A fortress facing defeat

January 1945 brought a great Red Army offensive to Lower Silesia, launched from the Vistula. The front, which had still seemed distant at the turn of the year, drew close to the borders of Silesia within a couple of weeks. On 20 January 1945 the Gauleiter Karl Hanke formally declared Wrocław (Breslau) a fortress, setting in motion the evacuation of the civilian population and the conscription of men aged 16 to 60. The same haste and the same fear of the approaching Red Army sealed the fate of the prisoners of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and its numerous subcamps scattered across the whole region.

By 1944 Gross-Rosen had grown into a network of over a hundred labour subcamps in Lower Silesia, the Sudetes and the Lubusz Land. Around 125,000 prisoners passed through the whole system in total. As the front drew near, the German camp authorities faced a decision: leave the prisoners in place, risking that they would tell the Allies about the working conditions and the sites of secret construction projects, or drive them deep into the Reich. They chose the latter, despite the frost, the lack of supplies and the exhaustion of people who had for months been worked beyond their strength.

Routes across Lower Silesia

The evacuation was not a single column but a series of separate marches setting out from different subcamps on different dates, usually heading in one of two directions. Some transports went north, to the Mittelbau camp, like the prisoners from AL Bunzlau, marched out on 11 February 1945, numbering 700-850 people, of whom only 541 reached their destination by 25 March. AL Aslau was evacuated in a similar way on 10 February, with the column directed to Nordhausen, which it reached on 16 March.

Other transports went south-west, to the main Gross-Rosen camp or further on to Bergen-Belsen. This route was taken, among others, by AL Breslau-Lissa (23 January), AL Breslau I and II (25 January) and AL Dyhernfurth I (24 January). The largest branch camp of Gross-Rosen was Fünfteichen, in what is now Jelcz-Laskowice, which held at least 6,000 men of various nationalities working for the Krupp arms concern. Its evacuation began on 21 January 1945, and the march on foot to the main camp took four days. About 300 of the most seriously ill, who were left behind in the camp hospital, lived to see liberation by Soviet soldiers as early as 23 January.

A separate group of routes was set by the subcamps of the secret Riese complex in the Owl Mountains, which was administratively subordinate to Gross-Rosen. On 16 February 1945 the evacuation began of prisoners from the Wolfsberg subcamp, heading towards Bergen-Belsen, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen. Source materials also list further camps of this complex, Dörnhau, Falkenberg, Fürstenstein, Lärche, Märzbachtal and Wüstegiersdorf, as covered by a similar action in February 1945, though the detailed course of their marches is less well documented than in the case of Fünfteichen or Bunzlau.

Marching conditions and diverging casualty estimates

The prisoners marched on foot, in the winter frost, exhausted by earlier labour and by hunger in the camps. Those who could not keep up the pace of the column were shot and buried in the roadside forests along the route of the march. The exact number of victims varies depending on the source and the camp, because record-keeping in the final weeks of the war was chaotic, and many bodies were never formally identified.

Where the figures are documented, the picture is stark: the march from Fünfteichen claimed around a thousand victims over four days, the evacuation of Wolfsberg cost the lives of at least 256 people, and at AL Halbau, marched out on 12 February, probably around 300 prisoners died. Across the whole Riese complex at least 4,775 people died in total, and counting those who died in the first weeks after the war from exhaustion, this figure reaches 4,929. This is not, however, a sum of the death march victims alone, but of the entire activity of the camps in this complex since 1943. Across the whole Gross-Rosen system, counting all the years of its existence, around 40,000 of the 125,000 prisoners who passed through it died. The discrepancies between these figures are a natural feature of the historiography of camps from this period, and it is worth writing about them openly rather than picking a single striking number.

The silence of the sources on residents' attitudes

The prisoner columns passed near towns such as Świdnica, Wałbrzych and Kamienna Góra, and the residents of these areas must certainly have witnessed the marches. However, the source materials available when writing this text do not describe in detail how the local population reacted to the passing columns, or whether help was ever given to the prisoners. It is more honest to admit this than to guess. This thread remains poorly documented in publicly available sources and requires recourse to regional archives and witness accounts collected by the museum in Rogoźnica.

Burial sites and today's memorials

After the war, in the area of the Arbeitslager Landeshut subcamp in Kamienna Góra, over 200 bodies were exhumed of prisoners who had died in the last three months of the camp's existence. The victims are commemorated today by two sites in the town: a grave in the municipal cemetery and a monument on the slope of Góra Parkowa, both reached via the Symbolic Grave of the Victims of the Gross-Rosen Camp.

The central site of remembrance for the whole camp system remains the site of the former main camp in Rogoźnica, where a museum was opened in 1983, and where the historic quarry in which prisoners extracted granite was opened to visitors in 2005. The Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica today holds documentation covering the whole network of subcamps, including the evacuation routes from the winter of 1945, and is a natural starting point for anyone who wants to explore this subject in more depth than a single article allows.