A View of the Holocaust

Page 6 of 8

• 1. The enemy
• 2. Origins of the Holocaust
• 3. 1933 - 1939
• 4. The war years
• 5. Industrial killing: Auschwitz-Birkenau
• 6. The end of the Holocaust
• 7. The outside world
• 8. Find out more
• Print entire article

The end of the Holocaust

The Final Solution moved into its last stages as Allied forces began to close in on Germany in 1944. The Project Reinhardt camps were razed. A prisoner work-gang called the Blobel Commando began digging up and burning the bodies of those killed by the Einsatzgruppen. Prisoners remaining in Auschwitz and other concentration camps were transported or force-marched to camps within Germany. Hardly fit for such an effort, thousands of prisoners on these death marches succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and cold, or were shot for not keeping up the pace.

'When British troops came across the camp on 15 April 1945, they encountered 10,000 unburied corpses...'

Jewish prisoners were concentrated at Bergen-Belsen, hitherto not known as one of the worst camps; but in the chaotic final months of the war conditions were allowed to deteriorate catastrophically. When British troops came across the camp on 15 April 1945, they encountered 10,000 unburied corpses, a raging typhus epidemic and 60,000 sick and dying prisoners crammed into overcrowded barracks without food or water.

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Published: 2003-01-01