of public feeling." His requests were ignored by German authorities. By the end of 1943, the Germans made an effort to erase all traces of the atrocities committed in the camp by burning records, incinerating corpses, and destroying other pieces of evidence. This task was undertaken by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, who arrived in Belgrade in November 1943. Upon arrival, he ordered the head of the local Gestapo, SS-Sturmbannführer Bruno Sattler, to form a special detachment that was to be responsible for the exhumation and burning of bodies. The detachment was led by Lieutenant Erich Grunwald, and composed of ten security policemen and 48 military policemen. The digging battalions were composed of 100 Serbian and Jewish prisoners. Exhumations occurred from December 1943 to April 1944, and thousands of bodies were burned. All the prisoners that were present during the exhumations were shot, except for three Serbs who managed to escape. Allied aircraft bombed Sajmište on 17 April 1944, killing about 100 inmates and inflicting heavy damage to the camp itself. On 17 May 1944, the Germans transferred control of the camp over to the NDH. It was closed that July. Aftermath and legacy After the war, Yugoslavia's new communist government announced that 100,000 people had passed through Sajmište between 1941 and 1944, half of whom were killed. The Yugoslav State War Crimes Commission later estimated that as many as 40,000 may have been killed in the camp, including 7,000 Jews. According to the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, the death toll was exaggerated by the communists for political purposes, and the real number of inmates was about 50,000, with 20,000 killed. It is estimated that half of all Serbian Jews perished in the camp. The Staro Sajmište memorial cites 23,000 fatalities, of which 10,000 were Jewish. Most of those responsible for the camp's operation were captured and brought to trial. Following the war, many prominent German officials, including Turner, Fuchs and Meyszner, were extradited to Yugoslavia by the Allies, and subsequently executed. Andorfer escaped to Venezuela with the assistance of the Roman Catholic Church. He returned to Austria in the 1960s, and was subsequently apprehended and tried on the minor charge of being an accessory to murder, for which he was sentenced to 2½ years' imprisonment. Andorfer's deputy Enge was apprehended in the 1960s and sentenced to 1½ years' imprisonment. He avoided serving his sentence due to his old