Death march

A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees. Those marching must walk over long distances for an extremely long period of time and are not supplied with food or water. Prisoners who collapse are left to die or killed by guards.

Examples of death marches

• In 1835, Alexander Herzen encountered emaciated cantonists, Jewish boys (some as young as 8 years old) conscripted to the Imperial Russian army. Herzen was being convoyed to his exile at Vyatka, the cantonists were marched to Kazan and their officer complained that a third had already died.^[1]

• In 1838, the Cherokee nation had to march westward towards Oklahoma. This death march became known as the Trail of Tears where an estimated 4,000 men, women, and children died during relocation.^[2]

• During the years 1914-1923, large numbers of Ottoman Greeks were subjected to death marches, in series of events that became known as the Greek genocide.

• During the 1915 Armenian Genocide, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were forced into death marches through the desert of Deir ez-Zor where most of them perished, leaving few survivors. Today there is a memorial in Deir ez-Zor for the marchers.

• In the Pacific Theatre, the Imperial Japanese Army conducted death marches, including the infamous Bataan Death March (1942) and Sandakan Death Marches (1945).

• The term 'death march' was used in the context of the World War II history by victims and then by historians to refer to the forcible movement between fall 1944 and April 1945 by Nazi Germany of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi concentration camps near the advancing war front to camps inside Germany.

• "The March" refers to a series of death marches during the final stages of World War II in Europe when over 80,000 Allied PoWs were force-marched westward across Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany in winter conditions, lasting about four months from January to April 1945.

• In the Brünn death march of Summer 1945, Sudeten Germans were expelled by Czechs from Sudetenland to Austria, killing at least 800 in the process.

• During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, some 70,000 Palestinian Arabs from the cities of Al-Ramla and Lydda were forcibly expelled by Israeli forces, and an estimated 350 people died during what came to be known as the Lydda Death March.^[3]

• In the Korean War of winter 1951, 200,000 South Korean National Defense Corps soldiers were forcibly marched by their commanders, and 90,000 soldiers starved to death or died of disease by their commanders embezzlement.^[4] This incident is known as National Defense Corps Incident.

• In July 1973, Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) cadres captured 292 pupils and staff from the school at St Albert's Mission between Centenary and Mount Darwin in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and force-marched them north towards Mozambique, where the ZANLA bases were. The march was intercepted by the Rhodesian Security Forces before it crossed the border and all but eight of the children and staff were recovered.^[5]

• The 1975 forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

See also

• Death marches (Holocaust)
• March of the Living

References