The largest single death march of the Holocaust was the evacuation of the Auschwitz complex in January 1945. As Soviet forces approached from the east, the SS evacuated around 60,000 prisoners on foot in temperatures that fell below minus twenty degrees centigrade. Around 15,000 of them died on the route.
The order to evacuate
The SS had been preparing for the evacuation for several months. Detailed plans had been drawn up for the destruction of the camp records, the dynamiting of the gas chambers and crematoria, and the removal of the prisoners. The order to begin came on 17 January 1945. Soviet forces were by then less than a hundred miles away.
The first columns left Auschwitz I, Birkenau and Monowitz on 18 January. Most prisoners had only the striped camp uniform and wooden clogs. Some had managed to wrap their feet in rags or to find pieces of blanket. Almost no one had a coat. The temperature was around minus twenty degrees. Snow lay deep across the route.
The route
The marches headed west toward the railheads at Wodzislaw and Loslau. From there the prisoners were loaded into open freight wagons and taken on to other camps still in German hands: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg. The journey on foot took between three and seven days depending on the column. The trail of bodies along the route was so consistent that survivors and historians later described it as the blood road.
SS guards walked alongside the columns. Anyone who fell behind, who stopped to rest, who tried to break ranks, was shot where they stood. Local Polish villagers along the route reported finding bodies in ditches, in barns, in the streets of their towns, for weeks after the columns had passed. Some villagers brought food and water to the columns when the guards permitted it. Others were warned away under threat.
Who survived
Around 7,000 prisoners were left behind at Auschwitz when the marches began, mostly those judged too sick or weak to walk. The SS had intended to kill them but the Soviet advance was too quick. They were the prisoners the Red Army found when it reached the camp on 27 January 1945. Of the 60,000 who had set out on the marches, around 45,000 reached the destination camps. The rest had died on the way, either shot or fallen from cold and exhaustion. Many of those who reached the destination camps died there in the following weeks of the conditions they had endured on the march.
The operational record
The operational record on The Auschwitz March, January 1945 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