The March (1945)

"The March" refers to a series of forced marches during the final stages of the Second World War in Europe. From a total of 257,000 western Allied prisoners of war held in German military prison camps, over 80,000 POWs were forced to march westward across Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany in extreme winter conditions, over about four months between January and April 1945. This series of events has been called various names: "The Great March West", "The Long March", "The Long Walk", "The Long Trek", "The Black March", "The Bread March", and "Death March Across Germany", but most survivors just called it "The March".

As the Soviet Army was advancing, German authorities decided to evacuate POW camps, to delay liberation of the prisoners. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of German civilian refugees, most of them women and children, as well as civilians of other nationalities, were also making their way westward on foot.

Notorious examples include:

On 19 July 1944, Adolf Hitler issued an order from his headquarters, Wolfsschanze, 150 km (93 mi) west of Stalag Luft VI, "concerning preparations for the defense of the Reich". It put the German civilian population on a total war footing and issued instructions for preparations for evacuations of 'foreign labor' (slave labor) and civilians away from the advancing Soviet Army in the east. Item 6(a) called for "preparations for moving prisoners of war to the rear". This prolonged the war for hundreds of thousands of Allied personnel, as well as causing them severe hardship, starvation, injuries and/or death.

In the later stages of the war there were great concerns among POWs over the motives for moving them westward. Many different and conflicting rumors abounded, including suggestions that:

There were three main POW evacuation routes to the west:

The marches began in July 1944, at Stalag Luft VI at Heydekrug, when thousands of western Allied POWs were marched either to Stalag Luft IV at Gross Tychow (a journey which also involved a 60-hour journey by ship to Swinemunde), or to Stalag XX-A at Thorn in Poland (with part of the distance covered by cattle train).

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Wikipedia