Archives detail horrors of Nazi death marches

BAD AROLSEN, Germany

World War II is near its end. The Nazi empire is crumbling inward as Soviet and Allied forces ad- vance. Millions of Jews, Gypsies and political enemies of the Third Reich have been exterminated. Hundreds of thousands are still in death camps praying for rescue.

Then the Germans empty camps about to be liberated and move their inmates to the German heartland. The final nightmare is about to begin: death marches.

“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, apparently referring to Dachau concentration camp. It is signed by Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and dated April 14, 1945.

After the war, a copy of Himmler’s extraordinary order was delivered from the Dachau archive to the International Tracing Service, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross that manages a vast repository of wartime and postwar German records in the small resort town of Bad Arolsen.

Last week this storehouse of Nazi papers, sealed from public view for 60 years, was the focus of intense diplomacy among the 11 nations governing the Tracing Service as they met at The Hague to discuss how to open them to researchers. The Associated Press was given access to the files on the condition that victims not be fully identified.

Eyewitnesses to history

Although much has been written about the death marches, the Bad Arolsen collection reveals a weakened, confused SS; a mass of prisoners marching onto packed trains, moving for up to three days at a time on no more than a piece of stale bread; shocked villagers witnessing — perhaps for the first time — their rulers’ inhumanity.

Across the Polish, Czech and German landscape, dozens of columns of emaciated men and women in striped prison garb straggled through towns and villages. Dogs snapped at their heels, and SS guards shot or beat to death those who couldn’t keep up.

Among the rarely seen papers are hundreds of 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, their accounts searingly fresh.

“A prisoner stuck out a cup and begged with his eyes for water,” one woman said 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.”

Stored in six buildings at Bad Arolsen are about 17.5 million names of people who were caught up in the machinery of persecution, forced labor, displacement and death. Last year, the governing states agreed for the first time to allow researchers to comb through the 30 million to 50 million pages, so far used mainly to track missing persons, reunite families and substantiate compensation claims. The lengthy ratification process frustrates aging Holocaust survivors seeking to know more of their own histories.

The death march documents, bound with string and kept in nondescript cardboard filers, 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 United States National Archives and Records Administration, an independent agency of the U.S. government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records.

Himmler’s quandary

Himmler ordered the abandonment of Dachau three days after U.S. forces liberated Buchenwald, one of the largest camps. Prisoners had broken into houses in the nearby town of Weimar. “The prisoners have behaved horribly to the civilian population of Buchenwald,” Himmler’s document said.

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