[2] He joined the resistance and acted as a secret liaison between Tresckow in Russia and Ludwig Beck, Carl Goerdeler, Hans Oster, and Friedrich Olbricht in Berlin, taking part in various coup d'état plans and plots.

[3] Following an intense defence, conducted by himself on both legal and 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.

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.

[8] 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.

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.

[12] He married Luitgarde von Bismarck, born at Frankenstein in Silesia (now Ząbkowice Śląskie, Poland) in 1939[13] and had the following children: "To prevent this success of Hitler in all circumstances and by all means, even at the expense of a heavy defeat of the Third Reich, was our most urgent task."