The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (review)

In this first comprehensive study of Nazi policy toward concentration camp prisoners during the last year of World War II, Daniel Blatman does not—and cannot—chronicle every evacuation, but he uses diverse, extensive documentation to provide as "wide and representative a range of death marches and evacuation routes as possible" (p. 11). Using widely diverging mortality data on forced evacuation marches—20% to 80%—Blatman manages difficult source material (eyewitness testimony often thinly supported, if at all, by Nazi documentation) to present perhaps the most accurate account of some evacuations that we will ever have.

Variations in the fate of prisoners on marches resulted from the equivocal, imprecise orders that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and his concentration camp system executives, Oswald Pohl and Richard Glücks, issued to regional SS and Police commanders and camp commandants responsible for, respectively, coordinating and managing prisoner evacuations. Prisoners were not to fall into enemy hands alive, but the SS leadership did not explicitly order that they be killed. Conversely, instructions implied that living prisoners remained of some value (p. 83) either as laborers or, in the case of Jews, as bargaining chips for a futile attempt to lure the Western Allies into negotiations for a separate peace (pp. 139, 144). Guard detachment commanders were to use lethal force to prevent prisoner escapes, but lacked specific authorization to liquidate those incapable of marching. Decisions to shoot prisoners thus devolved upon guard detachment commanders and—more often—upon individual guards. On some marches, all or most prisoners survived: 230 Jehovah's Witnesses evacuated from Sachsenhausen to Schwerin in April-May 1945 reached their destination (pp. 171-72); and U.S. troops liberated most prisoners evacuated from Dachau on April 26 within days (pp. 206-207). Conversely, in early February 1945, SS guards in Palmnicken on the Baltic Coast west of Königsberg slaughtered 3,000 surviving prisoners from the East Prussian subcamps of Stutthof (pp. 117-25); and on April 13 diverse officials and civilians in Gardelegen locked 1,100 prisoners in a barn, torched it, and shot those seeking to escape the flames (pp. 272-342). Survival depended upon one or more of four guard behaviors: 1) permitting access to food offered by sympathetic civilians; 2) tolerating prisoners' aid to one another; 3) not actively preventing escapes; and 4) ending the evacuation by deserting rather than by deadly violence.

Blatman's research reveals three important characteristics of the evacuations that may surprise some readers. In the last months of the war, killers distinguished less systematically between Jews and non-Jews. Murder now turned not on national or "racial" identity, but on the "interaction of military, political, economic, and ideological circumstances with local decisions" (p. 417). Having maintained a complex, ideologically driven hierarchy of victims, local authorities became equal-opportunity killers obsessed with preemptive elimination of real and imagined threats to their homes and communities. Imprecise orders and communications breakdowns as the Allies penetrated central Germany in 1945 left decisions to what Blatman astutely labels "local liquidating communities" (p. 419). Killer identities also evolved from "traditional" groups of perpetrators—SS-police and Wehrmacht—to a diverse collection of locally based units. Diluted in 1942-1943 by the influx of ethnic German conscripts from southeastern Europe, the homogeneous nature of SS guard detachments dissolved with absorption of Wehrmacht personnel and reinforcement by civilian units. By 1945, guard detachments included local police, armed forces reserves, and civilians—local Nazi Party officials, Organization Todt construction unit personnel, Hitler Youth units, the teenaged and late-middle-aged conscripts of the so-called People's Militia (Volkssturm¹), and even non-affiliated individuals. The absence of shared institutional history and experience complicated the responses of individual guards confronted with prisoners separated from the marching column. Those who killed were not necessarily antisemites or proponents of an ideologically articulate racial ideology (p. 423); some did not consider themselves Nazis. Virtually all, however, had experienced twelve years of...