made a great show of organizing the marine evacuation using Kriegsmarine radio communications, before once more getting away himself" by escaping through this Baltic Sea port on 23 April 1945 on the icebreaker Ostpreußen. From Pillau through Hel Peninsula, Rügen, and Copenhagen he arrived at Flensburg, where he hid himself after unsuccessfully demanding that a U-boat take him to South America. He was captured by British forces in Hamburg in May 1949. Trial and imprisonment The Soviet Union demanded Koch's extradition, but the British government decided to pass him on to the Communist Polish government instead. On 14 January 1950 he was handed over by the British to a prison in Warsaw, the Mokotów Prison, where he remained imprisoned for another eight years before his trial began on 19 October 1958. He faced charges of war crimes for the extermination of 400,000 Poles, but was never indicted for his crimes in Ukraine. Found guilty of these crimes, he was sentenced to death on 9 March 1959 by the district court in Warsaw for having planned, prepared and organized the mass murder of civilians. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment due to ill health, although many believe he was spared because the Soviets thought he possessed information about art looted by the Nazis during the war; in particular, information about the whereabouts of the Amber Room of Tsarskoye Selo palace near Leningrad which was dismantled on Koch's direct orders. The Soviets believed he had ordered parts of this famous room to be hidden on board the Wilhelm Gustloff cruise liner, which was torpedoed and sunk by the Soviets in the Baltic whilst evacuating German refugees from East Prussia in early 1945. Salvage attempts by both Soviet and Polish diving teams in the 1950s revealed no evidence to substantiate this theory. Koch appeared in a television report on Königsberg's history in 1986, interviewed by West German journalists in his Polish prison cell. He remained unrepentant to the end, arguing that he would never have surrendered as "it was a matter of honour". He died shortly thereafter of natural causes in Barczewo prison (formerly Wartenburg in East Prussia) at the age of 90, as the last war criminal to serve a term in Poland. He was buried in an unmarked grave, at the local prison cemetery. Koch and Christianity Koch was one of the openly Christian Nazi party members. In addition to