1. World War II
By Aayush Kumar
Mr. Lemere’s Class

2. The Nazis conducted many death marches near the end
of World War II, during summer of 1944. Death
Marches were forced marches of prisoners over long
distances, under very hard conditions. During march
prisoners were abused by their accompanying guards
and often killed.
Nazis started closing their camps when Allies
advanced in the west and Soviet advanced in the east.

3. The first camps to be emptied were those in eastern
and central Poland and in the Baltic States. Nazi
leaders decided to expedite the deportation of the
76,000 Jewish men, women, and children. They forced
them to walk to the Austrian border, accompanied by
Hungarian guards. This march lasted a month.
Thousands of prisoners died because of starvation,
disease, exhaustion, and cold. Thousands more were
shot dead too.

4. On January 18th 1945, about 60,000 mostly Jewish
prisoners were marched to Loslau (Wodzislaw) from
camp at Auschwitz. They were placed on crowded
freight trains and shipped to other concentration
camps in west. At least 15,000 people were killed on
this particular death march.

5. Throughout March and April 1945, when war was
coming to a close, the Nazis evacuated many camps
sending 250,000 of their 700,000 camp prisoners on
death marches. Some of those marches lasted for
weeks, causing thousands of deaths along the
highways of western Austria and central Germany.
On April 6, 1945, the evacuation of the main
Buchenwald camp commenced. 3,100 Jewish
prisoners were marched off, out of them 1,400 were
murdered. Over the next four days, another 40,000
prisoners were evacuated from the camp, of which
13,500 were killed.

6. By the end of April, the Nazis had initiated death
marches from all of their remaining camps in
Flossenburg, Sachsenhausen, Neungamme,
Magdeburg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrueck, and from
several of the Dachau sub-camps. The Holocaust
ended in the spring of 1945, when the allied forces
overcame the Axis powers, liberated the surviving
Jews and other prisoners, and restored peace to the
world.