Signum Temporis. Death marches in occupied Poland in 1939-1940

• In Event: Spaces of Suffering

Abstract

Death marches were a phenomenon in the last months of World War II. Already in the summer of 1944, when the Red Army and the First Polish Army liberated the areas on the right bank of the Vistula, most of German institutions, labor camps and concentration camps were evacuated, including Majdanek. Numerous columns of prisoners from German camps were evacuated in columns on foot. However, after the beginning of the January offensive in 1945, with the rapid advance of Soviet and Polish troops, thousands of prisoners from Auschwitz-Birkenau, labor camps in the Kielce region and other areas were evacuated in January 1945. As the Third Reich fell, hundreds of thousands of prisoners and captives wandered in large columns under SS guard from town to town, often aimlessly, dying along the way from hunger, cold and exhaustion.
Less known, especially in foreign literature, are the garbage marches that took place in southern Poland in the autumn and winter of 1940. These marches were intended to drive the Jewish population towards the demarcation line between the area of German and Soviet occupation. Such pogroms and expulsions were carried out by the Special Purpose Occupation Group (Einsatzgruppe zur besonderen Verwendung) under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch. On December 1, 1939, approximately 2,000 people were expelled. Jews from Chełm and a thousand from Hrubieszów were expelled towards Bełz and Sokal, most of them murdered along the way. On February 14, 1940, almost 900 Jewish prisoners of war, soldiers of the Polish Army, were expelled from Lublin to Biała Podlaska, two thirds of whom were murdered or died during the march. These actions were certainly a sign of the times, and not an accidental action that cast a shadow over the further period of the German occupation, heralding much more terrible events. The aim of the article is not only to attempt to describe and summarize these events, but also to provide a theoretical framework for this phenomenon.

Author

• Witold Medykowski, Author/Independent Scholar