Horrible Death Marches of the Prisoners

Death marches were a horrible way of keeping prisoners silent.They started, in the summer of 1944. When a Soviet offensive attack in eastern Belarus destroyed a German army and allowing soviet forces to overrun the first of the major Nazi concentration camps (United). When the rest of the camps heard word of the overrun, they started to evacuate camps and send their prisoners toward the interior of the Reich. Thus starting the horrible death marche’s era.
There were three purposes of the death march, one very important one was the fact that they did not want prisoners to fall into enemy hands. If they were to fall into the enemies hands, the prisoners would be able to tell the stories of the camps. If they did so their allied liberators would not like what the germans are doing and most likely stop helping them. Another reason why they forced prisoners to march because they thought that it was necessary to maintain the production of military equipment and supplies. If they did not have so many people to produce weapons and supplies they would not have much weapons to maintain power. Some of the SS leaders thought that they could take jewish concentration camp prisoners, and use them as hostages so they could bargain for peace in the west to keep the nazis in control of the government (United). There is one more reason for wanting use death marches.

The Nazis wanted to keep their crimes in the mist. When soviet forces became closer to the nazis they wanted to cover up their crimes so they dug up bodies and burned them. They destroyed all evidence left in the camps, and then evacuated and forced the prisoner to march which become to be known as the death marches. Anyone who started to fall behind or tried to escape were killed. Although the nazias tried to cover up their evidence at Majdanek, the soviet found it with little to no damage. Almost immediately an Soviet Nazi Crimes Investigation Commission was established. After that the soviet continued to look through poland and the nazis continued to evacuate their camps from east to west. The first major death march was the evacuation of approximately 3,600 prisoners from a camp, they had to march about 80 miles to kutno. When they arrived they had a little less than 2,600, after that they were packed onto a train and there several hundred more died, less than 2,000 reached Dachau 12 days later.