DEATH MARCHES,

name given by prison inmates and retained by historians to the forced evacuations on
foot of concentration and slave labor camps in the winter of 194445. With the onset
of winter and Allied armies closing in on the Nazi concentration camps the Soviets
from the East and the British and Americans from the West desperate SS officials
attempted to evacuate the camps both to remove the eyewitnesses and to conceal the
crimes that had been committed. Prisoners were moved westward in the dead of
winter, forced to march toward the heartland of Germany, where their
presence would be less incriminating. Daniel Goldhagen has called the death
marches, "the ambulatory equivalent of the cattle car." Yet this time the prisoners
were not being removed from Germany but moved back into Germany, perhaps to
serve as labor, perhaps also to be used as fodder for a last stand.
On January 18, 1945, just days before the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz, 66,000
prisoners were marched to Wodzislaw, where they were put on freight trains to the
Gross-Rosen, *Buchenwald , *Dachau , and*Mauthausen concentration camps.
Almost one in four died en route. On January 20, 7,000 Jews, 6,000 of them women,
were marched from Stutthof 's satellite camps in the Danzig region. In the course of
a 10-day march, 700 were murdered. Those who remained alive when the marchers
reached the shores of the Baltic Sea were driven into the sea and shot. There were
only 13 known survivors.
Death marches had been used before. In 1941, hundreds of thousands of Soviet
prisoners of war had been herded along the highways of the Ukraine and Belorussia
from one camp to another. They too were often walked to death. By 1942, with the
pressures of a long war ahead of them, Soviet POWs were preserved as laborers. In
1942 Jews in Poland were marched from smaller ghettos to larger ones. Within a
year many were deported by train to death camps. Elsewhere Romanians joined the
Germans as Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were marched to Transnistria.
Thousands died en route. On November 8, 1944, Adolf Eichmann initiated a death
march of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Budapest to the Austrian border.
Impatient to deport Hungarian Jews, he could not wait for trains to arrive in
Budapest. The march lasted a month. Those fortunate enough to survive were sent to
Dachau and Mauthausen.

Characteristic of these death marches were that they occurred in the dead of winter,
with few provisions for food or shelter and little opportunity to rest. Many died en
route from starvation, cold, and exhaustion. For the Germans they were a means of
moving a population from one place to another at a time of great scarcity and when
entire systems were breaking down. They also were a way of literally walking the
prisoners to death. Those who fell behind or who were too weak to continue were
killed on the spot; their bodies were often left on the side of the road. Those
fortunate enough to continue were shipped to concentration camps that were unable
to handle them when they arrived; they had broken down from the sheer numbers of
inmates and an infrastructure inadequate to the task. For the prisoners, the death
marches were an unending marathon testing their endurance and will to live and
pushing them beyond exhaustion. Most prisoners succumbed; the death rate was
often more than 50 percent and sometimes only one in ten survived.
There were 59 different marches from Nazi concentration camps during the final
winter of German domination, some covering hundreds of miles. Some had a
specific destination; others were continued until liberation or death.
[Michael Berenbaum (2nd ed.)]

We worked in a labor camp called Christianstadt near Auschwitz in an ammunition

factory. In the beginning of February 1945, we were told the commandant wanted us

to get all our things together and leave. We are going to walk. The Russians are
behind us and we have to get away from them. We had no idea where we were
going. The commandant said, "How many there will be at the end is not my
responsibility. I am just supposed to bring you." Some were shot on this walk. They
couldn't walk anymore and some tried to run away and were shot and others got
away.
We had civilian winter coats and we had a little square striped piece on the back of
the coat. A square hole was made into the coat and it was sewn into the coat. But
most of us had for some reason scissors and a needle and thread in the camp, so
when we had a little free time, we put a piece of material from our coat underneath
that hole and then sewed the striped piece back on. It just seemed like somebody had
the idea and we all copied it.
As we marched my girlfriend and I were talking. There were so many women you
couldn't keep track of who is missing. We made the plans at night if there was an
opportunity the next day to run off, what our names would be and what we would
say to people. So as we gathered again in rows of five, the two of us ran. Nobody
saw us. We took our scissors and we cut off these pieces of striped material. We
threw them in the brook and we sang songs. We got stopped by a policeman and he
said, "Aren't you two girls from the Jewish group that went by?" and we made the
attempt to look very surprised. How could he think that we would be two Jewish
girls? After that we stayed with some people overnight. We told everybody that we
were cousins, and we changed our names. So we went on our way and we joined a
troop of German refugees and we went to the Sudetenland in Germany. Our German
helped us and there we took jobs with some families.