In this month's issue of
mental_floss, there is a brief article about an area in Poland that came up with an extremely clever ruse to bypass German occupation and save its Jewish population:
They faked a typhus epidemic.
Using another, far less deadly bacteria that had symptoms like typhus, some of the non-Jewish townspeople made themselves sick. So, when the Germans inspected (and with a little alcohol and partying shoved into the German doctor), they were given an extremely UNCLEAN bill of health. An entire set of villages were quarantined off for the entirety of the war. Nobody was shipped off to camps. There was not a wholesale extermination of Jews.
I just found that to be...clever. And interesting.