Other prisoners are put on a death march to Lauenburg in eastern Germany, where they are cut off by advancing Soviet forces. About 5,000 prisoners from Stutthof subcamps are marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machine gunned. JanuThe evacuation and death march from Stutthof concentration camp The evacuation of nearly 50,000 prisoners, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, begins from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland. On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army enters Auschwitz and liberates the few remaining prisoners.

In Wodzislaw, the prisoners are put on unheated freight trains and deported to concentration camps in Germany, particularly to Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen. More than 15,000 die during the death marches from Auschwitz. SS guards shoot anyone who falls behind or cannot continue. Tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, are forced to march to the city of Wodzislaw in the western part of Upper Silesia. Thousands are killed in the days before the death march. Nearly 60,000 prisoners are forced on death marches from the Auschwitz camp system. JanuDeath marches from the Auschwitz camp system begin The SS begins evacuating Auschwitz and its satellite camps. Those still alive when the marchers reached the shores of the sea were driven into the water and shot. During one march, 7,000 Jewish prisoners, 6,000 of them women, were moved from camps in the Danzig region bordered on the north by the Baltic Sea. The Nazis often killed large groups of prisoners before, during, or after marches. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the Germans marched tens of thousands of prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, a town thirty-five miles away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. The largest death marches took place in the winter of 1944-1945, when the Soviet army began its liberation of Poland. Prisoners were forced to march long distances in bitter cold, with little or no food, water, or rest.

Prisoners were first taken by train and then by foot on 'death marches,' as they became known. The Germans began frantically to move the prisoners out of the camps near the front and take them to be used as forced laborers in camps inside Germany.

The Soviets approached from the east, and the British, French, and Americans from the west. Death Marches Near the end of the war, when Germany's military force was collapsing, the Allied armies closed in on the Nazi concentration camps.

Prisoner of ice and snow series