Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Author:Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307426239
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

PART V

Death Marches: To the Final Days

The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted, And barbarism itself have pitied him.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD II

13

THE DEADLY WAY

THE LONG-DISTANCE marching of Jews and other victims began (as early as late 1939 and ended only a day or two after the war had formally come to an end. These marches were appropriately dubbed by the victims "death marches" (Todesmärsche).1 Most such marches took place in the last year, particularly in the last half year, of Nazi German suzerainty. For this and other reasons, this final phase of marches is the focus of this chapter.

The marches can be broken up into three distinct periods. The first period, in which few marches occurred, extends from the onset of the war to the beginning of the Germans' systematic extermination of the Jews in June 1941. The second covers the years of extermination until the summer of 1944. The third covers the time of the Reich's denouement, when its doom was understood to be near, when all that the Germans could do was to hold on and stave off the end for a while longer, and when the extermination program was winding down.2

The logic behind this periodization of death marches is simple. The first period preceded the formal policy of extermination. It should therefore have produced few deaths when Jews were marching—that is, had the Germans overseeing the marches not themselves been animated by a set of beliefs that made them desire the Jews' deaths. The second period coincides with the time of full-scale extermination, when killing Jews on the march would have been but a natural component of genocidal slaughter. In light of the prevailing norms and treatment of Jews during this time of feverish killing, marches, like the camps, would likely have been replete with cruelty and death. The third span constitutes a distinct historical time, when the Germans' prospects had become bleak, rendering their efforts vain. Germany and Germans were facing a new, different mix of considerations, and the Nazi regime itself began to practice different politics. Moreover, the institutions and locales of extermination underwent significant change; the death camps had been or were being shut down, and in the German-controlled areas, only remnants of European Jewry survived—and they in skeletal condition. It is not at all clear how the circumstances of this period would have affected the Germans' victims, given the acute labor shortage that the German economy faced, and given the need for local German commanders and their subordinates to think about their own futures in the coming, yet undefined new order, where proof of their decent treatment of their prisoners might buy them some protection, might save their hides. Because the extermination camps had been closed down, because the Nazi era was drawing to a close, the actions of the Germans might not have been easily predicted: Would the marches be used as means to continue the camps' genocidal work, or would a more humane policy be instituted, if not from

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