New archive material has revealed the final sadistic spasm of the Nazis, at the end of the Second World War as they ordered thousands of concentration camp inmates on "death marches" into the heart of Germany and away from the advancing Allied forces that would have saved them.
"A handover is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive," says a handwritten note, referring to Dachau. It is signed by the Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and dated 14 April, 1945.
After the war a copy of Himmler's order was delivered from the Dachau camp archive to the International Tracing Service, or ITS, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross which manages a repository of records in the resort town of Bad Arolsen.
Now this storehouse of Nazi papers, sealed from public view for 60 years, is the focus of intense diplomacy among the 11 nations governing the Tracing Service as they meet this week in The Hague to discuss how to open them up to researchers. Selected reporters were given access to the files on condition that victims are not fully identified.
Among the rarely seen papers are questionnaires to mayors of German towns asking whether marchers passed through their precincts and how many prisoners died there. Also in the files are statements by survivors and onlookers.
"A prisoner stuck out a cup and begged with his eyes for water," said one woman in a statement filed in the archive. When she brought him a drink, "a guard took it from me and threw it in my face... I went on my way because I could no longer watch what was happening."
Himmler's 14 April order came three days after Buchenwald - one of the largest camps - was liberated by US forces.
In one of the largest evacuations, an estimated 60,000 prisoners were herded from the Auschwitz /Birkenau extermination camp. The archive has three volumes of tables and maps retracing the routes of 74 marches.
One chart follows the departure of 3,000 prisoners on 18 January, 1945.
They trekked by foot and train 310 miles through 20 named towns to Geppersdorf in what is now the Czech Republic. At Mikolai, 35 miles from Birkenau, 300-400 prisoners were "probably killed," the chart records. Nearly three months later, only 280 of the 3,000 reached their destination.
Store holds names of 17 millions
Stored in six buildings in Bad Arolsen are some 17.5 million names of individuals who were caught up in the machinery of persecution, forced labour, displacement and death.
Last year the 11 governing states agreed to allow researchers for the first time to comb through the 30 million to 50 million pages, so far used mainly to track missing persons, reunite families and substantiate compensation claims. But that decision must go through a lengthy ratification process - frustrating ageing Holocaust survivors seeking to know more of their own histories.
The death march documents, bound with string, illustrate the kind of raw material waiting to be refined into historical narratives. Besides originals, the archive has assembled duplicated records from museums and municipal libraries scattered across Europe and from the US national archive.
The Scotsman
March 07, 2007
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