7 Jul 2022 1:47 pm
When it became clear in early 1945 that the war was lost and that the Allies would soon be closing in on the Reich, the officers in charge of the camps accelerated their extermination plans. The feeling among many of these death camp officials was that even if the Third Reich did not last for a thousand years, it COULD at LEAST rid Europe of a very large number of Jews. There was an accelerated plan to exterminate Hungarian Jews at that time. When the allies closed in, those Germans who did not desert led all the prisoners who could march off along the railroads. There is a description of this in the second volume of Al Spiegelmann's "Maus".