut into

to a depth of about two and a half, three meters.

So we have two distinct pits here.

One that's about 15 meters long here.

And another one about 10 meters long here.

We also have evidence that there are bullet holes there.

- [Narrator] Alastair now addresses

the ground penetrating radar results in the courtyard

where they were searching for the mass grave.

- In the area between the buildings

we see the same features that we saw in building two.

And that is the sand has been cut into.

It's been back-filled with some other material.

In the same location we have anecdotal evidence

of bones that were uncovered during the installation

of the heating pipes 15 years ago.

Combine those two pieces of information we think

we are looking at a mass grave.

It's highly likely that there are still bodies in that area.

- Karl Plagge came back to a totally destroyed Darnstadt.

And he was quite sure that everybody died in Vilnius.

And that was really on his mind and on his conscience.

- [Narrator] After the war Plagge was tried

as an accomplice in war crimes.

He didn't defend himself, but some Jewish survivors

of HKP came forward to testify on his behalf.

As a result, he was acquitted.

But unlike others, he did not feel absolved from guilt.

- Plagge never spoke about what happened during the war

and he never spoke about what he did.

He thought it was his duty and he didn't do it well enough

because so many died.

- [Narrator] Konrad commemorates his godfather

who went to his grave

never knowing that he had saved hundreds.

- We are always told that a single ordinary man

cannot make any difference and of course that is true

if you see it from the global perspective,

but it is also true that a single person

can make a big difference as my grand uncle Karl Plagge did

when he saved here, the lives of over 250 people.

- [Narrator] Investigators and survivors,

now commemorate the hundreds buried here.

(chanting in foreign language)

- I want to thank my mother

who guided me my whole life through.

My mother got me into HKP which was a life saver.

She saved me during the Kinder Action,

she saved me after the Kinder Action.

She carried me down the stairs, over here, on her shoulders

and she got me out of Vilna

and then we went to the United States.

My mother survived and I survived.

My father, brother, other members of the family. No.

Very mixed emotion coming here after 70-odd years.

I can't say I'm glad to be here, but I'm glad I came.

So thank you Ma for everything.

(somber music)