Death marches during the Holocaust

During the Holocaust, death marches (German: Todesmärsche) were massive forced transfers of prisoners from one Nazi camp to other locations, which involved walking long distances resulting in numerous deaths of weakened people. Most death marches took place toward the end of World War II, mostly after the summer/autumn of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi camps near the Eastern Front were moved to camps inside Germany away from the Allied forces.^[2] Their purpose was to continue the use of prisoners' slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to keep the prisoners to bargain with the Allies.^[3]

Prisoners were marched to train stations, often a long way; transported for days at a time without food in freight trains; then forced to march again to a new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. The largest death march took place in January 1945. Nine days before the Soviet Red Army arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Germans marched 56,000 prisoners toward a train station at Wodzisław, 35 miles (56 km) away, to be transported to other camps.^[4] Around 15,000 died on the way.^[5]

Earlier marches of prisoners, also known as "death marches", include those in 1939 in the Lublin Reservation, Poland, and in 1942 in Reichskommissariat Ukraine.