The death camps in Poland had been closed one after the other as the Red Army advanced, with hurried attempts made to conceal the evidence of genocide. But over 700,000 prisoners of differing nations, creeds, ethnic groups (prominent among them, of course, Jews) and political persuasions still remained incarcerated in the huge, sprawling web of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe.65 Over a third of them would die in the horrendous forced marches those in the eastern camps now had to endure as they were driven — starving, frozen, exhausted, eating snow to still the raging thirst — in terrible treks, five abreast, at gunpoint westwards through icy blizzards, and at punishing pace, by their merciless captors whose hatred showed no signs of diminishing even at this late stage.66 There were mixed reactions among those who encountered the trekking columns on the streets, often adding to the crowds of refugees fleeing from the oncoming Red Army. Some — the merest ripple of humanitarianism in the unrelenting sea of cruelty — took pity on the prisoners, offering them titbits of food (which the guards prevented them from accepting). Others reacted with hostility to the human wrecks trudging by.67 Seeing themselves as Hitler’s victims did not even at this late hour necessarily offer an antidote to vindictiveness towards those persecuted by the regime. Frequently building upon pre-existing phobias and prejudice, the years of Nazi outpourings of hatred towards ‘enemies of the state’, towards Jews above all, had done their work.
In what was by far the biggest of the camps, the immense complex of terror at Auschwitz, not far from Kattowitz in Upper Silesia, some of the huge crematoria had been dismantled and blown up — one of them in a rising by Jewish prisoners — during autumn 1944.68 But the horror continued without respite. There were still over 65,000 prisoners of numerous nationalities — the majority of them Jewish — in Auschwitz and its numerous subsidiary camps in mid-January 1945, as the Red Army approached. As desperate attempts were were made to cover up traces of unimaginable inhumanity, the arrangements to evacuate the camps were improvised with great haste. A last note smuggled out by two prisoners just before the clearance of the camps started gave a foretaste of what was to come: ‘Now we are experiencing evacuation. Chaos. Panic among the SS — drunks… The intentions change from hour to hour since they don’t know themselves what orders they will get… This sort of evacuation means the annihilation of at least half of the prisoners.’69
For five days, beginning on 17 January, long columns of emaciated, starving, and frozen prisoners left the camp complex and were driven westwards by SS guards in forced marches of up to 250 kilometres. Some 56,000 left on foot, another 2,200 were at the end of the evacuation sent by rail.70 Hundreds too weak or sick to begin the marches were shot in the camps. The mortalities on the terrible journeys were predictably enormous. Those dropping by the wayside, unable to sustain the punishing pace, or attempting to escape were shot on the spot. Even stopping for the briefest of moments for the most basic human necessity was to risk incurring the wrath of the guards. ‘It was as if they were shooting at stray dogs… They didn’t care and shot in every direction, without any consideration. We saw the blood on the white snow and carried on walking.’71 In one of the marches alone, around 800 prisoners were murdered by their SS guards.72 After days of marching on starvation rations in freezing conditions, the survivors reached the more and more disastrously overcrowded concentration camp at Groß-Rosen in Lower Silesia.73 Most were dispatched within a short time in open rail way-wagons in journeys lasting up to two weeks in the midst of winter to more than ten other camps, including Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, and — in their tens of thousands — to Bergen-Belsen, near Celle in north-west Germany, now grossly overcrowded and rapidly descending into the depths of the hell-hole found by stunned and horrified British soldiers in April 1945.74
On 26 January, an SS unit blew up the last of the crematoria in Birkenau. The next day, the SS guards retreated in heavy fighting as Soviet troops liberated the 7,000 exhausted, skeleton-like prisoners they found in the Auschwitz camp-complex. They also found 368,820 men’s suits, 836,244 women’s coats and dresses, 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes, 13,964 carpets, large quantities of children’s clothes, toothbrushes, false teeth, pots and pans, and a vast amount of human hair.75
