The Soviets entered the completely empty facility on July 23, 1944. After the war, they captured and prosecuted hundreds, possibly as many as one thousand "Hiwis" who returned home to USSR. Most were sentenced to a Gulag, and released under the Khrushchev amnesty of 1955. The number of "Hiwis" tried in the West was very small by comparison. Six defendants were acquitted on all charges and set free by a West German court in Hamburg in 1976 including commandant Streibel. The Trawniki men apprehended in Soviet Union were charged with treason (not the shootings) and therefore were "guilty of enlistment" from the start of judicial proceedings. In the U.S. some 16 former "Hiwi" guards were denaturalized, some of whom were very old. In January 1943 the SS "Germanische Leitstelle" in occupied Zakopane in the heartland of the Tatra mountains embarked on a recruitment drive with an idea of forming a brand new Waffen-SS highlander division. Some 200 young "Goralenvolk" signed up, while offered unlimited supply of alcohol. They boarded a passenger train to Trawniki, but most left the train in Maków Podhalański once already sober. Only twelve men arrived in Trawniki. At the first opportunity they got into a major fistfight with the Ukrainians, causing havoc. They were arrested and sent away. The whole idea was abandoned as impossible by "SS-Obergruppenführer" Krüger in occupied Kraków by an official letter of April 5, 1943. The failure has inevitably contributed to his dismissal on November 9, 1943, by Governor General Hans Frank. Krüger committed suicide in upper Austria two years later.