Death Marches | Driven to Death

Memorial for death marches in April 1945 from the Dachau concentration camp, sculpture by Hubertus von Pilgrim

In the final months of the war, the Germans murdered approximately a quarter of a million people on so-called death marches. These were survivors from the concentration camps, transported before the advancing Allied liberators. The Nazis thus continued the genocide until the very last minute, using whatever means were still at their disposal in the face of impending defeat—and with the participation of civilians.

Destruction through work

The connection between the intent to kill and the lack of resources becomes clear in the eleven satellite camps of the Dachau concentration camp near Kaufering in southwestern Upper Bavaria. There, the Organisation Todt (OT), responsible for armaments production, used concentration camp slaves to build huge bunkers to manufacture fighter aircraft underground. The first transport from Auschwitz arrived on June 18, 1944. A total of up to 30,000 people were deported there, including women and children.

The program is extermination through labor. They live in holes in the ground, cold, dirty, and infested with vermin; their clothing is thin and full of holes; food is scarce and poor. Typhus, tuberculosis, and typhus are rampant. The slave laborers cut down trees, build embankments for railway tracks, and haul heavy sacks of cement. In total, at least one-third to one-half of them die in just under ten months. In October, more than 1,300 prisoners are selected as unfit for work, deported to Auschwitz, and murdered. Nevertheless, there is resistance. Zionist groups form in the camps, and a Yiddish-language newspaper is hand-copied.

As American troops approached from the west, the head of the Reich Security Main Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, wanted to bomb the camps to kill the prisoners. But there were no bombers for that. So the camp administration sent the remaining 10,000 inmates on foot and by train to the main camp in Dachau or the Allach satellite camp. There, they were driven further south toward the Alps with others brought there from the Buchenwald or Flossenbürg concentration camps. Anyone who collapsed from exhaustion along the way was shot by the guards or torn to pieces by bloodhounds. The SS set fire to Infirmary IV in Kaufering, and US soldiers found hundreds of burned corpses.

Driven by anti-Semitism

The Nazis organized such extermination marches right at the beginning of the war. In December 1939, several thousand Jews were driven from Chełm to the German-Soviet demarcation line on the Bug River, and hundreds were killed. Around 800 Jews from Lublin were reported to have marched to Biała Podlaska in mid-April 1940, but only a few dozen survived. In July and August 1941, tens of thousands of Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia suffered a similar fate. The Soviet Union had extorted these territories from Romania in 1940; the Germans invaded a year later.

Most death marches took place toward the end of the war. Starting in the summer of 1944, the camps in the Baltics, eastern Poland, and southeastern Europe were evacuated in anticipation of the approaching Red Army. From January to March 1945, prisoners were deported further west. Between March and May, more aimless movements took place within the shrinking German sphere of influence. The term "death marches" refers to the fact that the prisoners were already emaciated and half-starved and were abused and massacred by their guards along the way. The sight of such columns was commonplace, writes Shmuel Krakowski, a Polish-Israeli historian and director of the Yad Vashem archives, who himself survived the concentration camps.

The American historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cites the death marches as evidence that Germans were driven by murderous anti-Semitism until the very end. As a prime example of his thesis, he cites the approximately 1,000 women who were forced to walk from the Grünberg camp in Lower Silesia to the town of Helmbrechts, south of Hof, on January 29th; 200 women were murdered in the process. From Helmbrechts, they were forced to continue their journey on April 13th, along with others—a total of approximately 1,200 prisoners, half of whom were Jewish. They crossed the border into German-occupied Czechoslovakia, where the non-Jewish women were left behind, while the Jewish women were driven on under horrific conditions to Volary. On May 7th, a US officer described the surviving women as old women, but they were actually teenagers. Shortly before the march began, a courier from Heinrich Himmler arrived in Helmbrechts and conveyed the order from the Reichsführer SS not to kill anyone else. The messenger asked the female SS guards to put down their beatings, which they did not do, Goldhagen writes.

In the Gardelegen massacre, on April 13, guards, assisted by local officials and civilians, burned several thousand prisoners alive in a barn during a death march from the Dora-Mittelbau camp. Some marches crisscrossed the country, from the Flossenbürg concentration camp to Regensburg with a massive detour through Saxony, or from the Neuengamme concentration camp to Sandbostel via Bergen-Belsen in the south and Lübeck in the north. The distinctions between prisoner groups were blurred, with Jewish, Polish, and Russian prisoners equally affected, writes Israeli historian Daniel D. Blatman.

Atrocities until the end

That the specific aim was to torture and murder Jews could be true for the first two phases of the death marches, but not for the chaotic last one. 6,000 Jews were to be deported from the Bor camp in Yugoslavia to Hungary; only a few hundred survived; the rest were massacred. Around 76,000 Jews were driven from Budapest to the Austrian border at the beginning of November; thousands were shot, starved, froze to death, or died of disease. On January 20, the SS led around 7,000 Jews, 6,000 of them women, out of the Stutthof camp. By the time they reached Palmücken on the Baltic Sea on January 31, 700 had already been killed; the SS shot the others on the beach.

At the beginning of 1945, the retreat became increasingly chaotic, command structures collapsed, and the Germans nevertheless committed unimaginable atrocities, albeit indiscriminately. For example, in Buchberg near Bad Tölz, where the SS singled out and shot approximately 120 Soviet forced laborers, but allowed the Jews to live. At the beginning of February, the SS dissolved the Gross-Rosen camp and all its subcamps; of the approximately 40,000 prisoners, more than half were murdered. Approximately 26,000 people died in the death marches from the Stutthof concentration camp beginning on April 25. At the Mühldorf-Mettenheim subcamp, a semi-underground armaments factory owned by the Messerschmitt company, 4,000 people were crammed onto a freight train on April 25 for a five-day journey through Upper Bavaria. There was no food and no toilets.

In Poing, east of Munich, the train breaks down due to a malfunction. The guards shoot at escaping prisoners, leaving more than 50 dead and 200 injured stranded when the train starts moving again. When US soldiers discover the train on April 30 in Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg, the dead and wounded lie piled high in blood and excrement in the carriages. Survivors suffer from typhus and tuberculosis; 63 of them die of malnutrition and disease after liberation. The camp commandant of Mühldorf plans to have approximately 600 prisoners who had been left in the camp murdered on May 2. His order is no longer followed. The US units are about 15 kilometers away.

»End-phase crimes «

The death marches move through towns and villages. The living corpses staggering past their front doors elicit horror from some residents, while others are eager to help. Some survivors report that locals tried to give them bread, water, or potatoes. "The name of this town has stuck in my mind, not only because it seemed strange to me, but also because it was the first time I'd seen a town after ten months in camps and forests. There was another reason, too," Zwi Katz notes in his memoirs of Fürstenfeldbruck. Bread was thrown to them from the windows. "It was encouraging and made me optimistic; the war was clearly coming to an end."

Because only the survivors can report, a false impression is created. Most Germans hide in their homes, fearing the dangerous "subhumans" of Nazi propaganda who beg for help or steal; some also because the guards threaten helpful contemporaries. The population acts with extreme hostility, as Shmuel Krakowski writes. "This situation triggered a horrific wave of violence by civilians who had not previously been actively involved in the genocide," summarizes Daniel D. Blatman. He speaks of a "genocidal mentality."

Children throw stones at the processions of misery. Local Nazi officials, mayors, police officers, Volkssturm members, and Hitler Youth hunt down escaped "zebras," as the prisoners were called because of their blue and white striped concentration camp clothing. The so-called final phase crimes demonstrate that racial madness and mass murder were, until the very last moment, the hallmarks of what one AfD leader dismissed as "bird shit" in German history.