Holocaust Death Marches

The conditions that the Jews and other were put through were super horrible. They were forced into boxcars that didn’t have anything in them and they wondered where they were and where they were going. They stood in the boxcars for days with no food or water to keep them alive. (Joseph)(Source 3) Along their way to the concentration camps they were exposed to harsh weather. In the summer it was scorching hot and in the winter it was freezing cold. Since they were shoved amongst each other they suffered from suffocation. Along their journey many young and old died along the way (“The Holocaust”)(Source 2). Inside the boxcars there was no windows or anyway to breath. It was also very unsanitary because of the abundance of people in them and they didn’t have any water to at least wash themselves with. All they could do was stand there in the dark and wait (Joseph) (Source

As the Soviet Union made their way for the camp, the camp began to evacuate its three main camps and 44 subcamps. “SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from the Auschwitz camp system” (“Auschwitz,” n.d.). Prisoners were transported to Germany concentration camps. The travels to these camps were unbearable, and many prisoners lost their lives during the travel or were killed if they could not keep up during the marches. These marches are often referred to as “The Death Marches.” “On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army entered [Auschwitz-Birkenau camps] and liberated around 7,000 prisoners, most of whom were ill and dying” (“Auschwitz,” n.d.).

The concentration camps were horrible, they were a work from sun up to sun down place. The S.S. officers dehumanized the jews by treating them like animals, taking away their identities, and reducing their rights to almost nothing. In the Jewish concentration camps there were many things that were harsh on the jewish. One of these things was transportation. All of the Jews had to get put in cattle cars and shipped to camps.

One of the worst things that happened constantly in the camps did not just have to watch people die, or eve seeing the massive piles of dead bodies but the Germans made the Jews burn their fellow prisoners bodies in the crematoriums. The Jews were taken out of their homes and thrown into camps, while watching people die all around them if cruel and violent conditions as the Germans heartlessly treated them like animals.

One main condition during the Holocaust was lice and fleas. This was because so many people were in such a small area, a room that could only fit one hundred, would be packed with almost one thousand people, the lice and fleas were everywhere because of this. Men would get their heads shaved, and woman would get their hair cut really short, or sometimes even shaved all the way off like men, they did this in order to try stop the spreading of lice. In the barracks the lice and fleas were spreaded the worst. The bed would move in the straw beds because they were so infested with the bugs. Also men and womens clothes were infested with the bugs badly because they could not wash their clothing, so the lice and fleas

days without food or water” (95). The Nazi’s barely provided any food or water resources, and if they were to give out food it was just little amounts of food, which the Jews had to survive off like that. Many Jews suffered from starvation and were dehydrated. Unfortunately, some Jews passed away in such an inhumane way. Prisoners lived in constant fear for their lives.

Next, in Death March Articles, SS guards and officers were the aggressors who showed indifference. These Death Marches forced prisoners to walk long distances in bad conditions and no adequate food. According to Death March Articles, “SS guards brutally mistreated these prisoners and killed many” (Death Marches 2). The act that the SS officers forced the captives to perform during the Holocaust is horrifying. Many fail to see how these marches could bring joy to anyone.

The Holocaust was a period of terrible experience the Jews faced throughout European history. The Nazis led by Hitler altered life of many Jews politically, socially, and economically. Jews were treated horribly in Nazi Germany, they were forced to work until they passed out, or died. The Nazis also tried to execute all Jews to exterminate the entire population of Jews in Europe. The rise of the Nazi Party in 1933 impacted negatively on the lives of many Jews throughout Europe because it changed life of Jews economically, socially,and politically, they were treated horribly, and many Jews were executed when the Nazis implemented their “ Final Solution.”

One reason that there were death marches was that authorities did not want the Jews to fall into the enemy's hands and be able to tell them what had happened to them. Also the SS authorities believed that they needed slave workers wherever they went to maintain production of armaments. Some leaders of the camps thought that they could use the prisoners as hostages and use them as a peace offering in the west (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Marches were dreadfully common in World War II. All people incarcerated in concentration camps were ordered to be evacuated toward the inner part of Germany according to Heinrich Himmler. There were three main reasons for this. The first reason was that the SS would not allow the enemies to get to the prisoners alive to tell their stories. The SS also thought the prisoners were necessary to maintain production of military supplies. The final reason was that some SS leaders believed camp prisoners could be used as hostages to bargain. Marches started on trains and ships but as time ran out and the Allied troops pressed on, many marches were on foot. If prisoners could not walk anymore, guards obeyed their orders to immediately kill them. The prisoners were murderously mistreated and thousands died of starvation, exposure, and exhaustion. Liesel notes in The Book Thief how “hunger ate them as they continued forward” (Zusak 3920. Some

Jewish prisoners were forced to walk hundreds of kilometers, for up to a month, in freezing cold temperatures by the Nazis of Germany during the Holocaust. The prisoners were forced to go through weeks of suffering, even though they were walking away from their liberators. It is important to remember why death marches were initiated, the suffering the prisoners had to go through, and the major death marches with the most deaths. Death marches were initiated in 1944, and the SS guards called them “evakuierung,” a euphemism meaning evacuation. Most of the time, prisoners were given one loaf of bread for the whole march, and a few rags to keep warm. If they couldn’t keep up, the prisoners were shot. Death marches were an easy and convenient way to evacuate camps and kill off many Jews. There were many different reasons for initiating death marches, the Jews went through a lot of suffering, there were many different major marches, and the prisoners died for many different reasons.

Resistance in the mist of WWII and the Holocaust occurred all across Europe and the occupied territories of Nazi Germany. The three groups I’m going to discuss are Zegota, White Rose, and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Each one of these came from three very different areas, but they each resisted Nazi ideology. Each group has their own reason for why they decided to take a stand, whether morally, politically, or religious reasons and while there are differences between the groups many of them have overlapping reasons for their desire to resist.

The conditions of the camp were unbearable. The prisoners were barely fed, mainly bread and water, and were cramped in small sleeping arrangements. "Hundreds slept in triple-tiered rows of bunks (Adler 51)." In the quarters that they stayed, there were no adequate cleaning facilities or restrooms for the prisoners. They rarely were able to change clothes which meant the "clothes were always infested with lice (Swiebocka 18)." Those were sick went to the infirmary where also there were eventually killed in the gas chambers or a lethal injection. The Germans did not want to have anyone not capable of hard work to live. Prisoners were also harshly punished for small things such as taking food or "relieving themselves during work hours (Swiebocka 19)." The biggest punishment was execution. The most common punishment was to receive lashings with a whip.

Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the

According to “I’m Telling the Story” by Magdalena Klein, the prisoners were not given proper clothing. She writes “In rags, soiled, infested with lice” (Klein, stanza 2) and “Unclad frail feet were trudging in the snow” (Klein, stanza 4). The Nazi’s not only neglect to give the prisoners proper clothing, they also force them to walk barefoot through the snow! This problem is still present in the world today, not with the Nazis, but tyrannical governments still do this. In short, Nazi prisoners were not treated with the respect that is due to every human being, and suffered greatly because of it.