Starting in the summer of 1944 the Nazi were getting defeated and the war was almost over. When they realized that they would lose they wanted to get rid of all evidence of crimes, even the survivors. Nazi’s would burn the bodies of dead people and try to get rid of the camps but, there was still survivors who could tell people what they had happen to them so the Nazi’s walked them on death marches in worse conditions than in the camp. Over 250,000 people died on the marches but some lived to tell what happened and here is one of their stories. Gerda Weissmann Klein is a Polish-born, now American woman who went on one of these death marches. She was first put in a forced labor camp when she was a teen and before she was her father told her
At the start of World War II, German soldiers took over Denmark, throwing Jews into the concentration camps. In the year of 1942, Krystyna Chiger and Pavel Freedman were both escaping the Ghetto. They both were in Poland, wanting freedom for this occasion. They were both Jewish and tried to escape in different ways. Krystina went into the sewers and Pavel Freedman died in the concentration camp. 6 in a half million people died in the Holocaust. Krystina shared her story by a personal narrative and Pavel wrote a poem.
However, thousands still died every day at Treblinka, a concentration camp in Poland. “At the peak of operations, 15,000 men, women and children died there each day. Death on that scale took enormous labor, and towards the end, when the SS began to fear discovery, the mass graves were opened and the rotting bodies burned.” The Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners, were responsible of disposing bodies of other prisoners. The purpose of surviving till the end was to tell the horrific stories of the Warsaw Ghetto. Such as the filthy living conditions. “In Nazi camps especially,
Forced to march on and on with no feeling and dwindling hope, the victims of the Nazi concentration camps suffered from exhaustion and starvation as they walked through the unbearable winter. The Nazi party executed these evacuations, but the real question lies on why they did it. Not wanting the victims to interact with enemy countries, demanding them to maintain their weaponry and equipment, and holding the victims as hostages in attempt to establish peace, the Nazi party primarily conducted these death marches to protect and maintain their reputation as a political party. Explained in the article, “Death Marches in the Holocaust”, by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “SS authorities did not want prisoners to fall into enemy hands alive to tell their stories to Allied and Soviet liberators.”(2). If the prisoners encountered the rescuers from the west, they certainly would have exposed all the tortuous and horrendous actions the Nazis have inflicted on them. The SS did not want these stories to be leaked because they knew that if other people were to find out, the destruction of their party would have been a primary goal across the world. Furthermore, evacuating the prisoners seemed like the safest option for the Nazi party to have very little damage in their reputation, especially when they would bomb the concentration camps to hide their tracks. However, this was not the only reason they demanded these marches. Using the victims to continue the supply of
On January 27, 1945, a unit of the Soviet Army, opened the gates and entered the Auschwitz camp. The liberators discovered around 7,000 surviving prisoners across the three main camps of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buna Monowitz. Within those survivors there were 180 children; 52 of them under the age of eight. Many of these survivors had been decided to be unfit to join the final evacuation of thousands of prisoners by the SS just ten days earlier on what would become known as the ‘death marches’.
another way victims of the Third Reich were killed. The prisoners, guarded heavily, were treated brutally and many died from mistreatment or were shot. Prisoners were transferred from one ghetto or concentration camp to another ghetto or concentration camp or to a death camp” (A Teacher's Guide To The Holocaust). Even though Hitler sent people on Death Marches to kill them off in a torturous way, Death Marches were one of the methods to kill of witnesses of the crimes the Nazis committed. Some people had to walk on the death marches and they had to walk for miles and miles. Also, sometimes these people had to walk to trains and had to ride in trains with many people squeezed together on a long horrible ride to killing centers.
Her father, who always seemed to know what was on her mind, told her never to do that and never think about that again. One day her father came up to her and told her to put on her snow boots. She did as she was told, and it just so happens that a short period of time later she and other girls were forced on a “Death march,” as it was called. The march was called this because either they died on the way or they marched to their death. Gerda Klein survived this march because of her friends and her determination and hope. He was found by an american soldier, who was also Jewish. He had escaped to the U.S.A. because his family sent him there before they were captured.
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.
Out of these marches, most occurred during the winter when the conditions were the worst. The biggest death marches took place in late 1944 and early 1945 when the Soviet army began its liberation of Poland. The first large-scale death march during the Holocaust was during the summer of 1941. On May 2nd, 1945, the SS loaded 7,500 prisoners onto a german ship and ordered the crew to set sail into the Baltic Sea. The Nazi’s knew their enemies were approaching quickly and would bomb any German ships in sight. Just a few days later, the ship was bombed. There are no known survivors. Many dates of the marches were undetermined because the Nazis tried to hide and burn all of the existing evidence of their
Gerda Weissman was a teenager when the Holocaust started. When the war started she heard gunshots coming from the rooftops. Since it was very dangerous her family moved into their basement. The basement had no electricity, and water. Her brother was forced to leave, and go to a labor camp. The last day she saw her father was June 28th, 1942. She was taken to a labor camp where she was forced to work very hard. She met two girls that were close to the same age as her, and they became best friends.
There were death marches in ww2. The German soldiers took all the Jewish people. By the middle of the war, they began transporting all the Jews, but the jews had to run on bare feet. The death marches were horrific forms of punishment for the jews.
The death marches that occurred as one of the final plans for the Nazi Genocide, utilized a influence in the course of humanity during the Holocaust, through its inceptions that influence the tactic and its impact of the perspectives of those involved. The death marches were the forceful marches that occurred towards the end of the Nazi genocide, with prisoners transporting to other concentration camps in Europe. The depths of the death marches at its root, had an impact on how SS officers, during these marches, managed the victim's’ mental and physical state. Many SS officers, had intentions on the death marches due to the downfall of the Nazi regime that had been occurring during that time. Despite the initial connotation of the experiences that occurred during the death marches, the causes of the death marches pertained to the
“I pray you never stand at any crossroads in your own lives, but if you do, if the darkness seems so total, if you think there is no way out, remember, never ever give up. The darker the night, the brighter the dawn, and when it gets really, really dark, this is when one sees the true brilliance of the stars.” These words were spoken by Gerda Klein, a Holocaust survivor. Her story is filled with desperation and an overwhelming sense of hope. Gerda Weissmann was born in Bielsko, Poland. Both of her parents and her older brother died during the Holocaust. She was somehow able to survive “the ghetto, deportation, slave labor camps and a three month death march. She was rescued by an American soldier named Kurt Klein. She ended up marrying him and moving to the United States.
The Holocaust was one of the most brutal, dehumanizing events in the world. American history explains how the United states fought for liberation of the many occupied by the Nazis. Throughout my years in school, I have learned about this topic, but not in detail. I had the chance to watch an amazing documentary titled One Day in Auschwitz. It featured a woman named Kitty Hart-Moxon, a Holocaust survivor of Polish-English background. Separated from her family, she was thrown into the well-known death camp, Auschwitz. She described her story of survival to two young girls; they were the same age as Kitty was during that time.
There were over 1.3 million victims at Auschwitz. And about 1.1 million of them were killed. Auschwitz is the largest mass murder of human history. Febuary 21, 1940- Auschwitz was selected to be a concentration camp. November 22, 1940- First execution at the camp took place; 40 Polish prisoners were shot, then cremated in Crematorium 1. March 1942- First gas chamber goes into operation. May 1943- Dr. Josef Mengele arrives at Auschwitz where he conducts inhumane experiments on prisoners. January 18, 1945- Nazis evacuate the camp, forcing many prisoners on a “death march.” (no.2 (March 2001) : 119-132. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, EBSCO host.)
After World War II had ended, between 9 million to 11 million people had been victims of the Holocaust (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 8). About 9 million had moved to other countries at the end of the war, and about 6 million returned when it was over (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 8). Most found that they had no homes left in their native countries; they were destroyed or occupied by other people. Allied forces liberated concentration and death camps, and arrested the remaining Nazi personnel and held them for trial. The Nürnberg trials were among the most famous, in which 18 Nazi officers were found guilty of war crimes (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, Nürnberg Trials).