Introduction

In Memory of the Death Marches from the
German Concentration Camps in 1944 and 1945

Well over one million prisoners suffered and died in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. About 60,000 of them experienced the liberation on 8 May 1945 – but not in Auschwitz. Only a few thousand survivors were still in the camp when the Red Army liberated it on 27 January 1945. Since the autumn of 1944 the SS had been driving the majority of prisoners away towards the west, further and further, often from one camp to another, deeper and deeper into the National Socialist Reich or areas where their henchmen were still around, defending the territory with all available means to the very last minute.

The prisoners, the prisoners of war and the slave labourers who were in their power paid a high price. At the beginning of 1945 714,000 concentration camp prisoners were still alive, but four months later they numbered 500,000 at the most. At least a third of these people had died within this short space of time – in the overcrowded concentration camps, on the death marches and the death trains that took them to an endless chain of camps to prevent their liberation by the Allies.

This chapter about the death marches and the death trains escaped the attention of historical research for a long time. Intense research into this brutal chapter of National Socialist history only began about ten years ago. In the words of Noach Flug, the President of the International Auschwitz Committee: “Auschwitz was horrific, a never-ending nightmare, but the Death March of around 650 kilometres and Ebensee, the camp where I was liberated, were absolute hell.”

We want to show this hell on the following pages, as a reminder of these events 65 years ago: in remembrance of the Auschwitz prisoners who still had to go through so many hells, although Auschwitz had long since come to an end.

The start of the death marches is usually dated to coincide with the order to evacuate Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945. But in November 1944 about 25,000 Hungarian Jews were already driven on a forced march to the Austrian border, a distance of 220 kilometres. The majority of them were women, about a fifth of the people died on this death march.

Then the evacuation of Auschwitz began in January 1945, at first often just to Gross-Rosen, but then further and further to the west. Many prisoners were forced to go on a whole series of these death marches. They led to insufferable overcrowding in some camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück or Ebensee, and to dreadful conditions for the prisoners. Towards the end, the transports and the masses of prisoners were concentrated on the Baltic coast, in Bavaria and around Mauthausen and its subsidiary camp Ebensee in Upper Austria.

Generally, these transports had one main aim: the ruthless exploitation of the prisoners’ capacity to work to the very end. This applies to the Hungarian Jews who were used as slave labour, and it applies to the underground armaments complexes which were constructed to the last possible minute, for example, the gigantic underground galleries of Dora Mittelbau, which was already in operation and constantly being extended at the same time. In Ebensee the prisoners had to work their shifts right up to the end, digging out galleries with picks and shovels in preparation for huge underground factories.

But it wasn’t just a question of exploiting the prisoners’ labour. According to one of Himmler’s orders of 14 April 1945, under no circumstances were these people to “fall into the hands of the enemy alive.” It is not clear whether the SS were afraid that the prisoners could bear witness to their crimes. But the thought of giving up power over these people was obviously inconceivable to them. This is the only possible explanation for the fact that some of the death marches were not carried out on orders but on the personal initiative of SS officers. This was the case with Max Schmidts, the commandant of the Auschwitz sub-camp Fürstengrube, who herded ‘his’ prisoners to his home town. Gerhard Hoch, who uncovered this story, writes: “This, and the subsequent death marches under his command, took to the logical extreme the National Socialist concept of human existence: the right and privilege of the stronger, the German master race, and the destined extinction of the weak and non-integrated.”

One thing is certain: in these very final months of the war, the reality of the concentration camp was brought home to the German population. It was impossible to ignore the endless columns of tormented humans struggling along through the villages, impossible to ignore their suffering, impossible to ignore the corpses lining their route: shot, frozen, dead from exhaustion.

This is what the following memories have to recount.

back to overview