Auschwitz ‘Death March’ 50 Years Ago Thousands Of Prisoners Died When Approaching Soviets Forced Nazis To Flee Camps

Only those fit for hard labor were supposed to join the final evacuation march from Auschwitz. But the old, infirm and the children went, too. Remaining was thought to mean certain death.

Prisoners who either tried to flee what became known as the “Death March” or who collapsed of exhaustion were killed by SS guards with gunshots or a skull-crushing blow with a rifle butt.

Thousands of frozen bodies, many contorted grotesquely, littered the shallow snow as the Nazis herded 56,000 prisoners west to what remained of their Third Reich.

The evacuation of Auschwitz’s three camps - Auschwitz I, Birkenau and Monowitz - began 50 years ago on Tuesday, the last big column leaving two days later and the last major batch of SS guards departing on Jan. 21.

In contrast with the chaos characterizing the evacuation of other Nazi camps in war’s last weeks, when columns of prisoners were often driven aimlessly across the countryside, the liquidation of Auschwitz went largely according to plan.

After Majdanek in eastern Poland was liberated in July 1944, nervous SS officers at “Konzentrationslager Auschwitz” began eliminating evidence of their mass murder of 1.5 million people, 90 percent of them Jews but also Gypsies, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.

The majority of the remaining prisoners were killed between September and November 1944, including the Jews who serviced the camp’s gas chambers and five crematoria.

Some of these prisoners revolted on Oct. 7, 1944, when 450 were killed.

All but Crematorium V, which was blown up the day before the camp’s liberation, had been dismantled by the end of 1944.

When the first Soviet units converged on the camp on Jan. 27 they had no knowledge of it, Gen. Vasily Petrenko, a colonel in command of a Soviet rifle division at the time, told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday, his 83rd birthday.

Artillery shelling was halted but regular German troops still put up a fight. More than 230 soldiers of the Red Army’s 100th Infantry and 322 Rifle divisions were killed taking the camps and the town.

The Soviets found the corpses of 600 prisoners either shot or hacked to death, Andrzej Strzelecki, a historian at the Auschwitz museum, wrote in a paper based in part on new material provided by Petrenko.

About 7,000 inmates were found alive at the camp. Most were Jews.

Some had the strength to emerge warily from camp buildings and greet their liberators. Most were sickly skeletons sheathed in skin. The average adult weight 65-75 pounds.

Of the more than 200 children treated at Russian field hospitals and by the Polish Red Cross, a large number were Jewish twins who had been the object of the perverse medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele.