camp would be liquidated so they could implement their plans to escape or hide. On 1 July, Plagge made an informal speech to the Jewish prisoners in the presence of SS Oberscharführer Richter: In response to a question from the assembled Jews, Plagge added that there was no need to bring their luggage. When the SS came to the camp on 4 July, 500 Jews appeared at the roll call and were executed at Ponary. The rest either tried to escape or hid inside the camp. About 150 or 200 Jews survived the searches and were liberated by the Red Army on 13 July. Of the 100,000 Jews in Vilnius, only 2,000 survived the Holocaust; survivors of the HKP camp constituted the largest single group. Post-war After leaving Vilnius, Plagge led his unit westward and surrendered to the United States Army on 2 May 1945 without suffering a single casualty. Because he had joined the Nazi Party so early and commanded a labor camp where many prisoners were murdered, he was tried in 1947 as part of the postwar denazification process; he hired a lawyer to defend him. Plagge and his former subordinates told the court about his efforts to help Jewish forced laborers; Plagge's lawyer asked for him to be classified as a fellow traveler rather than an active Nazi. Former prisoners of HKP 562 in a displaced person camp in Ludwigsburg told Maria Eichamueller about Plagge's actions. After reading about the trial in a local newspaper, Eichamueller testified on Plagge's behalf, which influenced the trial result in his favor. The court did not exonerate Plagge completely, because it believed that his actions had been motivated by humanitarianism rather than opposition to Nazism. The judges may have been reluctant to recognize the extent of Plagge's humanitarian achievements because they cast a bad light on the indifference of ordinary Germans to the Holocaust and the retention of Nazi judges in the postwar judicial system. After the trial, Plagge lived the final decade of his life quietly and died of a heart attack in Darmstadt on 19 June 1957. In a letter to a Jewish lawyer, R. Strauss, dated 26 April 1956, Plagge compared himself to Dr. Rieux, a character in Albert Camus's novel The Plague. In the novel, which was written while Camus was living under Nazi occupation in France, Rieux risks his life to save people from the plague,