With the camp suffering from a shortage of coal since late 1944, the crematoria could not keep pace with the tempo of dying. Between 2,600 and 4,000 inmates per month succumbed to disease or starvation, roughly 100 every day. The numbers who died topped 400 in October, then doubled in November, before reaching 1,915 in December.ĭachau’s final four months of operation in 1945 proved truly catastrophic. In the autumn of 1944 a dreadful transition occurred. Twice in those three years, the death toll surpassed 400 per month. Looking back to the beginning of World War II, he contends that between 1,000 and 3,000 prisoners perished in the camp, annually, between 19. Harold Marcuse’s Legacies of Dachau offers us that. Some perspective is needed to comprehend the skyrocketing mortality rate in Dachau. In short order, overcrowding, disease (particularly typhus), and malnutrition followed the bitter cold of winter. Food supplies dwindled just as thousands of arrivals evacuated from other camps had to be fed. Other factors besides the SS’s wanton cruelty incited new terror among Dachau’s prisoners. Undoubtedly, the omnipresence of the SS guaranteed that attempted escape or rebellion would be met with extreme violence. Due to its location in Bavaria, quite distant from the battle fronts, liberation would not happen anytime soon. Despite the fragmentary knowledge of the state of the war they gained, there was much uncertainty about how long the Hitler regime might withstand the Allied advance. There were powerful reasons for inmates, though, to temper expectations. As the weeks passed, confidence in Allied victory, while fragile, struck roots in Dachau. News, much of it good, about the Allies’ recent triumphs -stopping Adolf Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive and the unleashing of the Red Army’s Vistula-Oder Offensive (mid-January 1945)-seeped in. The historic winter of 1944-45 tested the endurance of the Dachau concentration camp’s captive population. US Army Signal Corps Photo, Gift of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from the Collection of The National World War II Museum, 2009.373.057 Top image: US Personnel caring for ill patients in a typhus ward, Dachau, 1945.
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