Death Marches and Liberation

DEATH MARCHES AND LIBERATION

1944
The liquidation of the Concentration Camps began in the summer of 1944, during the great Red Army offensive in the east and the Allied landings in the west. The first camps to be evacuated were those in the Baltic states and in eastern and central Poland. The death march from Budapest began on November 8, 1944, and lasted an entire month. In that march 76,000 Jews - men, women, and children - were made to walk to the Austrian border, escorted by Hungarians. Thousands were shot to death en route, and thousands more starved to death or succumbed to cold and disease. Several hundred were saved by neutral diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg, who pulled Jews out of the columns, put them under his protection, and escorted them back to Budapest. On the Austrian border the Germans took over, leading the columns to various concentration camps, primarily Dachau and Mauthausen.
January 1945 - Auschwitz and Other Camps
In November 1944 Himmler ordered the cessation of murder by gas at Auschwitz, a turning point in the Nazi policy toward the Jews, attributed to Germany's imminent defeat in the war. The Jews were, therefore, included among the other camp inmates in the continuous evacuation operation. The Jewish concentration camp inmates lived with the constant fear that in the last stage of the war, they would be murdered because they won't be needed anymore for work.In the wake of the renewed Soviet offensive in mid-January of 1945, the Nazis undertook the evacuation of the remaining Concentration Camps in Poland. In January 1945, death marches were launched, primarily from Auschwitz in the south and Stutthof in the north. The Germans began evacuating Auschwitz and its satellite camps on January 18, 1945; 66,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, were marched to Wodzislaw (Loslau). There they were put on freight trains and transported to various concentration camps, principally Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen. At least fifteen thousand perished in that march. On January 21, 1945, four thousand prisoners, most of them Jews, left the Blechhammer camp on foot. The evacuation of the Stutthof camp complex was exceptionally brutal and tragic. On the eve of the evacuation, in the middle of January 1945, these camps had a prisoner population of 47,000 over 35,000 of them Jews, most of whom were women. In January 1945, a total of 7,000 Jews - 6,000 women and 1,000 men marched for ten days, and during its course 700 Jews were murdered. On January 31, the convoy arrived at Palmnicken, on the shores of the Baltic. The same day, the Nazis drove all the prisoners into the sea and machine - gunned them. Only 13 persons are known to have survived this massacre.
February 1945
The evacuation of the main camp of Gross-Rosen and its satellites began in early February 1945. A total of 40,000 prisoners were moved out; thousands were murdered en route. Of the 20,000 Jewish prisoners employed as forced laborers in the Eulengebirge camps, nearly all were killed, most of them either just before the evacuation or during the death march in February 1945.
March and April 1945
Throughout March and April 1945, when the American and British armies were advancing in the west and the Red Army in the east, the Germans evacuated one concentration camp after the other, moving the prisoners into the territory still under their control. In mid-March, Nazi Germany still held 700,000 prisoners in concentration camps, among them 200,000 women. Approximately 40,000 SS men were still employed in running the concentration camps, guarding the prisoners, and escorting the death marches. In those last two months of the Third Reich's existence, at least a quarter-million prisoners, men and women, were sent on death marches, some of which lasted for weeks. The graves of the murder victims and the others who perished on the highways were spread over central Germany and western Austria. In that final phase, the evacuation of the camps was generally a combined operation: the prisoners made their way partly on foot and partly by train. The train trip was no less harsh or cruel than the foot march, as the prisoners suffered from intolerably foul air in the cars, which held an average of seventy persons each, and from lack of food and water. In the evacuation of the main Buchenwald camp, the first convoy left on April 6. It consisted of 3,100 Jewish prisoners, of whom 1,400 were murdered on the way. In the next few days, April 7 to 10, some 40,000 prisoners left the camp, of whom 13,500 were murdered during the march. 21,000 prisoners remained in Buchenwald, among them a few Jews. Rehmsdorf was one of the last of the Buchenwald satellite camps to be evacuated, on April 13; 4,340 Jewish prisoners left the camp, but no more than 500 reached their destination. The evacuation of the Dora-Mittelbau camp started on April 1, with most of the prisoners marching to Bergen-Belsen, which lasted about two weeks. In one of the convoys the prisoners were forced into a barn that was then set on fire; the next day, when the American forces reached the site (near the town of Gardelegen), they found hundreds of burned corpses. At the end of April, about two weeks before Nazi Germany's final surrender, death marches were launched from Flossenburg, Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, Magdeburg, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, and several of the Dachau satellite camps. The marches of these last two weeks are believed to have cost the lives of tens of thousands of prisoners. On one short stretch alone, between Gunskirchen and Mauthausen, a distance of 37 miles (60 km), thousands of prisoners were buried, most of them Jews from Hungary. The evacuations and death marches were kept up literally until the Third Reich's last day. Approximately one quarter of a million prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps were murdered or otherwise died on death marches between the summer of 1944 and the end of the war.