The Auschwitz death marches: 80 years after the frozen hell

Soviet soldiers liberating Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27 1945. | Public Domain

The death marches from Auschwitz-Birkenau were a final act of Nazi barbarism, born of desperation as the Soviet Red Army closed in. They began on January 17 1945 and stand out for their sheer scale and the horrific conditions endured by the prisoners.

The evacuation of the camps was part of the retreating Germans’ attempt to cover up their crimes, particularly the Holocaust: the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews. They also wanted to retain the slave labor force for deployment at other concentration camps.

Background: the horror of Auschwitz

The Third Reich teetered on the brink of collapse by January 1945. The tide of the war had decisively turned against Germany. Allied forces were closing in from both east and west. The Soviet army, having witnessed the horrors of Majdanek concentration camp upon its liberation in July 1944, would later uncover even greater atrocities at Auschwitz.

Of the 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz from across Europe barely 400,000 were registered and imprisoned in the compound. The vast majority — approximately 900,000 people — were gassed and cremated within hours of arrival.

In the face of the advancing Soviets, the Nazis began evacuating tens of thousands of prisoners between August 1944 and mid-January 1945 from Auschwitz. The prisoners were redeployed deeper into the Third Reich in various camps as slave laborers working on the expansion of armaments plants in the mountains of northern Germany and Austria.

Resistance: victims fight back

The Nazis then turned their attention to the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners forced to work in the crematoria and gas chambers. These prisoners were direct eyewitnesses to the Nazi crimes, and the SS feared leaving eyewitnesses who could testify behind.

In the autumn of 1944, the Sonderkommando faced selection for extermination. On October 7 they launched a desperate uprising, fighting back against their impending doom. For the mutineers, their fate was never really in doubt and the revolt cost the lives of more than 450 prisoners. Crematorium IV was rendered unusable during the mutiny. It never returned to use.

In the following months, the SS, under orders from Heinrich Himmler, began dismantling the remaining crematoria to erase the evidence of their crimes. However, one crematorium remained operational until the final days of the camp, for even in the face of imminent defeat, their war against the Jews continued.

The death marches begin

With the Red Army fast approaching, the Nazis made a frantic bid to evacuate Auschwitz. The fascists forced 56,000 prisoners to assemble and march out of the main camp and its subcamps between January 17-21 1945.

The prisoners were divided by their captors into more than 50 marching columns, with most going westward, nearly 40 miles to the train depot at Wodzislaw Slaski (Loslau) or 34 miles north-west to Gliwice (Gleiwitz). These journeys were undertaken on foot, in the depths of winter, with temperatures plunging to -20°C (-4°F).

From the sub-camp in Jaworzno, 3,200 prisoners made one of the longest marches — 155 miles to the Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp in Lower Silesia.

Only people strong enough to march great distances were meant to be on the marches, but they also included people who were weak and ill and children, all of who chose to evacuate rather than risk murder at the hands of the Nazis in the camp before liberation.

The prisoners, already weakened by starvation, disease, and abuse, were ill-equipped for an arduous trek in such frigid conditions. They shivered in inadequate clothing, footwear, and food, and were subjected to physical and psychological torment by their SS guards.

The Nazis shot on the spot anyone who faltered, slowed down, or collapsed. The roadsides and railway tracks along the evacuation routes became littered with the corpses of those who perished from exhaustion, exposure, or outright murder.

Conditions on the marches

Conditions on the death marches were horrific as the ragged columns made their way through the countryside. Prisoners trudged through snow and ice, their thin clothing offering little protection from the biting cold.

Many suffered from frostbite, dysentery, and other illnesses. Survivors’ accounts describe the relentless pace of the marches, the brutal beatings, and the callousness of the SS guards. They recalled seeing fellow prisoners collapse and die, their bodies left to freeze in the snow.

One survivor, Zofia Stepien-Bator — who was imprisoned for her activities in the Polish resistance — later recounted her evacuation to Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp on one of the marching columns:

“We could hear the squeaking of the snow and the labored breathing of the tired prisoners … Gunshots kept ripping the nighttime silence apart and women were constantly thudding into the ditch for their eternal repose.

“Then someone ahead of me fell over. I helped her up. She was a tiny girl, totally exhausted and as completely alone as I was … I declared that she would come back with me to my home, and that I wouldn’t leave her. I begged her to gather up her strength, to hold out until dawn, because the sun would come up in the morning and that would make things easier.

“She calmed down, and went on for a while with a regular gait, and then she fell again. I picked her up. Now I was dragging her along. Nobody helped me. Prisoners barely able to stay on their feet were passing us … I had lost so much strength, I was all sweaty from the effort, but I was past the point where I could have left her.

“And so we found ourselves at the tail end of the column. When she fell for the final time, and I no longer had the strength to lift her up, I called for help, and somebody’s hand took hold of me and pulled me forward. I was very tired, and did not realize that I was not going to save that girl, and that I myself could die with her.

“One of the prisoners, a stranger, oriented herself in the situation, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me along with her. A moment later, there was a shot. It was my poor little ward, who I had promised not to abandon. She had stopped suffering … the echo of that shot still rings in my memory.”

In Upper Silesia alone, about 3,000 evacuated prisoners died. At least 9,000, and up to 15,000, Auschwitz prisoners died during the evacuation. This is how they became known as the “death marches.”

Massacres of prisoners took place in some of the localities along the evacuation routes. At the Leszczyny/Rzedowka train station near Rybnik on the night of January 21 1945, a train carrying 2,500 prisoners from Gliwice halted.

On the afternoon of January 22, the prisoners were ordered to disembark. Some of them were too weak to get off the train. SS men travelling with the prisoners and local Nazi police fired machine guns through the open doors of the train cars at those left behind.

They then forced the remaining prisoners to march westward. Afterwards, over 300 bodies of prisoners who had been shot or who had died from the harsh conditions were gathered from the grounds of the station and its surroundings.

The aftermath

After the frozen hell of the marches and reaching their destinations, survivors faced familiar conditions. Herded into camps already bursting with the sick and starving, they found conditions no less horrific than those they’d fled. Disease stalked the overcrowded barracks, and hunger kept them in a weakened state. For many, these final months of the war brought not liberation, but a lingering, agonising death.

While this was happening, the Nazis set about destroying the evidence of the crimes committed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. With the Soviet Army just days away from the infamous camp gates they destroyed prisoner files and registration forms and burnt the lists of names of the Jews deported to Auschwitz for immediate extermination.

But the scale of the crimes were on an industrial scale carried out over a huge complex — too enormous to cover up — and when the camp was liberated on January 27 1945 the Soviets immediately began collating evidence in readiness for bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Survivor Zofia Stepien-Bator’s account and other useful information is online at: Auschwitz.org/en/liberation-of-kl-auschwitz75/witnesses-accounts75.

Read further articles by Steve Silver at leadenskies.substack.com.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!

---

CONTRIBUTOR

Morning Star

Morning Star is the socialist daily newspaper published in Great Britain. Morning Star es el diario socialista publicado en Gran Bretaña.