The End

left Auschwitz-Birkenau on foot in freezing conditions on 18 January. ‘It was a complete shooting- festival.’¹⁰⁰

‘Every hundred metres there’s an SS milestone’—the SS’s own term for another corpse they had left in the gutter by the roadside with a bullet in the head—recalled another survivor, who endured sixteen days of the barely imaginable horror before arriving at Gro?-Rosen. On the first awful night of the march, he had been forced to stand with the other prisoners for eight hours overnight in the freezing cold of a factory yard belonging to one of Auschwitz’s subsidiary camps, without food or drink, not even permitted to move to relieve himself. By the time they moved on next morning, seventy prisoners were dead. The column tramped on as if in a trance, prisoners eating snow to quench a raging thirst. Whenever there was a fragment of food to be had, prisoners in near delirium fought each other for it, to the amusement of their guards.¹⁰¹ On one day, 23 January, after marching for nine hours through the fierce cold, the prisoners caught a glimpse of a signpost telling them that they were 2 kilometres farther from Gleiwitz than when they had started that morning. Little wonder that some thought the torture had no point, other than marching on until they were all dead. Some yearned for death to end their misery, and the SS were glad to oblige. For others, survival was all that counted.¹⁰² For many, there was no survival. Up to 15,000 Auschwitz prisoners, most of them Jews, died on the marches.¹⁰³

For those who reached Gro?-Rosen, the agony of the marches was far from over. Initially a small camp, Gro?-Rosen, at an important rail junction in Silesia 60 kilometres south-west of Breslau, had swollen to become a huge complex comprising numerous subsidiary camps, and held 80,000 prisoners. As camps and prisons in the General Government of Poland had been closed down over previous months and new prisoners had arrived on almost a daily basis—many of them swiftly to be pushed out again—Gro?-Rosen’s overcrowding reached monstrous proportions, with some of the barrack-huts forced to house up to nine times their normal complement. Hygiene and sanitation were as good as non-existent, illness and infestation rampant. Rations consisted of bread and a spoonful of jam, with half a litre of salty soup distributed three times a week. ‘We are a thousand men lying in a room with space for maximum two hundred,’ jotted one prisoner in his diary notes. ‘We can’t wash, we get half a litre of swede-broth and 200 grams of bread. Up to today there are 250 dead in our barracks alone.’¹⁰⁴ And as conditions deteriorated, the terror inflicted by the guards became even more arbitrary.

Many of the tens of thousands teeming into Gro?-Rosen from Auschwitz were there only a couple of days before being transported onwards in open railway wagons on journeys that could last up to a fortnight before arrival at one of the equally overcrowded and grotesquely brutal hellholes in the Reich, such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Dora-Mittelbau or Mauthausen (in Austria). On 8–9 February, the main camp at Gro?- Rosen was itself evacuated in chaotic haste, though some of the outlying auxiliary camps fell into Soviet hands before the prisoners could be removed. The prisoners received a piece of bread each for the journey before being crammed like cattle into open goods-wagons, so tightly and without protection against the bitter elements that many did not survive the journey. Others were shot even on the way to the station and some while trying to escape. Many others—500 in one transport of 3,500—were murdered at the station. Bodies lay strewn along the railway lines.¹⁰⁵ Around 44,000 prisoners from Gro?-Rosen reached other camps within the Reich. The number who died en route is not known, but was evidently very large.¹⁰⁶

For a third huge concentration camp complex in the east, at Stutthof near Danzig at the Vistula estuary, detailed evacuation plans had been worked out the previous summer. The idea was to ship a section of the prisoners westwards from Danzig and Gotenhafen (Gdynia), while the remainder would head over land to a temporary stationing at Lauenburg in Pomerania, before being moved on to camps in the Reich itself. A number of subsidiary camps were closed down at the approach of the Red Army in January and the 22,000 prisoners, the majority of them women, held there were moved out. The massacre at Palmnicken in East Prussia, mentioned in the previous chapter, was the result of one such evacuation, but was far from the sole slaughter of prisoners removed from the subsidiary camps, particularly those not capable of undertaking the forced march, whom the SS did not know what to do with. The threat from the Red Army’s advance to the vicinity of Elbing and Marienburg on 23–4 January, leaving them only about 50 kilometres from Stutthof, led also to the hastily reached decision to evacuate the main camp. On 25 January, each taking 500 grams of bread and 120 grams of margarine for the trek, around 11,000 prisoners were forced out into the wintry wastes for a seven-day march to Lauenburg. German and the small number of Scandinavian prisoners were better treated than the Jews, Poles and Soviets. Clear orders were given that the prisoners were to march in rows of five and that any trying to flee or showing any signs of rebellion were to be ruthlessly shot down. By the time they reached Lauenburg, between 1 and 4 February, two- thirds of the prisoners were dead. Most were unfit to travel further into the Reich. An estimated 85 per cent—9,500 out of 11,000 who started the terrible march to Lauenburg, mostly Jews—did not survive.¹⁰⁷

Some 113,000 concentration camp prisoners, in all, set out on the death marches in January and February.¹⁰⁸ A cautious estimate is that at least a third did not survive. Those on the marches could expect little help from the villagers of the places they passed through. The guards did what they could to keep the prisoners segregated and, where there was some contact, prevented attempts by anyone prepared to show sympathy by throwing them a piece of bread or another morsel. In other instances, people were hostile to the prisoner columns. Whether from fear of the guards, of the prisoners or of both, or approval of the treatment of the Reich’s ‘enemies’, most bystanders kept their distance. Often, too, the marches were passing through already evacuated districts or diverted to avoid contact with refugee treks.¹⁰⁹ Of those who did manage to survive the terrible ordeal, the barely describable suffering was far from at an end. Having reached grossly overcrowded concentration camps within Germany, where conditions of existence—it could scarcely be called living—were deteriorating drastically by the day, in the last, wild weeks of the Third Reich they were forced to endure still further death marches even more chaotic than those they had already barely survived.

V

In another way, too, terror came ‘home into the Reich’ on a new scale. This was the terror from the skies, given its lasting symbol by the Allied raids on 13–14 February 1945 which ruthlessly obliterated the historic and beautiful centre of Dresden, a city labelled, on account of its cultural glory, ‘Florence on the Elbe’.

By this time, hardly any German city or town of any size had wholly escaped the horrors of the Allied bombing campaign and many had experienced death and destruction at the hands of the bombers on numerous occasions. Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris had presided over the campaign to destroy German cities since 1942.¹¹⁰ Northern and western cities, most easily reachable from British bases, had been the first to be targeted. By 1943, British night-time ‘area bombing’ was linked to day-time American so-called ‘precision raids’ (often, in fact, considerably less than precise) as the severity of the attacks grew in the proclaimed strategy of ‘round-the-clock bombing’. In a specially terrible and devastating attack on Hamburg in July 1943, around 40,000 citizens perished in horrific firestorms. The cities of the Rhine–Ruhr industrial belt were relentlessly and repeatedly attacked as the bombing intensified over 1943 and 1944. Cologne, Essen (home of Krupp), Dortmund, the Ruhr ‘coal-pot’ Bochum, and other major parts of the industrial conurbation were reduced to heaps of rubble. As Allied control of the skies grew and air bases could be situated closer to Germany, cities in the middle and south of the country became more frequent targets. Kassel and Darmstadt, Heilbronn, Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Munich were among those to suffer fearful attacks. The great metropolis Berlin, its sheer size as well as distance from enemy bases an obstacle to the level of destruction caused in some other cities, was attacked 363 times in all during the course of the war. The heavy raid on 3 February inflicted the worst destruction in the capital to date, laying waste the government district and the historic buildings of the city centre (though, luckily for Berliners, causing only a fraction of the death toll the Allies had intended).¹¹¹

There was a sharp escalation of the bombing as Allied strength grew and the Luftwaffe was increasingly rendered ineffective. In 1942, a total of 41,440 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany. In 1943 the figure rose to 206,000 tons, and in 1944 expanded more than fivefold to 1,202,000 tons. And 471,000 tons, or more than twice the amount dropped in the whole year of 1943, were dropped between January and the end of April 1945.¹¹² The 67,000 tons dropped by the RAF in March 1945 amounted, in fact, to almost as much as the entire tonnage unloaded onto Germany during the first three years of the war.¹¹³ Some of the most devastating attacks were made on near defenceless populations in the very last weeks of the war with the