4.5 When and how did the Holocaust end?
4.5 When and how did the Holocaust end? The Holocaust only ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany. From the summer of 1944, the wartime Allied powers, the Soviet Union in the east and Britain and the USA in the west and the south, forced the German army to retreat after a series of defeats.
there were no witnesses to their crimes. Also, they still wanted to use Jewish prisoners as slave labour. Prisoners were either forced to walk, often for weeks at a time, or were herded into tightly packed freight trains, made for goods not people. There was no shelter and they were given little, if any, food and water. Those prisoners who could not keep up or who tried to escape were shot. Conditions on these forced marches were so terrible that the prisoners themselves gave them the name ‘death marches’. In total, approximately 250,000 prisoners, both Jews and non-Jews, died as a result of the death marches.
The death marches As the German army retreated, those prisoners still alive in the remaining camps began to be moved away from the approaching Allied forces to other concentration camps, work camps and their sub camps inside Germany and Austria. The Nazis wanted to make sure
Think about What do Figure 4.16 and Source 4.5 on the next page tell us about what German civilians knew and how they treated prisoners? Why might some German civilians have taken such photographs in secret?
Figure 4.16 Death march from Dachau. German civilians secretly photographed several death marches as they passed through their towns.
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