From the summer of 1944, the Soviet Army advanced steadily on the Third Reich. The Nazis were losing the war. As it became evident that they must retreat, they endeavoured to eradicate the evidence of what had taken place in the extermination camps of Poland. Countless files and records were burned and the Auschwitz gas chambers were destroyed. In Western Europe, too, Allied offensives impacted on the Nazi extermination policy: round-ups and deportations largely ceased from September 1944, and German officials fled Drancy and Westerbork as the Allies advanced.
Hundreds of thousands of people were still alive in the Polish camps who would be able to testify against the Nazis if they survived. Operations, therefore, began to evacuate the surviving Jews, Soviets, Poles, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and other prisoners. Even thousands of Jews from Budapest, who had thus far escaped deportation, were forced to march on foot to Austria in November 1944. Sixty-five thousand prisoners had been transported from Auschwitz by the end of 1944 and on 18 January 1945, 56,000 further inmates were sent on journeys towards concentration camps in Germany.
Besides concealing the truth of the extermination centres, the Nazis intended to further exploit these weak, malnourished people as additional labour in the failing war effort. As they were marched westwards in to the Reich for weeks on end, however, no value was placed on the lives of these potential slaves. Anyone unable to keep up was shot and left by the roadside.
In the winter of 1944–5, temperatures plummeted as low as -20 degrees centigrade. Thousands of those on the marches died of exposure and starvation. People suffered from severe frostbite and had only snow to eat. Occasionally, prisoners were crammed into open train wagons and anyone who died was cast over the side. Elie Wiesel, a Romanian Jew sent on a march out of Auschwitz, later recounted that of 100 people in his wagon, twelve survived the journey. Some of these trains were attacked by Allied planes that had mistaken them for military transports, resulting in further destruction of lives.
Of the estimated 714,000 people still incarcerated as enemies of the Third Reich at the beginning of 1945, by May approximately 250,000 had perished on death marches. Those who did reach their destinations alive were plunged once again into the chaos and suffering of overcrowded concentration camps.