Cole Reiner

Mr. Hawkins
Modern World History P, Period 2
8 April 2016
The Death Marches
The Death Marches were a very painful march that the people that were brought out of
the camps had to endure at the end of the war. The Death Marches started January in 1945 and
kept on going until the almost the end of the war. Many captives were brutally murdered while
having to walk back into German territory for unjust reasons. Many people were just too weak
from the concentration camps to actually walk and the march itself actually killed the captives
from the camps. The three main points that are the best to know about the Death Marches are:
the reason the Nazis still want the prisoners even though they were losing the war, the reason so
many of the prisoners die while on these marches, the reason the death marches mainly happend?
The Death Marches occurred during the end of the war for a reason. The Germans knew
that they were bound to lose the war and a lot of the concentration camps were located outside of
Germany in other captured German territories. Jews, especially German, Western European
and Russian, also worked as slave labour in work camps in Germany (Evidence 1). The
Germans mainly still wanted the Jews to continue to work and be their slaves. With the Germans
losing territories, they needed to get the prisoners back to their side of the battle line. Even
though they needed them for more work, they still treated them with very little respect and
murdered so many. Forced labour became particularly important following the outbreak
of World War II, when the Nazi war economy demanded an enormous effort (Evidence 1).
By moving more of the prisoners toward Germany, they could use more of them to slave away

on jobs not done by the German citizens. They needed them in order to function because they
were losing too many people from the war. Chelmno was the first extermination camp to be
established as part of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question the Nazis systematic
effort to exterminate the Jews (Evidence 1). This was also another reason they had to bring
all the prisoners back and keep them. The Germans did not have an easy way of killing them
since they could no longer use the gas chambers and they were most likely saving more of the
bullets they had for the allies. That is why they took the effort to move these prisoners, but on
the way so many of them died.
The Death Marches were named the Death Marches for a reason and everyone can guess
why they were called that. In the last months of Hitlers Reich, as the German armies
retreated, the Nazis began marching the prisoners still alive in the concentration camps to
the territory they still controlled (Evidence 2). In the last couple months of the war the
prisoners were already so unhealthy and sick they could barely move. It was no wonder why so
many brutally died during this time. They just physically could not work any longer and they
ended up dying. Prisoners were forced to march long distances in bitter cold, with little or
no food, water, or rest (Evidence 3). Not only did they have little energy left, but they also
almost always had barely little clothing and if they stopped, they would be killed. They usually
did not get any food either so they had no way of gaining energy to walk the far trek, so they
were just constantly losing more and more energy. The Nazis often killed large groups of
prisoners before, during, or after marches (Evidence 3). On top of just trying to survive the
hike, they also never knew if the Nazis would just randomly start killing prisoners. This made it
very hard to survive the trip with all of the things dragging them down during it, and that is why
so many people died or were murdered during the process.

One of the main reasons that the Germans moved the prisoners rather than just ditching
them were two things. They did not want the prisoners spreading what the Nazis had done, and
two, they still did not want to let the prisoners survive and they wanted to figure out another way
to destroy the world of them. Nearly 60,000 prisoners are forced on death marches from
the Auschwitz camp system. Thousands are killed in the days before the death march
(Evidence 3). So they killed as many as they could before they had to leave the camps so that
they wouldnt have to deal with as much of them, but once they had to move, they started the
march the weak prisoners behind their own lines. The Germans began frantically to move
the prisoners out of the camps near the front and take them to be used as forced laborers in
camps inside Germany (Evidence 3). Since they didnt have enough places to keep the
prisoners they just had to force them to work. This was, in a way, smart because the prisoners
were not just sitting around in camps. Even though they were very weak, they still did jobs that
the normal Germans didnt have to do. On the ten-day march, 700 were murdered. Those
still alive when the marchers reached the shores of the sea were driven into the water and
shot (Evidence 3). Even some of the people that survived these terrible marches at the end will
still murdered in the case of one death march. The Nazis still just ended up shooting and killing
almost every single prisoner right near end of the war.
The Germans were brutal but effective in what they did. They were smart enough to try
to stop any prisoners from telling anyone of what the Nazis did. They also made some of them
work once they finished the march in order to keep some productions up and running instead of
having soldiers doing it. The Death Marches were very so brutal though. The Nazis killed so
many and they did not let anyone slow the group down. So many died just because they had no
energy to continue on, so they were killed on the spot.