The Fallacy of Race and the Shoah

DEATH MARCHES—FINAL ORGANIZED MASS MURDERS

DEATH MARCHES— FINAL ORGANIZED MASS MURDERS Beginnings Although death marches are usuallyassociated with the end of the war years, tie Nazis used these cruel and torturous means of transportingprisoners from as early as October 1939,when the Germans expelled Jews on marches in an easterly direction from the annexed territory in Poland. By the end of 1939, thousands of Jews had been driven to the border of the Soviet Jnion. Hundreds either drowned in the Bug River or were shot on marches, as were several hundred Polish Jews from Chelm when they were driven on foot to the Soviet Union.1 In mid-January 1940 in Poland,800 Jewish prisoners of war from the Polish army were sent from their camp in Lublin and marched in bittercold to Biata Podlaska, approximately 100 kilometres away. Only a few dozen survived.2 Je\\s from Bessarabia and Bukovina were marched in 1941toTransnistria. Thousands were shot along the way by the German and Romanianmilitary and gendarmerie escorts. Many inhabitantsfrom small ghettos of eastern Europe were moved to larger ghettos by foot in 1942 and 1943,their last point before being sent to killing centres. Many were shot along the way by German escorts or Ukranian and Lithuanian auxiliary police.3 As the Nazis liquidated small ghettos,they often marched the inhabitants to largerghettos before finally deportingthem to killing centres. Death marches were the last of the Nazis' organized efforts to murder the Jews of Europe.In the final year of the war, one of the purposes of these marches was to evacuate the camps as the Allies drew nearer;the Russians from the east, and the Americans,British, and Canadians from the west.At this time, the marches were also an alternative to the usual means of transport for Hungarian Jews, either to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz if they survived the march, or to be used as slave labour in Austria and Germany. The death marches from 1939 to the summer of 1944 were unlike the marches in the last months of the war, in that the final marches were responses to approaching enemy armies that threatened to overrun the camps and killing centres. Not all prisoners were sent on foot. Many camp evacuations were made by rail on transport trainsthat took weeks to reach their destinations,claiming the lives of thousands of prisoners on the way. 1. Martin Gilbert,Atlas of the Holocaust (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 33-35. 2. Shmuel Krakowski,"Death Marches," in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 348-354. (Hereafter, Krakowski/'Death Marches") 3. Ibid., 350. 297 4. Ibid., 353. The earlier marches were initiated by the Germans; they were not a response to approaching enemies or liberators.The marches at war's end can be understood only as another means of killing. In the last few weeks of war,the Germans did not have the efficient gas-chamber killing machinery of the previous two years. There can be no doubt that the purpose of some of the marches taking place within Germany in late 1944 and early 1945 was to relocate forced labourers. However, this could not have been the explanation in the final weeks as emaciated prisoners clad in uniforms, wearing wooden sandals and without food or water, were brutally sent on aimless marches.These marches can only be understood as the final organized means of murder by the Nazis.The evacuation of the Dora-Mittelbau camp on 1April speaks of the intention of the Nazis. One of the convoys on the two-week march to Bergen-Belsen,near the town of Gardelegen, was forced into a barn, which was then set on fire. The next day,American troops discovered the atrocity and 400 corpses.4 5. Yahil,Holocaust, 517-518. 6. Ibid.,518. 7. Hilberg,Destruction,Vol. 2,858-860. 298 Budapest The march of thousands of Jews from Budapest to Austria in November 1944 illustrates both the need to relocate forced labour and the goal that underlay all Nazi policy—the murder of European Jewry. As Russian troops approached Budapest in the first week of November 1944,Eichmann began deporting the Jews. He was not able to send them to their deaths in Auschwitz,as the operation at this,the largest killing centre, was being terminated.Concurrent with this slow-down in Auschwitzwas an increasing need for slave labourers in the Reich to work in the underground plants being constructed by the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, under Gmppenfuhrer Kammler.Tens...