{*As part of the conclusion to my USHMM Teacher Fellowship project, I am posting the unfolding nature of the discovery of the camps as Allied troops closed in from the East and the West, sixty-five years to the day that the discovery/event occurred. This material was published elsewhere, as noted below; it is used with permission. This post also gets an inordinate amount of hits; please be sure to visit the “About” link for context.}
Prisoners on a death march from Dachau move towards the south along the Noerdliche Muenchner street in Gruenwald. German civilians secretly photographed several death marches from the Dachau concentration camp as the prisoners moved slowly through the Bavarian towns of Gruenwald, Wolfratshausen, and Herbertshausen. Few civilians gave aid to the prisoners on the death marches. Germany, April 29, 1945. — KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau. USHMM
Early April 1945
The SS evacuates thousands of Jews–mostly on foot–as Allied and Soviet forces press in from the east and west. Evacuees are taken to camps at Bergen-Belsen, Germany; Dachau, Germany; Ebensee, Austria; Leitmeritz, Czechoslovakia; and Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. The operation is rife with daily beatings and murders as well as deaths from starvation and typhus. Thirteen hundred Jews are evacuated on foot from Vienna; only 700 will reach their destination, the Gusen, Austria, camp, alive.
The evacuations of the concentration camps had three purposes:
(1) SS authorities did not want prisoners to fall into enemy hands alive to tell their stories to Allied and Soviet liberators
(2) the SS thought they needed prisoners to maintain production of armaments wherever possible
(3) some SS leaders, including Himmler, believed irrationally that they could use Jewish concentration camp prisoners as hostages to bargain for a separate peace in the west that would guarantee the survival of the Nazi regime.
The SS guards had strict orders to kill prisoners who could no longer walk or travel. As evacuations depended increasingly on forced marches and travel by open rail car or small craft in the Baltic Sea in the brutal winter of 1944-1945, the number who died of exhaustion and exposure along the routes increased dramatically. This encouraged an understandable perception among the prisoners that the Germans intended them all to die on the march. The term death march was probably coined by concentration camp prisoners.
During these death marches, the SS guards brutally mistreated the prisoners. Following their explicit orders, they shot hundreds of prisoners who collapsed or could not keep pace on the march, or who could no longer disembark from the trains or ships. Thousands of prisoners died of exposure, starvation, and exhaustion. Forced marches were especially common in late 1944 and 1945, as the SS evacuated prisoners to camps deeper within Germany. (USHMM)
April 1, 1945 – The Red Army liberates Sered labor camp in Slovakia. The first UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) teams enter Germany in the wake of the Allied armies to facilitate and assist in the relief of the displaced persons.
April 1, 1945: The SS initiates death marches to evacuate the concentration camps at Dora-Mittelbau and Kochendorf, Germany.
April 3, 1945: All 497 members of a slave-labor group at Bratislava, Slovakia, are shot and killed by their captors. The Nazis evacuate the concentration/slave-labor camp at Nordhausen, Germany.
Source(s):
Weber, Louis. The Holocaust Chronicle. Publications International Ltd., 2007. http://www.holocaustchronicle.org
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1945- The Year of Liberation. 1995.
