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The Auschwitz Memorial Commemorates the 65th Anniversary of the Death Marches

A group of Auschwitz Memorial historians commemorated the tragic events that took place 65 years ago, during the Marches of Death in the second half of January 1945. They placed flowers and lighted candles in Brzeszcze, Pszczyna, Brzeźce, Pawłowice, Jastrzębia, Wodzisław, Świerklany, Żory, Suszc, and Bieruń Stary.

Jacek Lachendro of the Research Department at the Museum said that they were paying tribute to prisoners forced by the Nazis to march from the Auschwitz camp to Wodzisław Słąski and along a second route to Gliwice. “This occurred at the moment when the Red Army was approaching Cracow and moving rapidly westward, toward Upper Silesia,” he said.

As the Red Army neared Oświęcim, the SS led about 56 thousand prisoners out of Auschwitz and its sub-camps on January 18.

The prisoners covered the two main routes, to Wodzisław Śląski and Gliwice, on foot. From those points, the Germans transported them onwards in open train cars. The longest route, about 250 kilometers, was marched from the sub-camp in Jaworzno to Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, by some 3,200 prisoners.

During the march, the SS opened fire on prisoners who attempted to escape, and shot those who were too weak or exhausted to keep up. As a result, the route was strewn with the corpses of thousands of prisoners who had been shot or who had died of exposure or exhaustion. It is estimated that about 15 thousand prisoners died this way in the days immediately before liberation.

Of the more than a million people deported by the Nazis to this largest of their concentration camps and extermination centers, only about nine thousand prisoners, most of them ill and incapable of marching, remained alive in Auschwitz and several of the sub-camps at liberation.

The story of the Death Marches has been thoroughly researched by Dr. Andrzej Strzelecki, on the staff of the Research Department at the Auschwitz Museum, who presented his findings in Ewakuacja, likwidacja i wyzwolenie KL Auschwitz [The evacuation, liquidation, and liberation of Auschwitz], available in several languages.

Adam Cyra, Jadwiga Badowska, and Jacek Lachendro of the Auschwitz Museum place flowers on the grave of Death March victims at the cemetery in Brzeźce, near Pszczyna. Photograph by Tomasz Pielesz