The Death Marches: The Holocaust’s Last Killing Phase

By the winter of 1944, the Third Reich was collapsing. The Red Army was advancing through Poland; American and British forces had crossed into Germany from the west. The camps that had industrialised murder were about to be overrun. Any rational calculation would have suggested that the killing would stop — that a regime facing defeat would abandon its machinery of extermination and turn to its own survival.

The opposite happened. In the final months of the war, the SS forced hundreds of thousands of prisoners out of the camps and drove them on foot, in freezing weather, deeper into shrinking German territory. These evacuations became known as the death marches. Historians estimate that between 200,000 and 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died during them — a substantial share of them in the last hundred days of the war, after the outcome had already been decided.

Why the Marches Happened

The evacuations began in earnest in the summer of 1944, when Soviet troops approached the Majdanek camp near Lublin and captured it largely intact, complete with gas chambers and crematoria. The photographs and film that followed were the first hard evidence the world received of the killing centres. Heinrich Himmler and the SS leadership drew a lesson from it: no camp, and no prisoner who could testify, was to fall into enemy hands.

There were other motives, layered and contradictory. Prisoners were still valuable as slave labour for the underground armaments factories the Reich was building in a last effort to keep production going. Some SS officers imagined prisoners as bargaining chips in a negotiated peace that never came. And beneath the practical reasoning ran something harder to name: an ideological momentum that treated Jewish and other prisoners as enemies who must not be allowed to survive the regime that had condemned them. Orders were often vague, and local commanders filled the gaps with their own brutality.

Auschwitz, January 1945

The largest evacuation began on 17 January 1945. Some 56,000 prisoners were marched out of Auschwitz and its network of sub-camps as Soviet forces closed in from the east. They walked west and north-west in columns, in temperatures well below freezing, many in wooden clogs or wrapped rags, on a ration of nothing at all. Guards shot prisoners who fell behind, who stopped to help another, who reached for snow at the roadside. The route from Auschwitz towards Wodzisław Śląski and Gliwice was marked afterwards by bodies in the ditches; villagers in the towns along it later described the snow as stained for miles.

At the rail heads, survivors of the march were loaded into open freight wagons for journeys of several days to Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Gross-Rosen. At least 3,000 people died on the roads out of Auschwitz alone; thousands more died in the wagons. When the Red Army entered Auschwitz on 27 January, it found roughly 7,000 prisoners left behind — those too weak to walk, whom the SS had judged not worth the effort of killing or moving.

A Continent Crossed on Foot

Auschwitz was the beginning, not the end. Through the spring of 1945 the marches multiplied as the front lines converged. Prisoners were driven out of Stutthof along the Baltic coast, out of Sachsenhausen towards the north-west, out of Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme and Dora-Mittelbau. Some columns walked for weeks, doubling back as the territory available to the Reich contracted around them. Prisoners who had already survived years of starvation and forced labour were asked to walk hundreds of kilometres on empty stomachs.

What distinguished this phase of the Holocaust from what came before was its visibility. The killing centres had been built in occupied Poland, deliberately remote. The death marches went through the middle of Germany and Austria — through market squares, past schools, along village roads. Ordinary Germans watched columns of skeletal prisoners pass their houses. Some threw bread; a few were shot for it. Many closed their shutters. When the marches ended, the bodies left behind had to be buried by the townspeople in whose fields they lay, and Allied commanders frequently compelled local civilians to do the digging and to look at what they had buried.

Some of the worst massacres occurred in these final days. At Gardelegen in April 1945, more than 1,000 prisoners from an evacuation transport were herded into a barn that was then set alight. Near Nammering in Bavaria, hundreds were shot in a ravine after a stalled transport. These were not the acts of a distant apparatus but of local SS men, police auxiliaries, Volkssturm militia and, in places, civilians — killing people in their own neighbourhoods, days before the surrender.

Survival and Its Cost

Survivors of the marches describe them as the hardest thing they endured. In the camps there had at least been a terrible predictability — a barracks, a roll call, a ration. On the road there was nothing but the walking, and the certainty that stopping meant death. Prisoners held one another upright. They shared shoes. They calculated, hour by hour, how much further they could go.

Elie Wiesel, evacuated from Auschwitz in January 1945 at the age of sixteen, walked with his father through the snow to Gleiwitz and then rode in an open wagon to Buchenwald, where his father died weeks before liberation. Primo Levi survived only because scarlet fever had left him in the Auschwitz infirmary, too sick to be marched out; almost none of the friends who left with the columns came back. That inversion — the sick surviving, the strong dying — runs through many accounts of those final months.

Liberating soldiers who reached Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Mauthausen in April and May 1945 found camps far beyond their intended capacity, filled with people who had arrived from other camps only days or weeks earlier, and with epidemics of typhus that the overcrowding had made unstoppable. Thousands died after liberation, their bodies unable to recover.

Why the Death Marches Matter

The death marches complicate any account of the Holocaust that treats it as the work of a hidden bureaucracy operating out of sight. In their final phase, the killings were carried out in the open, by a wide range of perpetrators, without any of the industrial infrastructure that had made Auschwitz possible — and without any military purpose whatsoever. The Reich was days from surrender. Continuing to kill served nothing except the intention to kill.

That is the fact the marches leave behind. Today, memorial stones stand along their routes in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic, in villages that were briefly and unwillingly made witnesses. They mark ordinary roads. The people they commemorate had already survived the ghettos, the deportations and the camps, and died within sight of the end.