What do you think?
Rate this book
Die Todesmärsche 1944/45: das letzte Kapitel des nationalsozialistischen Massenmords
Im Winter 1944/45 lässt die SS alle Konzentrationslager evakuieren, die den alliierten Truppen in die Hände zu fallen drohen. Schwache und kranke Insassen werden zurückgelassen oder getötet, alle anderen zu Fuß oder per Eisenbahn in Lager innerhalb des Reichsgebiets gebracht. Wer unterwegs zusammenbricht oder zu fliehen versucht, wird auf der Stelle ermordet; viele erfrieren oder verhungern. Von den über 700000 Häftlingen, die Anfang Januar 1945 registriert sind, kommen bei den Todesmärschen mindestens 250000 ums Leben. Der israelische Historiker Daniel Blatman stellt dieses letzte Kapitel der nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungspolitik zum ersten Mal umfassend dar. Anders als zuvor spielten sich die Ereignisse nicht mehr im fernen Osteuropa ab, sondern auf deutschen Straßen und Feldern. Und die Mörder stammten nicht mehr nur aus den Reihen der SS. Brutalisiert durch den Krieg und die NS-Propaganda beteiligten sich nunmehr auch Zivilisten an Massakern und der erbarmungslosen Hatz auf flüchtende «Volksfeinde». So ist dieses neue Standardwerk auch ein erschreckendes Porträt der deutschen Gesellschaft am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs.
851 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Daniel Blatman
4 books1 followerDaniel Blatman (Hebrew: דניאל בלטמן) is a Holocaust researcher and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 19, 2026
In January 1945, some 714,000 people were imprisoned across the vast network of Nazi concentration camps, a universe sprawling from the Rhine to the Vistula, populated by Uzbeks, Armenians, French Resistance fighters, Soviet POWs, Jehovah's Witnesses, children, and, in very large astonishing numbers, Jews.
Daniel Blatman's monumental study opens by establishing what neither the Nuremberg trials, the Allied press, nor even the Hebrew-language papers of pre-state Palestine Eretz Israel fully grasped. The final five months of this system constituted a distinct chapter of genocide, with its own perpetrators, its own administrative chaos, and its own body count, which would eventually reach at least 250,000 dead, a figure representing roughly 35 percent of the entire camp population at the start of 1945.
Blatman, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written a book whose ambition is total, and whose evidence is drawn from survivor testimony, postwar tribunals, SS administrative documents, and the letters of horrified American GIs who were the first to encounter what the Reich had been doing to its captive population in the final sprint toward defeat.
Part One traces how the concentration camp system, born as a political detention apparatus under the fanatical administrator Theodor Eicke and his Dachau model of bureaucratized terror, mutated across twelve years into a colossal slave labor empire managed by Oswald Pohl's economic machine, the SS-WVHA, feeding armaments plants, aviation factories, and the underground rocket tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora.
By the time Himmler began issuing his characteristically indecisive and contradictory orders in early 1945, the system was already cracking at every seam. Prisoners were dying at rates of 300 per day in individual camps, trains stranded under Allied air attacks on destroyed railway tracks, guards deserting in civilian clothes, and camp commandants receiving simultaneous orders to protect Jewish prisoners as diplomatic bargaining chips and to ensure that no prisoner fell alive into enemy hands.
The result of this administrative surrealism was murder at every junction. At Lüneburg, guards from a navy-staffed transport calmly shot 173 prisoners stranded after an air raid, with one guard named Jepsen noting with tender precision that he fired through the heart of each victim to minimize suffering, while his girlfriend Ilsa Bähr waited safely for the next train home.
Part Two closes in on the town of Gardelegen in April 1945, where Kreisleiter Gerhard Thiele, supreme civic authority and dedicated Nazi, faced the arrival of over 2,000 prisoners from the stranded Mittelbau-Dora evacuation transports.
Thiele telephoned Debrodt of the local Volkssturm at 3 a.m., screaming, "Yes, they must be shot! I have so much to do and I cannot have this worry." His logistical preparations included gasoline requisitioned from the party offices, weapons from the Luftwaffe base, flamethrowers, Panzerfäuste, and a brick barn on the Gut Isenschnibbe farm outside town.
On the evening of April 13, 1945, roughly 1,100 prisoners, among them French Resistance fighters who sang the Marseillaise as the barn burned, Soviet POWs who sang the Internationale, and Polish prisoners who sang their national anthem, were locked inside, the straw on the floor soaked in fuel. American forces entered Gardelegen the next morning and found the charred remains.
Blatman's final chapters ask, with forensic patience and cold fury, how many of the guards, the Volkssturm members, the Hitlerjugend boys with their hunting rifles, and the Gardelegen townspeople who watched the smoke rise decided, in those hours, that this was reasonable.
Daniel Blatman was born in 1953 and teaches Holocaust history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studies the Bund, Jewish labor politics, genocide, and The Death Marches.
The death marches were a genuinely distinct episode of genocide, with their own perpetrators, their own social conditions, and their own logic of mass murder. The Gardelegen case alone, with its civic meetings, its gasoline requisitions, its Volkssturm men shooting prisoners in the back of the head while smoking cigarettes, forecloses any argument that ordinary Germans were passive bystanders to the killing. The march toward death, it turns out, had a very local and very willing escort.
The book is long, exhausting, and scrupulously sourced. Those qualities are, in the present climate, practically acts of defiance.
Never Again! Never!
❤️ 🇮🇱
Daniel Blatman's monumental study opens by establishing what neither the Nuremberg trials, the Allied press, nor even the Hebrew-language papers of pre-state Palestine Eretz Israel fully grasped. The final five months of this system constituted a distinct chapter of genocide, with its own perpetrators, its own administrative chaos, and its own body count, which would eventually reach at least 250,000 dead, a figure representing roughly 35 percent of the entire camp population at the start of 1945.
Blatman, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written a book whose ambition is total, and whose evidence is drawn from survivor testimony, postwar tribunals, SS administrative documents, and the letters of horrified American GIs who were the first to encounter what the Reich had been doing to its captive population in the final sprint toward defeat.
Part One traces how the concentration camp system, born as a political detention apparatus under the fanatical administrator Theodor Eicke and his Dachau model of bureaucratized terror, mutated across twelve years into a colossal slave labor empire managed by Oswald Pohl's economic machine, the SS-WVHA, feeding armaments plants, aviation factories, and the underground rocket tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora.
By the time Himmler began issuing his characteristically indecisive and contradictory orders in early 1945, the system was already cracking at every seam. Prisoners were dying at rates of 300 per day in individual camps, trains stranded under Allied air attacks on destroyed railway tracks, guards deserting in civilian clothes, and camp commandants receiving simultaneous orders to protect Jewish prisoners as diplomatic bargaining chips and to ensure that no prisoner fell alive into enemy hands.
The result of this administrative surrealism was murder at every junction. At Lüneburg, guards from a navy-staffed transport calmly shot 173 prisoners stranded after an air raid, with one guard named Jepsen noting with tender precision that he fired through the heart of each victim to minimize suffering, while his girlfriend Ilsa Bähr waited safely for the next train home.
Part Two closes in on the town of Gardelegen in April 1945, where Kreisleiter Gerhard Thiele, supreme civic authority and dedicated Nazi, faced the arrival of over 2,000 prisoners from the stranded Mittelbau-Dora evacuation transports.
Thiele telephoned Debrodt of the local Volkssturm at 3 a.m., screaming, "Yes, they must be shot! I have so much to do and I cannot have this worry." His logistical preparations included gasoline requisitioned from the party offices, weapons from the Luftwaffe base, flamethrowers, Panzerfäuste, and a brick barn on the Gut Isenschnibbe farm outside town.
On the evening of April 13, 1945, roughly 1,100 prisoners, among them French Resistance fighters who sang the Marseillaise as the barn burned, Soviet POWs who sang the Internationale, and Polish prisoners who sang their national anthem, were locked inside, the straw on the floor soaked in fuel. American forces entered Gardelegen the next morning and found the charred remains.
Blatman's final chapters ask, with forensic patience and cold fury, how many of the guards, the Volkssturm members, the Hitlerjugend boys with their hunting rifles, and the Gardelegen townspeople who watched the smoke rise decided, in those hours, that this was reasonable.
Daniel Blatman was born in 1953 and teaches Holocaust history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studies the Bund, Jewish labor politics, genocide, and The Death Marches.
The death marches were a genuinely distinct episode of genocide, with their own perpetrators, their own social conditions, and their own logic of mass murder. The Gardelegen case alone, with its civic meetings, its gasoline requisitions, its Volkssturm men shooting prisoners in the back of the head while smoking cigarettes, forecloses any argument that ordinary Germans were passive bystanders to the killing. The march toward death, it turns out, had a very local and very willing escort.
The book is long, exhausting, and scrupulously sourced. Those qualities are, in the present climate, practically acts of defiance.
Never Again! Never!
❤️ 🇮🇱
October 23, 2023
Zugegeben: dieses Buch zu lesen erfordert Durchhaltevermögen! Nicht nur wegen der düsteren Thematik, die an sich bereits schwere Kost darstellt, sondern auch wegen der schier endlosen Aneinanderreihung von, bis ins kleinste Detail, recherchierten Daten und Fakten. Dennoch habe ich es letztlich nicht bereut, bis zum Ende durchgehalten zu haben, denn wie ich nun weiß, wusste ich unglaublich Vieles nicht über das letzte Kapitel des Holocaust bzw. Dritten Reichs. So grausig dieser Teil der Menschheitsgeschichte auch war, so interessant war er auch, alleine schon aus (sozial)psychologischer Sicht. Dieses Buch sollte zu einem Standardwerk der (deutschen) Geschichtsliteratur werden!
May 11, 2011
This book certainly adds to the Holocaust literature, describing the death marches from the concentration camps. Once again, we realize how much the German people had to know as tens of thousand of prisoners were marched throughout Germany, many shot when they became too tired to go on. The book, however, is really for the Holocaust historian as it it filled with numbers and names, rather than narratives. Important but not an easy read or one that is easy to stay with.
August 24, 2013
Tedious at times but a constant reality check about how cruel humans can be.
February 19, 2026
Die Auflösung der Konzentrationslager - Haupt- und Nebenlager - in Todesmärschen, Transporten und Massakern - angetrieben von widersprüchlichen Befehlslagen, heranrückenden Fronten und Fanatismus. Auch in den letzten Tagen des Krieges finden sich fanatische Zivilisten, die Jagd auf KZ-Häftlinge machen und sich an Massakern beteiligen. Der Autor versucht kein Gesamtbild aller Grausigkeiten, sondern strebt einen Überblick an und arbeitet typische Muster heraus. Die Auflösungserscheinungen eines totalitären Staates mit einem menschenverachtenden System, in dem Täter alles Menschliche verloren haben. Das weit gespannte Netz der Haupt- und Nebenlager lässt vermuten, dass man da in jeder Ecke des Landes finstere Kapitel der deutschen Geschichte entdecken kann - und bei so manchem haben sich lokale Fanatiker, darunter auch HJler, beteiligt. Kein Wunder, dass man das in der Nachkriegszeit dann gerne eher ausgeblendet oder in der größeren Geschichte des Lagersystems zusammengefasst hat.
February 4, 2018
Not to dismiss the atrocities of this period/war, this book couldn’t keep my attention. Felt that I was simply reading numbers that had perished (again no disrespect). Have read many other books about the Holocaust but this was a difficult one to get through.
January 29, 2019
Very thorough though a bit dry in places, provides a good look at some of the worst Nazi actions that have often gone unrecognized except by books like this one.
October 15, 2015
the death marches were on many levels a unique period of the holocaust. the one quarter of a million people that were killed during the evacuations of the camps were not the victims of a genocidal central planning. if there were any orders concerning the treatment of the prisoners, they varied immensely from place to place and were often contradictory or counter-intuitive (like in the case of the evacuation marches of hungarian jews through austria, whom the ss chief himmler wanted explicitly to be cared for and not to be harmed in any way - which did not prevent the local actors from killing thousands of these people on their way to mauthausen). neither did the perpetrators recruit themselves from a single organisation like ss or police or were integrated in a hierarchy that was functioning in any meaningfull sense. on the contrary: society was on the brink of collapse. the nazi system was breaking down. and everyone knew it. and under these circumstances the murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, previously confined to the camps and carried out by "specialists", went on the road. it came to small towns all over germany and austria, found new executioners almost everywhere and only rarely (like in the case of the Volkssturm - commander Feyerabend in Palnicken near the north sea) met any resistance. the killing did not recede when it left the defined space of the concentration camps to enter society, it increased to a new horrific peak. without any orders from above, a significant number of people who had never worked in a camp before became murderers in the last moments of a crumbling regime.
the complex set of circumstances that enabled this genocidal drive in our society, as well as the concrete documentation of it's horrifying effects are the topic of this book.
the complex set of circumstances that enabled this genocidal drive in our society, as well as the concrete documentation of it's horrifying effects are the topic of this book.
October 28, 2015
This is a detailed, almost clinical read about the sheer numbers of death marches and its victims. It gives a well-detailed overview of it to even begin to understand the mass exodus of prisoners and the horror stories that ended up all over in small town that previously had not been part of the camp systems. It is chilling and compelling while holding my interest for every single page. It takes a look at the climate of Germany that perpetuated these marches in the last few months of a war that was obviously doomed. Quite an eye opening experience to read this book.
May 18, 2011
Excellent, though the translation is weak at times.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews