internees, watched over by 40,000 SS guards. A further 190,000 or so prisoners, many of them interned for ‘political’ offences, were held in German penal institutions at this time.85 This entire population of the dispossessed, beyond the reach of any conventional judicial constraints, however harsh, and utterly exposed to the whim of their captors, was now in the greatest peril. Hitler had made no bones about the need to eradicate any internal threat on enemy approach. Probably in February 1945 he issued verbal orders to blow up the concentration camps on the approach of the Allies. According to Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, the Reichsfuhrer-SS told him at the beginning of March that ‘if National Socialist Germany is going to be destroyed, then her enemies and the criminals in concentration camps shall not have the satisfaction of emerging from our ruin as triumphant conquerors. They shall share in the downfall. Those are the Fuhrer’s direct orders and I must see to it that they are carried out down to the last detail.’86
Himmler himself had already, in June 1944, passed executive powers to the Higher SS and Police Leaders to take necessary action in the event of a rising of prisoners on enemy approach.87 Camps were to be evacuated and those interned there moved back into other camps. Should this not be possible, they were to be liquidated.88 In January Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps in the east, telling their commanders that Hitler held them responsible for ensuring that no prisoner should fall alive into enemy hands.89 Precise responsibilities were, however, as so often in the Third Reich, left unclear. When the camps came to be evacuated, it was amid much confusion and panic rather than through precise implementation of clear orders from above.90
Two imperatives, at least partially contradictory, played their part in the confusion. One was that prisoners should not fall living into the hands of the enemy, presumably to prevent their giving testimony about the barbarity of their treatment, and also because they might be used as hostages in any possible deal with the Allies. The other—offering the most slender of lifelines for the prisoners—was the need, still bizarrely felt even at this juncture, to retain them for their economic value as slave-labourers for the war effort. Extermination versus economic exploitation had long been a contest of Nazi racial policy. The contest continued to the last.
Himmler was by now playing a double game, demonstrating his unquestioned loyalty by maximum ruthlessness and brutality, exactly along the lines that Hitler would wish, while seeing his concentration camp empire as a pawn in possible feelers towards the western Allies with an eye on retaining a place in the post- Hitlerian order. Resorting to a long-held view in leading Nazi circles, he continued to entertain the vague notion that Jews could be used as hostages or a bargaining tool with the enemy. An attempt had already been made, in spring 1944, to barter the lives of Hungarian Jews for lorries to be used on the eastern front, in a fairly transparent tactic to try to split the enemy coalition. And in October 1944, Himmler met the former Swiss Federal President, Jean- Marie Musy, the go-between in an attempted deal to arrange the release of Jews in German hands against a payment of 20 million Swiss francs from Jewish sources in the United States. Himmler and Musy met again in the Black Forest on 12 January, when the Reichsfuhrer agreed to transport 1,200 Jews to Switzerland every fortnight in exchange for $1,000 for each Jew to be paid into a Swiss account in Musy’s name. On 6 February the first train-load of Jews from the camp at Theresienstadt in north-west Bohemia did actually reach Switzerland, and 5 million Swiss francs were deposited in Musy’s account. But Ernst Kaltenbrunner, involved in his own soundings (which eventually came to nothing) to ransom Jews, sabotaged the deal. Kaltenbrunner brought to Hitler’s attention press reports of the arrival of the first transport of Jews in Switzerland, together with an intercepted piece of intelligence suggesting, wrongly, that Himmler had negotiated with Musy about asylum for 250 Nazi leaders in Switzerland. An enraged Hitler promptly ordered that any German who helped a Jew to escape would be executed on the spot. Himmler immediately halted the transports, though he was soon to attempt another route to try to use the Jews as a bargaining pawn with the Allies, this time through Sweden. For now, Hitler and Himmler still needed each other. But Hitler’s suspicions of his ‘loyal Heinrich’ can only have been sharpened by what he had learnt.91
It would be asking too much to look for coherence in Nazi policy in these weeks, even in the area of killing the defenceless, in which the regime excelled. In any case, the speed of the Soviet advance in the east, where some of the largest camps were situated, meant that decisions were usually taken ‘on the ground’, in maximum haste and often chaotically, by the local SS leadership, and frequently lacked any clarity of goal other than to evacuate the camp forthwith and prevent the enemy taking the prisoners alive.92 Mass killing of huge numbers of prisoners at the last minute, as guards were taken by surprise by the rapidity of the Soviet advance, was impractical. Leaving them alive for the enemy to find was explicitly ruled out (though in practice this sometimes happened with those too weak to transport away). That left forcing them, weakened and emaciated by their capitivity, ill-clothed and with scarcely any food, to be moved westwards, often on foot since insufficient transport was available, through the ice, snow and glacial winds of midwinter. The result was predictably murderous, but the horror was more usually a matter of improvisation within the remit of general guidelines rather than following clearly prescribed orders from above. For the guards, in any case, the haste of the marches, and the shooting or clubbing to death of stragglers and others who could not keep up the pace, was less dictated by the worry that the prisoners would fall into enemy hands than the fear of being taken captive themselves.93
The chaos of the actual evacuations of camps and prisons did not mean that no plans had been laid for the removal of the incarcerated when the enemy arrived. The judicial authorities in Berlin had, in fact, already in late 1944 devised guidelines for evacuating the inmates of penal institutions, which were passed on in early 1945 to areas close to the front lines. Prisoners were divided according to the severity of the offence and racial criteria. Remaining Jews and ‘half-Jews’, Sinti and Roma, Poles, and the most serious categories of habitual criminals, psychopaths and ‘asocial subversive prisoners’ were on no account to be freed or allowed to fall into enemy hands. If they could not be transferred to the police and removed, they had to ‘be neutralized by shooting them dead’ and the evidence ‘carefully cleared up’.94 The Soviet advance was so fast, however, that the 35,000 or so prisoners in seventy-five jails and penitentiaries in the path of the Red Army could not be transported back to central Germany in any orderly fashion.
Forced marches of prisoners who were in no physical condition to endure the treks of more than 30 kilometres a day on icy roads and tracks with hardly any food and without warm clothing or adequate footwear were chaotically undertaken. Many simply dropped by the wayside, exhausted, frozen and starving. Others were shot by trigger-happy guards, themselves desperate to flee from the oncoming Soviets. In one march of women prisoners, forced to cover 36 kilometres in a day in a temperature of minus 12 degrees Celsius, only 40 out of 565 arrived at their destination. But on some marches, a third of the prisoners managed to escape. Their guards were often too few in number and more concerned to save their own skins than to bother about the prisoners. Some guards just left their charges and fled into the unknown. Even so, the death rate during the prison evacuations was high, while several thousand prisoners were simply shot dead in their penitentiaries in the last months of the war to add to those who died on the forced marches.95
For the inmates of the concentration camps, the death toll on the forced marches was far higher still. By 27 January, when the Red Army reached Auschwitz, by far the biggest concentration camp (which, with its nearby satellites, had combined a huge slave-labour complex with an immense extermination capacity), only about 7,000 of the weakest prisoners—barely more than living skeletons—remained of a camp population that had once comprised as many as 140,000 terrorized individuals, the bulk of them Jews. Gassing operations had been halted in November 1944. About 1.1 million victims, around a million of them Jews, had perished there.96 Killing installations had been dismantled, and attempts made to erase the traces of the camp’s murderous activities.97 The unexpected swifness of the Soviet advance had caused panic among the Auschwitz guards, though reasonably clear guidelines had been laid down for the clearance of the camp. These included orders from the camp commandant, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Richard Baer, to shoot stragglers on the march or any prisoner trying to flee.98
Beginning already on 17 January some 56,000 prisoners, resembling ‘columns of corpses’,99 had marched off, in great fear and abject misery, scantily clad and without food, trudging through heavy snow in piercing cold. Some were forced to push wheelbarrows carrying the guards’ belongings. Another 2,200 were transported by train six days later in open coal wagons with no protection from the glacial conditions. The guards scarcely knew where they were going, apart from the targeted destination of the camp of Gro?-Rosen, some 250 kilometres to the west. Minimal food supplies were requisitioned in the villages the prisoner columns passed through. What rest the prisoners were allowed had often to be spent in the open; even barns or schoolrooms could sometimes not be used for overnight stays since they were already full of refugees. ‘Any of the prisoners who could not go further was shot,’ recalled just over a year later one member of a column of about 3,000, mainly Jews, who
