By April 1945 the death marches had become a dispersed, barely controlled phenomenon. The SS had no central command over the evacuation operations. Local commandants made their own decisions about when to move, which direction to take, and what to do with prisoners who could not keep up. American and British troops advancing into Germany encountered the marches in progress across Bavaria, Thuringia, Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein, sometimes catching the columns on the road, sometimes finding only the bodies of prisoners shot in the preceding hours.
What the Allied troops found
The physical evidence was scattered across hundreds of kilometres of German countryside. American troops in Bavaria in late April reported bodies in roadside ditches at intervals of a mile or less along routes the marches had taken. Some of the dead had been shot; others had simply fallen and been left. British troops in Schleswig-Holstein found similar evidence. The bodies were often identifiable as concentration camp prisoners by their clothing and their extreme emaciation.
Several documented cases record SS guards continuing to march and shoot prisoners within hours of Allied forces arriving in the area. The Gardelegen massacre of 13 April 1945, in which approximately 1,016 prisoners were herded into a barn on the outskirts of the town of Gardelegen and burned alive, took place four days before American troops arrived. The perpetrators included not only SS guards but local Wehrmacht soldiers and members of the Hitler Youth. American forces arriving in Gardelegen found the barn and the bodies and compelled local civilians to bury the dead with proper markers.
The final camps
Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony had become, by April 1945, a terminus for death march survivors from camps across the east. It was not itself a death camp, having been established as a prisoner exchange facility in 1943, but the influx of tens of thousands of evacuated prisoners in the early months of 1945 overwhelmed its facilities entirely. By the time British forces arrived on 15 April 1945 around 60,000 prisoners were present in conditions of complete collapse: no food, no water, no sanitation, tens of thousands of unburied dead. Around 13,000 prisoners died after liberation, too weak to survive even with medical care. The liberation of Bergen-Belsen was the first major liberated camp seen by British and American journalists and became the defining image of the Holocaust for the British and American public in 1945.
Dachau
Dachau, outside Munich, was liberated by American forces on 29 April 1945. A train of cattle wagons had arrived at Dachau shortly before liberation, carrying prisoners from Buchenwald. Most of those on the train were dead; the survivors were barely alive. American soldiers who entered the camp and found the train have given testimony describing the psychological effect on combat troops who had thought themselves hardened. Several SS guards were shot by American soldiers in the immediate aftermath of liberation, outside any legal process.
See also
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
- Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, Jonathan Cape, 2005
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Death Marches, encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, Cambridge University Press, 2001