Why the SS continued to march prisoners to their deaths in the spring of 1945, when Germany had clearly lost the war and the Allied armies were weeks away from the camps, is one of the harder questions in the history of the genocide. The marches served no military purpose. They consumed resources the collapsing German war effort could not afford. The killings were carried out in plain view of local populations who would soon be reporting to Allied occupation authorities. The behaviour requires explanation.
Himmler’s orders
Heinrich Himmler had issued orders in the summer and autumn of 1944, reiterated in early 1945, that no concentration camp prisoner was to fall into Allied hands alive. The orders were clear and were transmitted down the chain of command. Camp commandants who organised evacuations understood that their instructions included the killing of prisoners who could not be moved, and the killing of those who fell behind on the march. The orders were never withdrawn, even as Himmler himself began making private peace overtures to the Western Allies in the last weeks of the war.
But Himmler’s orders do not fully explain the behaviour. They explain why commandants organised evacuations and why guards shot those who fell behind. They do not fully explain why guards continued killing in circumstances where the war was obviously over, where capture by Allied forces was imminent, and where the guards themselves might reasonably have expected that the cessation of killings would be taken into account in their postwar treatment. Some did stop. Many did not.
Ideology and habit
Daniel Blatman, in The Death Marches, argues that the killings in the final weeks reflected the internalisation of a genocidal norm that had become habitual. Guards who had spent months or years in an environment where the killing of prisoners was routine continued to operate within that norm even after its institutional rationale had collapsed. The distinction between prisoner and enemy, between the person who could be killed and the person who could not, had been eroded by years of dehumanisation and institutional permission to kill. Reverting to a norm of not killing required an active decision that many guards did not make.
There was also a specific ideological dimension. The Judeo-Bolshevist framing of the war meant that the advancing Soviet army represented, within the Nazi worldview, the very enemy the Holocaust had been intended to pre-empt. Killing Jewish prisoners as the Soviets approached was, in this framework, a last act of the war against the racial enemy rather than a crime committed in defeat. This does not make it rational. It explains why it could be experienced by perpetrators as purposeful.
The absence of consequences
Guards who killed on the marches had every reason to expect that they would face no consequences for doing so. The culture of the SS had consistently treated the killing of prisoners as not only permissible but meritorious. There was no mechanism within the SS system for a guard to face punishment for killing too many people. The only risk was the postwar legal reckoning, and many guards calculated, reasonably given the scale of the chaos in April 1945, that individual accountability was unlikely. In a significant proportion of cases that calculation proved correct.
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
- Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, Allen Lane, 2008
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
- Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012