In the winter of 1945, almost 300,000 Allied POW’s were forced to march across Poland into Germany to evade the advancing Soviet Army. But why would the German's go through such an exercise when the reasons were so unclear?
As early as July 1944 Hitler was aware of the impending situation that they were losing the war and issued orders for the ‘Defence of the Reich’. Amongst these orders was the decision to evacuate the POW camps along the Eastern front and march the POWs west towards Lübeck and Hamburg.
Some say that Hitler wanted to use the prisoners as hostages, others say that it was to prevent the Allies and Russians from using them as a fighting force against the Nazis. A former commandant of one of the camps acknowledged “this was the death sentence for thousands of prisoners.”
Historian Howard Tuck comments "The Germans didn’t want them falling into Russian hands because they could be useful in some sort of military fashion and Hitler imagined that he could use the POWs as a 'bargaining chip', to negotiate towards the end of the war."
The German forces, were terrified of what the consequences of a Soviet attack would be. The Red Army had a fearsome reputation in battle and death was very much part of their way of waging war, not only on the military, but civilians as well.
Despite all these plans, it wasn’t until the winter of 1944/45 that Hitler's orders were carried out. Himmler gave the order to evacuate all the eastern camps demanding, “no healthy prisoners remain in any of the camps.”
This set in motion a series of events that created the Long March...
