Today’s Brutal Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the last few months of World War II Soviet armies advanced in the east while American, British and French forces pressed Germany in the west. In response to these offensives, the Nazis decided to evacuate and dismantle concentration camps hoping to conceal their heinous crimes. That process actually began in the summer of 1944 when evacuations began at Auschwitz, the largest of the concentration camps. The Germans finally liquidated that killing center in mid-January 1945, forcing some 66,000 prisoners to take to the roads. The following month the camp at Gross Rosen, with its 40,000 prisoners, was evacuated. With Allied forces closing in, the Germans emptied one camp after another. The massive transfer of hundreds of thousands of sickly and emaciated inmates became known as the “death marches”, in reference to the enormous number of fatalities resulting from the ordeal.
When the evacuations began, there were some 700,000 prisoners in concentration camps throughout Europe, run by approximately 40,000 SS guards and administrators. It has been estimated that almost a quarter of a million camp inmates died in forced marches across central Europe from January to May, 1945. The evacuations occurred in camps throughout German occupied territories, and everywhere the camp population was brutalized and tormented. Ill-clad, they froze in sub-zero temperatures; exhausted, they received little more than stale bread and water for their daily rations. Not surprisingly, many prisoners succumbed to the bitter cold, to hunger, or to the effects of typhus. But a staggering number of victims died from brutal abuse and outright murder at the hands of their guards. Many were shot or beaten to death because they were too weak to keep pace, or because they had fallen down. Victims included women as well as men, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses, Soviet prisoners-of-war as well as Spanish republicans, although Jews accounted for at least half the number of fatalities. The persecution continued even as the Third Reich crumbled, even after Hitler’s suicide on April 30th. Ironically, the last death march began on May 7th, the same day that Germany surrendered to the Allies.
Death Marches
Culled from: Road to Hell: Recollections of the Nazi Death March
Death March Photos
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a small collection of chilling images from the death marches that are well worth a gander. I tried to go to this museum last week, by the way… but the crowds drove me away. I’ll keep trying… maybe one day I’ll make it! I do have some forthcoming travelogues from the places I did manage to see last week!