Bad Arolsen, Germany – World War II is near its end. The Nazi empire is crumbling from its edges inward as Soviet and Allied forces advance. Millions of Jews, Gypsies and political enemies of the Third Reich already have been systematically exterminated.
Hundreds of thousands are still in death camps praying for rescue.
Then, in one final sadistic spasm, the Germans set out to empty camps about to be liberated, and move their inmates to the German heartland.
The final nightmare – death marches – is about to begin.
“A handover is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive,” says a handwritten note on plain paper, apparently referring to Dachau. It is signed by Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and dated April 14, 1945.
After the war a copy of Himmler’s extraordinary order was delivered from the Dachau concentration camp archive to the International Tracing Service, or ITS, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross that manages a vast repository of wartime and postwar German records in the small resort town of Bad Arolsen.
Now this storehouse of Nazi papers, sealed from public view for 60 years, is the focus of intense diplomacy among the 11 nations governing the Tracing Service as they meet today in The Hague to discuss how to open them to researchers.
While much has been written about the death marches, the Bad Arolsen collection allows a unique picture to emerge: a weakened, confused SS; a mass of prisoners marching or packed into trains, moving for up to three days at a time on no more than a piece of stale bread; and shocked villagers witnessing – perhaps for the first time – their rulers’ inhumanity.
Across the Polish, Czech and German landscape, dozens of columns of emaciated men and women in striped prison garb straggled through towns and villages. Dogs snapped at their heels, and SS guards shot or beat to death those who couldn’t keep up.
