As the Red Army approached Vilnius in late June 1944, the Wehrmacht prepared to retreat. The Jewish prisoners in the camp were aware (having heard news reports from the BBC on covert radio sets) that whenever the Red Army liberated a Jewish slave-labor camp, they found all the inmates dead, having been shot by SS killing squads just before the Germans retreated. Thus many of the prisoners had been working on hiding places (called Malines) or escape plans in the months leading up to the summer of 1944. But they needed to know when the SS squads would arrive to exterminate the prisoners. On Saturday, 1 July 1944, Plagge entered the camp, with SS Oberscharfürhrer Richter at his side and made an informal speech as the camp's Jewish prisoners gathered around him. Plagge announced that he and his men had been ordered to withdraw to the west, and that he had not been able to obtain permission to take the workers with the unit; however he reassured them that the prisoners were to be relocated by the SS on Monday, July 3, and commented that they should not worry because they all knew that the SS was an organization devoted to the protection of refugees. With this covert warning, more than half the camp's prisoners went into hiding before the SS death squads arrived on 3 July 1944. The 500 prisoners who did appear at the roll call called by the SS were taken to the forest of Paneriai and shot. Over the next three days the SS searched the camp and its surroundings and succeeded in finding half of the missing prisoners; these 250 Jews were shot in the camp courtyard and behind Building 2. However, when the Red Army captured Vilnius a few days later, some 250 of the camp's Jews emerged from their hiding places and were the largest single group of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Vilnius.