The death marches were the last mass killings of the Holocaust. Between the summer of 1944 and the final weeks of the war in Europe, the SS evacuated concentration camp prisoners ahead of the advancing Allied armies, forcing them to march, often in mid-winter, without food or adequate clothing, toward camps deeper inside German-controlled territory. Between 250,000 and 375,000 people died. They had survived years of imprisonment only to be killed in the final weeks, sometimes the final days, before liberation.
Why they happened
Himmler had issued standing orders that no concentration camp prisoner was to fall into Allied hands alive. Those orders were never withdrawn. But the marches also reflected something beyond obedience to orders: the SS continued killing prisoners in plain sight of Germany’s defeat, in open countryside visible to local populations, because the genocidal logic of the regime had not stopped even as everything else was collapsing around it. Why men who knew the war was lost kept shooting exhausted prisoners at the roadside is one of the harder questions in the history of the Holocaust, and it is addressed directly in these pages.
What is documented here
The Auschwitz march of January 1945, in which around 60,000 prisoners were driven into the Polish winter when the SS evacuated the complex, is the largest single death march and the one most extensively documented in survivor testimony. The Stutthof evacuations along the Baltic coast included an attempt to move prisoners by sea that ended in mass drowning. The western marches of April 1945 brought the columns into direct contact with advancing American and British forces: troops reported finding bodies in roadside ditches every mile or two along routes the marches had taken.
The survivor testimony gathered from the marches is some of the most raw in the entire Holocaust memoir literature. Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Imre Kertész all survived marches that form part of their accounts. The postwar prosecution of death march perpetrators was uneven and in many cases inadequate: most of those who killed on the roads were never held to account, and the reasons for that are documented here too.
Sources
- Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide, Harvard University Press, 2011
- Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015
- Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, Einaudi, 1947
- Elie Wiesel, Night, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Death Marches, encyclopedia.ushmm.org