Death march

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This term is also occasionally used as a popular (albeit technically incorrect) title for the Funeral March movement of the Chopin Piano Sonata No. 2.

A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees when they walk over long distances and for an extremely long period of time, being supplied with little or no food and water. The result is that the weakest of them die primarily due to exhaustion and dehydration. Those who refuse to walk further, stop to rest, or lose consciousness, are executed or tortured.

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 1915 Armenian Genocide, 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.

• 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.

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

• 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 the Second World War in Europe when over 80,000 Allied PoWs were force-marched westward across Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany in appalling winter conditions, lasting about four months from January to April 1945.

• At the end of World War II, ethnic Germans were often forced to relocate from previously occupied areas under the Nazi regime, including Poland and the Sudetenland in summer 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]

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

References

See also

• March of the Living