At the end of the war when it became obvious that the German army was trapped between the Soviets to the east and the advancing Allied troops from the west, the Nazis, in an attempt to prevent the liberation of camp inmates, forced them to march westward. Thousands died in these marches.
When Russian armies moved in from the East, the concentration camps were taken apart and the prisoners marched to Germany, in camps such as Bergen-Belsen. A third of the prisoners died in January 1945.
When the Allied Forces began to enter Germany and other Nazi occupied land, the Nazis emptied the camps to wipe out any evidence. A few surviving Jews were forced to walk on the death marches out of the camps.
Forced marches of prisoners over long distances and under intolerable conditions was another way victims of the Third Reich were killed. The prisoners, guarded heavily, were treated brutally and many died from mistreatment or were shot. Prisoners were transferred from one ghetto or concentration camp to another ghetto or concentration camp or to a death camp.
The prisoners of Auschwitz and other camps in Poland were forced by the Germans to march to camps in Germany as the Russian armies approached from the east. The death camps were taken apart and the prisoners were forced onto the roads in the bitter January cold of 1945. About one third of the prisoners died on the death marches.
The death marches refer to the forcible movement in the winter of 1944-45 by Nazi Germany of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from German concentration camps near the war front to camps inside Germany. Later the term "death march" was applied to similar events elsewhere.
