Death marches
Death marchesPerhaps some of the most vivid images of the Holocaust are the
death marches, when tens of thousands of Jews at one time were paraded
to the extermination camps in Germany, Poland and Austria. Some of the
more notable death marches included the mass march from the Warsaw
Ghetto to the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the numerous marches
that occurred following ghettoization related in Elie Wiesel's Night.
Though much of the modern world may find it difficult, if not
impossible, to accept that notion that humankind can act with such
disdain for human life, the objectification of the Jews as a component
of the Nazi regime defined the acceptability of the death marches and
the systematic extermination of innumerable populations of Jews.
One of the keys to the relative successes of Hitler's
extermination plans was that few people escaped the horrors at the end
of the death march, and so there were only a handful of people who were
able to actually substantiate claims of mass extermination that took
place at camps like Auschwitz, and even fewer who could fan the flames
of resistance by retelling the horrific stories of what occurred to
those who followed. Some theorists argue that if the Jews had not been
exposed to the kind of Nazi propaganda that was utilized as a control
measure through out the early part of World War II that the mass
exterminations would have been far less effective. At the same time,
Nazi occupation of much of Europe during this period maintained an
atmosphere capable of quelling resistance, even to the horrific death
camp marches that occurred following increasing ghettoization of the
Jewish population and subsequent implementation of the death march to
exterminate large segments of the Jewish population.
Warsaw
Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of the kinds of
atrocities that occurred and the implementation of the death march can
be assessed in the events that followed the ghettoization of the Jewish
community in Warsaw. After the occupation of Poland, the Nazi regime
determined the necessity centralizing the Jewish community, only to
force many into the killing facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau between
1942 and 1944. The views of some of the survivors of Auschwitz help to
underscore the history of the ghettoization process and the quelling of
opposition to Nazi control.
The process of ghettoization has been related in the stories of
many of the survivors of the death marches, many of whom lived through
ghettoization in Hungary and Poland under the directives of Adolph
Eichmann (Smith 22). Under the plan for the Judenfrei-Europe
(Jew-free), the directive was set for the use of the death marches to
transport Jews from regions of Europe like Hungary to the more
centralized extermination camps in Poland (Smith 22). Over 500,000
Hungarian Jews, for example, were exterminated in the midst of Hitler's
plan, many of whom were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death
camps for extermination (Smith 22)....
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