The marches from the camps of central Germany in April 1945 were the last large-scale evacuations of the Holocaust. They produced one of its most notorious atrocities: the burning alive of around a thousand prisoners in a barn at Gardelegen on 13 April 1945, three weeks before the German surrender.
The Buchenwald evacuation
Buchenwald held around 50,000 prisoners in early April 1945. As American forces approached, the SS began evacuating the camp on foot toward Flossenburg and Dachau, around 200 miles to the south. The columns moved through the Thuringian forests in spring weather, but with the same lack of food and the same shooting of prisoners who fell behind. Around 25,000 of the 28,000 evacuated died on the route or in the destination camps. The 21,000 prisoners left behind at Buchenwald were liberated by the American 6th Armored Division on 11 April 1945, partly because the camp’s underground resistance, organised by communist political prisoners, had effectively taken over the camp before the Americans arrived.
The Mittelbau-Dora evacuation
Mittelbau-Dora was the underground V-weapon factory complex near Nordhausen, staffed by concentration camp prisoners working in tunnels. The SS evacuated around 40,000 prisoners in early April 1945, mostly to Bergen-Belsen. The conditions on the marches and on the freight wagons were murderous. Several thousand died on the way. The evacuation produced numerous massacres along the route, of which the worst was Gardelegen.
Gardelegen, 13 April 1945
Around a thousand prisoners from sub-camps of Mittelbau-Dora arrived at the town of Gardelegen on 13 April. American forces were less than a day away. The SS, with help from local Volkssturm and Hitler Youth units, herded the prisoners into a large brick barn at the Isenschnibbe estate on the edge of the town. The barn was packed with petrol-soaked straw. The doors were locked. The straw was set on fire.
Most of the prisoners burned to death. Some who tried to escape through the roof or to dig their way out under the walls were shot. Around twenty survived by lying still under bodies and emerging after the SS had left. American troops from the 102nd Infantry Division reached the site two days later. The barn was still smouldering. The bodies of around a thousand men were inside.
The American commanding officer, Brigadier General Frank Keating, ordered that the local civilian population of Gardelegen would dig individual graves for each victim, in the presence of the bodies, and would maintain the graves in perpetuity. The cemetery still exists. A memorial stone was erected on the site of the barn in 1950.
The operational record
The operational record on Marches from Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.
The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.
See also
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
- Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
- Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994