procedural grounds (claiming his torture had made the process outrageously unworthy of justice) and in an exceptionally rare instance in its final nine months of existence, the People's Court acquitted von Schlabrendorff on 16 March 1945. His death was later demanded by Hitler's decree, but the order was defied insofar as it was never carried out. After his second trial, Schlabrendorff was moved from one concentration camp to another: Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg, then Dachau near Munich. In late April 1945 he was transferred to Tyrol together with about 140 other prominent inmates of Dachau, where the SS-Guards fled after being confronted by a regular German Wehrmacht unit led by Wichard von Alvensleben and told to stand down by the Supreme Commander of all SS troops in Italy, who took responsibility for the order. Schlabrendorff was eventually liberated by the Fifth U.S. Army on 5 May 1945. After the war As was revealed only 60 years after the fact, Schlabrendorff wrote analyses for the US secret service OSS about the leadership of the Wehrmacht and about war crimes committed by the Nazis. OSS head William J. Donovan then questioned him personally. When Donovan became adviser to the American delegation of lawyers at the Nuremberg trials after the dissolution of the OSS, he included Schlabrendorff on his staff. Schlabrendorff convinced Donovan that it was not the Germans but the Soviet secret service NKVD that had murdered some 4000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest. Donovan then had the Americans block the Soviet attempt to add Katyn to the list of German war crimes. Schlabrendorff was admitted to the Protestant Order of Saint John (Bailiwick of Brandenburg), in which he served as Captain of the Order (legal counsellor to the Herrenmeister, head of the Order) from 1957 to 1964. From 1 September 1967 until 7 November 1975, he was a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court of West Germany, the country's supreme constitutional court, serving in its second senate. Schlabrendorff died on 3 September 1980. Family He married Luitgarde von Bismarck, born at Frankenstein in Silesia (now Ząbkowice Śląskie, Poland) in 1939 and had the following children: Herzeleide von Schlabrendorff (born Berlin, 28 February 1940), married to (b. Hamburg, 15 June 1939 – 2 May 2006), four children. Dieprand Ludwig Carl Hans-Otto von Schlabrendorff (born Stettin, 18 May 1941), married to Eva von Polenz (born Karlsruhe, 10 June 1950), one child. Jürgen-Lewin Hans