Dbq Death Marches

Towards the end of World War II, the Nazis knew they were not going to win the war. They tried to evacuate the camps where they tortured Jews, the Polish, Soviet prisoners, homosexuals, and many more through labor and experiments that did not accomplish anything. The Nazis attempted to destroy as much of the data and evidence of what they did in these camps, but it was too late due to the rapid advancements of the Soviets. These evacuations were known as Death Marches.
The first death march took place on April 1944 and this was the evacuation of the Majdanek camp. The evacuations of these camps were ordered by a Nazi chief officer named Heinrich Himmler. Death marches were prolonged journeys by foot and train getting to the interior of the Reich with three purposes. These purposes were, so the prisoners would not fall into enemy hands alive, so they could not tell their stories of what happened to them in these camps, to keep production of military supplies, and Himmler believed that they could be used as hostages for bargaining with the western world to keep the Nazi regime alive. Many prisoners died during these marches from exhaustion, starvation, disease, or they were shot. The Nazis were ordered to shoot whoever could not keep up and so they did, shooting hundreds of prisoners who were left in the dust exhausted and …show more content…
One such event is the Armenian Genocide. From 1915 to 1918 the Ottoman government worked to annihilate the Armenian people, the same way Hitler and the Nazis wanted to obliterate the Jews. During these years, women, and children were forced to march across the Syrian desert. The victims were brutalized and left to starve, and to avoid this many resorted to eating things such as grass, herbs, locusts, and in very desperate cases, they would eat dead animals and human bodies. This kind of treatment was not new when the Holocaust happened, but it had never happened to this