Top Photo: Clandestine photograph of prisoners marching to Dachau. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Maria Seidenberger. 

At the very end of the Holocaust, as liberation neared, the Nazis ordered most remaining concentration camp survivors to be marched toward the crumbling heart of the Third Reich. Desperate for slave labor to continue the doomed war effort and fearful of camp survivors exposing Nazi crimes, German decision-makers put in motion nearly three-quarters of a million concentration camp prisoners. Of this number, 250,000 died in these death marches. Initially destined for forced labor camps, as the Reich disintegrated, the marches later had no destination at all. In the words of Daniel Blatman, the preeminent historian on the death marches, “This was a ghastly coup de grace even by the criteria of Nazi genocide activities: more than 35 percent of the camp prisoners perished in Nazism’s last murderous eruption during the death marches.”[1] While there are no definitive numbers of individual death marches, it is clear they represent a broadly coordinated (at least initially) final phase of the mass murder of European Jews and other targets of Nazi violence.  

Forced Labor 

Following defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, the German Wehrmacht consistently retreated into territory it conquered only a year or two earlier. By 1944, the war was clearly lost for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front, though higher-ups in Adolf Hitler’s regime, including Hitler himself, believed Germany could fight on and potentially sue for peace with the Soviets. Before mid-1944, concentrations camps in the “Old Reich” (Germany, Austria, parts of Czechoslovakia, and Poland), after years of deportations to death camps in the East, very few Jews remained in their prison populations. Yet, to keep pace with the growing demand of the overwhelmed armaments industry, Nazi policy changed rather abruptly. In what Blatman has called a “tactical retreat even from the effort to realize the vision of the racial empire,” hundreds of thousands of Jews, and others “perceived from the outset as undeserving of long-term survival,” like Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, French resistance fighters, and Yugoslav and Italian communists, were transported into the Third Reich’s forced labor and concentration camps in the last 18 months of the war.[2] 

Being transferred to Germany to work spared these individuals from immediate death—especially around 107,000 Hungarian Jews deported from Auschwitz—but forced labor for the war effort was brutal in its own right. At Mittelbau-Dora, a camp in central Germany where forced laborers built aircraft and experimental weapons, squalid working conditions in damp, dark, and dangerous underground tunnels for upward of 12 hours a day was its own kind of “extermination through labor.” High-level SS officer Hans Kammler captured this sentiment in a 1944 order regarding treatment of forced laborers at Mittelbau-Dora: “Do not be considerate of the human victims. The work must be completed in the shortest possible time.”[3]

‘Evacuating Auschwitz’

As the war sped toward its conclusion in late 1944 and early 1945, the initial deportations of prisoners to serve as forced laborers in Germany took a darker turn. As Blatman explains, “it was no longer possible to employ the previous techniques (of mass murder), mostly because the constraints of the war mandated the need to withdraw from the concentration and death camps. Killing in the course of evacuation was now the sole extermination technique. The Germans no longer had full control of the timetable of murder, since it was the advance of the victorious forces rather than the Nazi initiative that dictated events.”[4] 

After the concentration-death camp at Majdanek near Lublin fell into Soviet hands in July 1944, Nazi leaders knew the liberation of Auschwitz would soon follow. From January 17–21, 1945, SS officers forced approximately 60,000 prisoners from the camp to begin walking toward Germany. Since many others were fleeing the advancing Red Army as well, these prisoners joined a human throng marching westward amid the chaos of a collapsing front line. There were two destinations—Gliwice (34 miles/55 km away) and Wodzisław Śląski (39 miles/63 km away). From there, the prisoners were loaded onto train cars and shipped to camps further west at Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald.[5]

The marches quickly degenerated into mass murder soon after leaving Auschwitz. After exiting the camp, the guards had total responsibility for the marchers, yet few orders had been given to the guards beforehand. Thus, as chaos descended, the guards took brutal measures to oversee groups of marchers that soon stretched out for miles in length; killing anyone who fell behind, tried to escape, could no longer physically keep marching, or, increasingly, was deemed “problematic” became commonplace. In addition to the violent treatment, factors like cold winter weather, lack of food or provisions, and inadequate clothing or shoes turned the evacuations into brutal death marches.[6] It is estimated that around 15,000 Jews died in these death marches from Auschwitz—3,000 on the Auschwitz–Gliwice segment alone.[7] 

The brutal treatment of the marchers by German guards is well-documented. Many Poles living in villages through which prisoners marched witnessed and sometimes even engaged with the columns as they passed through town. As Blatman notes, “Quite a few residents of Rybnik (Poland), saw the hundreds of dead victims. Sometimes the murders were committed in courtyards adjacent to the villagers’ homes. The murderers did not even try to conceal their identity. … Quite frequently, peasants and town residents took pity on the prisoners passing through and tried to throw them food, evoking angry responses from the guards. … Sometimes villagers identified the slaughtered victims as Jews and carried the corpses left lying by the roadside to mass graves in the local Jewish cemetery.”[8]

Clandestine photograph of prisoners marching to Dachau. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Maria Seidenberger. 

This roadside witnessing continued until the very end of the war. As the picture above shows, Maria Seidenberger and her mother witnessed rows of prisoners going from Buchenwald to Dachau on a forced march. She snapped this clandestine photo while her mother stood outside giving potatoes to the prisoners. The photo is estimated to have been taken on April 26, 1945, near Hebertshausen, Germany.[9]

Roads to Nowhere

For those who reached the train stations, evacuation continued after arriving at a new camp further away from the Eastern Front. Death marches set out from other camps across the area soon after Auschwitz was evacuated, and many of these original marchers were forced back on the road (alongside thousands of new prisoners). In February 1945, just days before the Soviets liberated Gross-Rosen, an estimated 44,000 prisoners, mainly Jews, were forced to evacuate the camp and its subcamps on trains or on foot.[10] As conditions deteriorated, the breakdown of command meant German guards made decisions about where to go on the march. Therefore, while the initial impulse to put prisoners into motion appears to be an organized decision from high-level Nazi leaders, once in motion, the outcomes for individual marchers varied widely. As Blatman elaborates on the dynamics at play, “The prisoners soon realized that their guards were tense, confused, and anxious at the prospect of being stranded with their charges and falling captive. The aimless wandering, and the desire to arrive as soon as possible at a camp or railway station where the prisoners could be loaded onto freight cars, was one of the main threats to the marchers’ lives. … However, survival was not, in the final analysis, determined by the heroic struggle for life that the prisoners waged, but mainly by the decisions or ability of the murderers to slaughter them. … In certain cases, almost all the prisoners were liquidated; in others, most of the evacuees succeeded in exploiting a local situation and survived.”[11]

Map of the Nazi Death Marches. Credit: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

As the front collapsed even further, prisoners were often marched around from one camp to the next, and as the railway system imploded, sometimes the marches became ends in themselves. One group of women originating from a Gross-Rosen subcamp endured a 400-mile (640 km) death march over the course of one month until they reached a camp in northern Germany. They were given no food, and their survival depended solely on their ability to find food en route; frequently, guards did not even bother to shoot prisoners who fell behind, and instead simply left them lying in the roadside snow.[12] Another group left on January 29 headed for Helmbrechts on a death march that lasted until March 6, 1945. They traveled 19 to 31 miles (30 to 50 km) per day along snow-covered routes, some marchers without shoes or with feet wrapped only in rags. Some resorted to scooping roadside snow while walking to quench thirst. About half of those who started on the march died by the time they reached their destination, and an even smaller number lived to the end of the war, partially because additional marches followed.[13]

As survivor Halina Klein recalled, “We had no idea where we [were] going because they never told us, and we just didn’t know. We just went through towns and through villages and on the highway or through the woods. … I think the fear of the death is so great that unless you are very gutsy or desperate…you always had the hope that maybe tomorrow you will survive.” She continued, “So you can imagine there wasn’t much for us, and whatever food that they had, the SS people managed to procure for themselves because they had it well. They weren’t starving. They were just marching with us, but they certainly weren’t starving. And at that point, when you think of what was the purpose of this march, it was a shelter for the SS. Do you understand? Because they marched us so they would not have to go to the front. If you think about it because they could have just taken a machine gun and finished us off. So in a sense, it gave them something to do. … [The march] was their form of protection for themselves. They had a mission because if they would have finished us, where would they go?”[14]

Major Aaron Cahan, a US medical officer who assisted in the liberation of these death march survivors in May 1945, recalled, “My first glance at these individuals was one of extreme shock, not ever believing that a human being can be degraded, can be starved, can be so skinny and even live under such circumstances…like mice on top of one another, too weak to as much as raise an arm. … I was surprised and shocked when I asked one of these girls how old she was and she said 17, when to me she appeared to be no less than 50.”[15] The physical conditions of these survivors was so desperate that many died days after liberation, including 25-year-old Fela Szeps of Poland, who weighed only 29 kg and “looked like a 75-year old woman,” according to American Army medical records.[16]

Major Frank Ankner with the 5th Infantry Division, Medical Battalion, takes the pulse of a female Jewish survivor of a death march at an American military field hospital in Volary, Czechoslovakia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
 

The human horrors of the death marches were fully evident in many other death marches. For just another example, in late January 1945, perhaps 50,000 prisoners (mostly Jews) were evacuated by barge, by train, and on foot from Stutthof. In the Stutthof Death March, 5,000 were marched to the coast, forced to walk into the Baltic Sea, and shot to death in the water. The rest were forced to march to Lauenburg in Germany, but after the Soviets cut off that path, the guards decided to go back to Stutthof. The continued marching, brutal conditions, and lack of food killed thousands more. Repeated massacres in the Baltic Sea occurred and German guards kept trying to evacuate marchers, even on small boats, right until the liberation of Stutthof in May 1945. It is believed that 25,000 people died during these Stutthof death marches, approximately half the total prisoners who were evacuated from the camp.[17]

The ‘Last Solution’

Death marches spread out from many camps throughout the collapsing Third Reich, and each differed in where they ended up, when, and how many marchers were murdered. Yet, collectively, even though the killing process had been completely decentralized, Blatman suggests that “the killings were not the outcome of spontaneous or impulsive reactions, but stemmed from deliberate calculations of advantage, efficiency, timing, and local conditions. … [T]he killings were the continuation of the familiar process of liquidating enemies, and to leave them alive ran counter to what had been self-evident for some time.”[18]

In this rapidly shifting phase defined by abrupt and brutal violence, victims often faced precarious situations. While the marches theoretically gave them some opportunities to escape they lacked while interned in heavily guarded, static concentration camps, there were also many factors working against them. For one, their physical conditions were extremely deteriorated and getting worse by the day. The unfamiliar landscapes and demeanor of local populations meant they faced major obstacles to sustaining an escape attempt beyond a day or two, especially if they didn’t speak the local language. To top it off, as the Red Army advanced behind the columns of marchers, whatever natural and human environments they entered soon fell into further violent upheaval and chaos. Surviving death marches, therefore, became a complex calculus of factors, not least being some amount of luck. Horrifically, the longer one survived during a march, the higher likelihood they had of being forced on another; this chain of seemingly endless violence took not only a physical toll, but a profound mental one. In the words of Helmbrechts death march survivor Hanah Kotlicki, “They took everything from us and nothing can heal the wound. … We’re scarred for life.”[19]

An American soldier studies a grave marker on the sight of a mass grave of death march victims. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Joseph Eaton

Spatially speaking, the sites of memory and remembrance for the violence of death marches is widely scattered, even to this day. As Blatman writes, “The last stage of Nazi genocide was marked by the creation of countless murder sites where columns of prisoners stopped. These columns split up again and again in a mutational process that divided the mass of victims incessantly into smaller and smaller groups until the murderers had completed their work. … The graves of these nameless victims are strewn along the paths, forests, and villages of Germany and Austria.”[20]