Archives detail horrors of Nazi death marches

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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.