1944-5: The Final Year of the War

From mid-1944 to the end of the war in May, 1945 the relentless drive to utilize Jews and other people imprisoned as slave labourers to aid the war effort, to completely “liquidate” this population, and, to eradicate traces of atrocities continued unabated. These contradictory aims, all of which in different ways sapped energies and resources that might better have been used to assist the Wehrmacht, were directed by competing organizations and leaders within the now imperiled Reich. Those in control of policy were, like Hitler, clear that there was no possible future for them once the war was concluded. Evidence of war crimes was so broadly spread over such a vast terrain that secrecy could never be maintained. As the Allies squeezed Germany from west, east, and south the territories held shrunk month by month. An even greater frenzy was stirred to accomplish the aims which had driven the various organs of state. In charge of war supplies, Spear fought for increases in the number of slave labourers even as Himmler, leader of the SS, worked to eliminate traces of concentration camps and their inhabitants. Hitler’s scientists and technologists worked feverishly, producing the first ballistic missile and jet airplane, hoping to fulfill their leader’s promise of super-weapons that could force a German victory. The technologies they were developing were superior to anything yet achieved by the Allies (other than the developing atomic bomb) and if time had allowed, these might have in fact altered the final denouement of May, 1945.

From June, 1944 to the end of the war the SS directed the removal of prisoners from the east, moving those who might be able to work to new labour camps developed closer to the heart of Germany. At the same time deportation trains continued to bring Jews from France, Hungary, Greece, and other countries still under German control to Auschwitz and their deaths. Forced marches from concentration or labour camps in the east had the deliberate effect of killing the weak en route. Already starved and ill, thousands fell by the wayside and were summarily shot by their captors. Survivors were warehoused to become labourers at new sites.

By August Soviet forces had entered Poland. The “working ghetto” of Lodz was evacuated, 70,000 being taken by train to Auschwitz to be eliminated. Deportation trains also began to take potential labourers westward to camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen in Germany. Entrained in cattle cars with neither food nor water hundreds died en route. Death marches and trains continued throughout the fall from Auschwitz and other camps. At the same time trains arrived there from Theresienstadt ghetto near Prague and from Slovakia with more victims for the gas chambers. In Hungary a death march of Jews from Budapest was begun in the first week of November, just days before the Soviets overran the area. Over 10,000 perished on this march.

By November American and British forces had penetrated into Germany and the first of the concentration camps there was liberated. The “rumours” of German atrocities now were confirmed for the western Allies. Films taken of hundreds of emaciated corpses and of near skeletal survivors living in appalling conditions spread horror among all who were to see them. Death marches and trains continued from the east through that winter despite conditions as the Soviets maintained a steady pressure on the retreating German army. Some of the trains carried open wagons onto which the prisoners were forced, dying by their hundreds from exposure as the trains moved into Germany. In January, 1945 one group of about 3,000 was marched from Birkenau to Geppersdorf. The journey took six weeks. Only 280 survived.  A group of 3,700 was taken from factories near Stutthof, promised evacuation by sea. Seven hundred were shot on the way. Near the shore their guards open fire with machine guns, killing all but 60 who despite weakness and overwhelming forces, managed to escape.

At the end of January the Soviet front line was a mere hundred miles from Auschwitz. Efforts to transport workers to the west to be used at other labour camps were redoubled. At Birkenau 4,200 prisoners deemed unfit were shot but from the Auschwitz complex as a whole 98,000, and from nearby Czestochowa 6,000, were culled and evacuated to camps in Germany and Austria: Gusen, Mauthausen, Gunskirchen, Enensee, Schlier, Dachau, Tuttlingen,Spaichingen, Schorzinger, Schomberg, Flossenberg, Fulda, Ohrdruf, Rehmsdorf, Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Dora, Gardelgen, Saltzwedel, Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbruck. These evacuations, like those above were managed with a brutality which led to the deaths of thousands. One evacuated group of 100 Hungarian Jews, sealed into two cattle cars had been shunted from one depot to another for six days before being left on a track at Zwittau. The cars were labelled “Property of the SS.” Without an SS representative on site no one at Zwittau was authorized to open them. Oscar Schindler, who famously had by then being protecting “his Jews” at his factories in Poland, since moved into Czechoslovakia, heard of the plight of this group. He went to Zwittau and risking his life, simply wrote on the bill of lading, “Final destination: Schindler factory, Brunnlitz.” The cars were sent to Brunnlitz where he had the locks broken; the 80 still alive were given food and shelter.

My next post will complete this overview of some of the events of the Holocaust during WWII. Tomorrow, September 12/13, Mark and I will leave for Berlin. All of the posts from that point will be about our travel in Eastern Europe and the people and conditions that we meet there.