Death march
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As a death march in the will Conflict and Violence forced marches of groups of people refer to operations where the death of the marchers is considered acceptable or even is the goal. A high death rate can be caused by the guards' indifference to overexertion and insufficient provision of food, clothing and accommodation to the marchers or by targeted violence against the participants.
definition
“Death march […] describes the process by which a regime , usually a government or an occupying power, begins to gather members of a particular nationality, group or subgroup - based on their ethnicity , religion, language or culture - with the intention of their annihilation. The term death march denotes the physical action by which the assembled people are then set up and sent to certain, mass death. "
"Death march [...] signifies the process by which a regime, usually a government or an occupying power, begins to summon members of a particular nation, group, or subgroup - on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, language, or culture - with a view to their elimination. The term death march signifies the physical action by which the gathered persons are then lined up and marched to certain mass death. "
According to the definition of the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky , death marches are “a slow form of collective extermination” and differ from other forms of social persecution and repression by their temporal extension . They represent a special form of deportation in which the goal is not primarily the arrival of the deportees at their destination, but their death. In its pure form, the death march to Sofsky is completely aimless. The acts of violence directed directly against the marchers are traced back to excesses of violence, triggered by the absolute power of the guards over the marchers. In historical and conflict research, death marches are generally classified as war crimes and as a means of ethnic cleansing or genocide , although the criteria for classifying a particular event as a death march can be controversial and the term is not always clearly used.
In Wolfgang Benz's Encyclopedia of National Socialism , death marches are defined as a “phenomenon in the Third Reich , v. a. towards the end of the war, when the inmates of several concentration camps were evacuated, d. H. were forced in large numbers to march over long distances under unbearable conditions and brutal mistreatment, a large number of them being murdered by the escort teams ”. This definition falls short insofar as the death marches from the National Socialist concentration camps are probably the best documented death marches, but the phenomenon as such is not limited to marches from the concentration camps .
There are also events that are consistently characterized in neutral historical literature as the death march, such as the Bataan death march or the Brno death march . For expulsions by German troops in Yugoslavia , this designation is also used in the minutes of the Nuremberg trials . Deportations in the course of the Armenian genocide are also often referred to as death marches.
Historically documented death marches
Indian tribes (1838)
In the autumn and winter of 1838/1839, under President Martin Van Buren , the US government had various Indian tribes, including the Cherokee , resettled on reservations, with around 4,000 of the approximately 10,000 Indians dying due to poor planning, food and equipment; the resettlement action is therefore also known as " Trail of Tears ": (English Trail of Tears known). Since a large part was unwilling to voluntarily submit to the Indian Removal Act , they were rounded up by the military and deported on treks from Tennessee , Kentucky , Missouri and Arkansas west to Indian territory in Oklahoma .
Armenians (1915)
In the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire , 300,000 to over 1.5 million people were killed on death marches. After most of the Armenians were initially concentrated in their main settlement areas in July 1915, they were either murdered there or, on Talat's orders, sent on death marches over impassable mountains towards Aleppo . It was not about resettling the Armenians, but about the "complete extermination of them in Turkey".
American and Filipino soldiers (1942)
During the Bataan death march , 70,000 US and Filipino prisoners of war were forced by Japanese troops to march over 100 km for 6 days. 16,000 prisoners died of diseases such as malaria and dysentery as well as dehydration , hunger and exhaustion.
Hungarian Jews (1944)
After the Arrow Cross took power with German support in October 1944 under a government of Ferenc Szálasi , the deportations of Hungarian Jews to extermination camps and concentration camps continued. Lack of transport - the Germans were in retreat on many fronts; in the west , the Allies stood at Aachen on the imperial border - Hungarian gendarmes drove Hungarian Jews on foot towards the Austrian border. Tens of thousands of people died. A special task force of the RSHA led by Adolf Eichmann guarded the death marches.
Concentration camp prisoners (1944/45)
With the later so-called death marches of concentration camp prisoners, the SS guards pursued two goals in the final phase of the Second World War : They withdrew the evidence of their crimes in the concentration and extermination camps from the approaching Allied troops by eliminating the victims and at least tried to do so to keep the prisoners' labor for other camps. These final phase crimes probably killed at least a third of the 714,000 concentration camp prisoners registered in 1944. Prisoners who were unable to march were often shot in large numbers. Parts of the camp were set on fire by the SS before they left. Some death marches ended in a catastrophe like the sinking of the Cap Arcona or in a massacre like the Isenschnibber field barn in Gardelegen or in Palmnicken .
The shoe runner detachment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp was a punitive company that held runs for the purpose of material testing, where deaths were the norm every day.
Germans from the Eastern Territories (1945)
After the end of the war in 1945, the expulsion of over 15 million Germans from the east ( East Prussia , Silesia , Pomerania , Neumark ) and south-east ( Sudetenland , Danube Swabia , Bessarabia ) began. The Germans were chased out of their hometowns and towns in numerous death marches. The best known is the Brno death march with 27,000 participants and 5,200 dead, and also the death march of the Komotauer (Sudetenland) to Saxony .
Croatian and Slovenian Wehrmacht Allies (1945)
Among the massacre of Bleiburg came after her unconditional surrender at Bleiburg ( Carinthia ), as Croatian, Slovenian and more troops on the side of the Wehrmacht fought, after the Second World War by British army authorities to the Tito partisans delivered were. In the period that followed, the Bleiburg massacres occurred while these disarmed troops were being transported to camps in Slovenia and northern Croatia. Like German prisoners of war, they were driven from these camps in marches to camps in Vojvodina , sometimes over hundreds of kilometers. These death marches resulted in large numbers of victims, including thousands of German prisoners of war. Many of the marchers are said to have died of exhaustion, illnesses or the consequences of abuse, or were shot at random or because they could no longer keep up with the march.
Palestine War (1948)
During the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, around 70,000 Palestinians were forcibly evicted from the cities of Al-Ramla and Lod by the Israeli forces . An estimated 350 people died in what has become known as the " Lydda Death March " crime.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity . Dinah Shelton, Macmillan Reference, 2005, p. 226 ( ISBN 0028658485 ).
- ↑ Wolfgang Sofsky: Time of Violence . In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie , special issue 37, 49th year, 1997, pp. 102–121.
- ↑ Wolfgang Sofsky: Times of Terror: Amok, Terror, War . Verlag S. Fischer, 2002, ISBN 310072707X , p. 103 ff.
- ↑ Trutz von Trotha: Sociology of violence . Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3531131370 , p. 115 ff.
- ↑ according to Article II c) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide on the "deliberate imposition of living conditions on the group which are capable of bringing about its physical destruction in whole or in part"
- ↑ Shmuel Krakowski: Death Marches. In: Encyclopedia of National Socialism. Ed. V. Wolfgang Benz / Hermann Graml / Hermann Weiß. Munich: dtv 1997, p. 759.
- ^ Protocols of February 18, 1946 . Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 7, p. 552.
- ↑ Tessa Hofmann : Annihilation, Impunity, Denial: The Case Study of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire (1915/16) and Genocide Research in Comparison (PDF; 270 kB). CGS Symposium, Tokyo, March 27, 2004.
- ↑ Wolfgang Gust (ed.): The genocide of the Armenians 1915/16 . Documents from the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office, Springe, to Klampen-Verlag 2005, p. 219 or: on armenocide.de
- ↑ www1.yadvashem.org ; Margit Szöllösi-Janze: The Arrow Cross Movement in Hungary : Page 427
- ↑ Eberhard Kolb: The last war phase ... , p. 1135 in: Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth , Christoph Dieckmann: The National Socialist Concentration Camps. Fischer TB, Frankfurt, ISBN 3-596-15516-9 .
- ↑ Richard Holmes , Hew Strachan, Chris Bellamy, Hugh Bicheno: The Oxford companion to military history , Illustrated. Edition, Oxford University Press , 2001, ISBN 0198662092 : "On 12 July, the Arab inhabitants of the Lydda- Ramie area, amounting to some 70,000, were expelled in what became known as the 'Lydda Death March'."