UNIT five: DEATH MARCHES AND LIBERATION TABLE OF CONTENTS learning objectives 3 SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES 4 classroom activities • Liberators 18 • Liberation 18 iwitness activities (downloadable mini lessons) • Death Marches 9 • Memory as an Historic Source – Liberation and Returning Home 11 text for teachers • Introduction 6 • Liberation 7 • Majdanek 7 • Auschwitz 9 • Bergen-Belsen 9 • Buchenwald 11 • The Generals 14 • The Chaplains 15 • The Survivors 15 2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES UNIT 5 LEARNING OBJECTIVES Through survivor testimonies, students will: 1. Understand the historical events that led to the death marches 2. Trace the routes of the death marches 3. Understand why some camps were liberated before others 4. Recognize how the Allies and the press responded to the liberation of the camps 5. Explore the range of the survivors’ complex reactions to freedom 3 SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES In this unit, students will have the opportunity to watch testimony from: • Thomas Buergenthal, son of Menachem and Gerda (née Silbergleit), was born on May 11, 1934, in Ľubochňa, Czechoslovakia. His parents co-owned a hotel with Erich Godal, a famous political cartoonist. After Slovak soldiers took over the hotel, the family fled to Zilna, a nearby city; the family later fled to Poland. The Buergenthal’s planned to seek refuge in England, however, their plans were upended by the start of World War II. The family moved to Kielce, Poland, where they were put into a ghetto. They were later sent to work at a labor camp. In 1944, Thomas and his parents were deported to Auschwitz. Thomas was interned at Auschwitz until January 1945, when he was sent on a death march. Thomas was liberated by Soviet troops at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in Germany, in April 1945. Menachem was died at Flossenburg, a concentration camp in Germany. Gerda survived the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, Thomas immigrated to the United States. He attended Bethany College and New York University Law School. Buergenthal went on to become a professor of law, dean of American University’s School of Law, one of the nation’s authorities on human rights, and the lone American judge on the International Court of Human Rights. He married twice and had three children. This interview was conducted on October 13, 1997, in Bethesda, Maryland. • Katsugo Miho was born on May 15, 1922 in Kahului, Hawaii to first-generation Japanese immigrants. He was a student at the University of Hawaii in Oahu when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Katsugo’s father, a prominent member of the Japanese community in Hawaii, was taken as a prisoner of war and relocated to an internment camp until the war ended. Despite his anger towards his father’s treatment, Katsugo volunteered to be enlisted in an all-Japanese army unit. He was sent to training in Mississippi, where he remembers experiencing anti-Japanese discrimination, as well as witnessing segregation in the South. Katsugo’s experience with seeing discrimination was far from over. His unit was shipped out to Europe in 1945, and they made their way from Italy to Germany, chasing out the remnants of the nearly-defeated German army. In April they reached Dachau, where they liberated the concentration camps. By the time they arrived, most camp prisoners were barely surviving, and Katsugo was deeply affected by the horrors he saw. In December, his unit was finally shipped home, after which he resumed his studies at the University of Hawaii. His father returned soon after. Katsugo went on to study law at George Washington University and practiced law in Hawaii with his brother. In 1959 he was elected as a member 4 of the Hawaii House of Representatives, and went on to work in the state judicial system. He met his wife Laura at the Veterans Administration, and went on to have four children. His experience in the war left him with an understanding of the same-ness of all people, a message he taught to his children. His interview took place on January 27, 1998 in Honolulu, HI. • Leon Bass, son of Henry and Nancy, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 23, 1925. Leon had four brothers and one sister. In September 1943, Leon volunteered for the U.S. Army. Leon served in the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion; as a black soldier in a segregated unit he was treated like a second-class citizen. In April 1945, Leon’s unit helped with relief efforts at Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany. After the war, Leon enrolled at West Chester State Teachers College, where he again faced discrimination. After graduating from West Chester State College, he enrolled at Temple University, where he received a Doctorate. Leon became a teacher and a principal. He married Mary Sullivan in 1948, and the couple had two children and three grandchildren. This interview took place on August 12, 1998, in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Leon passed away on March 28, 2015. He was 90 years old. 5 TEXT FOR TEACHERS INTRODUCTION Death Marches is the term that was given by prison inmates to the forced evacuation on foot of concentration and slave labor camps in the winter of 1944-45, later retained by historians. MAP: Major Death Marches and Evacuations, 1944-1945 MAP: Major Death Marches from Auschwitz In the winter of 1944–45, the Germans knew they had lost the war. As the Allied armies closed in on the Nazi concentration camps—the Soviets from the East, and the British and Americans from the West— desperate SS officials made a frantic attempt to evacuate the camps. They wanted no eyewitnesses to remain when the camps were overrun, and therefore a concerted effort was made to conceal the crimes that had been committed. The concentration camps were dismantled or abandoned. But Germany still needed slave labor and more time to complete the “Final Solution.” The inmates of the camps were moved westward in the dead of winter, forced to march toward Germany’s heartland. IWitness Watch Page – Liberators In January 17, 1945, just ten days before the Soviet Army arrived at Auschwitz, approximately 66,000 prisoners were marched to Wodzisław, where they were put on freight trains to the Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen concentration camps. Almost one in four died en route to the camps in Germany and Austria. On January 20, 7,000 Jews 6,000 of them women were marched from Stutthof’s satellite camps in the Danzig region. In the course of a ten-day march, 700 were murdered. The surviving marchers who reached the shores of the Baltic Sea were driven into the sea and shot. There were only thirteen known survivors. These were by no means the first death marches. In 1941, hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war had been herded along the highways of the Ukraine and Belorussia, from one camp to another. Romanians joined the Germans as Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were marched to Transnistria. Thousands died en route. In 1942 Polish Jews were marched from small ghettos to larger ghettos in Poland, only to be transported from there 6 to the death camps. In 1944, Adolf Eichmann, the SS official in charge of the deportation of European Jewry, was eager to deport Hungarian Jews. He could not wait for the trains to arrive in Budapest. On November 8, a death march began; tens of thousands of men, women, and children were marched to the Austrian border. Many died en route from starvation, cold, and exhaustion. Anyone who could not keep up was shot. The march lasted one month. Those tenacious enough to survive were sent to Dachau and Mauthausen. IWitness Connection – Meet Thomas Buergenthal Thomas recalls being taken on a death march out of Auschwitz. There were 59 different marches from concentration camps during the final winter of Nazi domination, some covering hundreds of miles. The prisoners were given little or no food and water, and hardly any time to rest or take care of basic bodily functions. Those who paused or fell behind were shot. Many reached the point of utter exhaustion, and collapsed. In his work, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, noted Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen describes the death marches as “the ambulatory equivalent of the cattle car.” The antithesis of deportations, which for two and half years brought Jews to centralized killing centers, this method of dispersion sent them off along in various paths toward Germany which, on the brink of defeat, was taking back the Jews it had once so proudly expelled. IWitness Watch Page – Liberation LIBERATION MAJDANEK Soviet soldiers were the first to liberate a concentration camp. On July 23, 1944, Soviet troops arrived at Majdanek, a death camp outside the Polish city of Lublin. As the Soviet Army advanced to the outskirts of Lublin, the SS hastened to hide, bury, and burn the evidence of their crimes. They simply ran out of time. 7 The soldiers were shocked by what they saw. Press coverage was intense. Roman Karman, a well-known Soviet correspondent, filed this report on August 21, 1944: In the course of my travels into liberated territory I have never seen a more abominable sight than Majdanek near Lublin, Hitler’s notorious Vernichtungslager [“extermination camp”], where more than half a million European men, women, and children were massacred. This is not a concentration camp; it is a gigantic murder plant. Save for the 1,000 living corpses the Red Army found alive when it entered, no inmate escaped alive. Yet full trains daily brought thousands from all parts of Europe to be coldly, brutally massacred. In the center of the camp stands a huge stone building with a factory chimney—the world’s biggest crematorium.