| German civilians are forced to walk past bodies of 30 Jewish women starved to death by German Shutzstaffel (SS) troops in a 300-mile march across Czechoslovakia. Buried in shallow graves in Volary, Czechoslovakia, the bodies were exhumed by German civilians working under direction of Medics of United States 3rd Army, 5th Infantry Division, 2nd Infantry Regiment, 5th Medial Battalion. Bodies will be placed in coffins and reburied in cemetery in Volary. Under the supervision of American medics, German civilians file past the bodies of Jewish women exhumed from a mass grave in Volary. The victims died at the end of a death march from Helmbrechts, a subcamp of Flossenbürg. Germans were forced to exhume them in order to give the victims proper burial. On January 20, 1945, approximately 1,000 female Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau – young women who had come mostly from Hungary and from the Lodz ghetto – were evacuated to the Schlesiersee (today Sława) camp in Upper Silesia, western Poland, a region annexed to Germany. These women were forced on a death march in a southwesterly direction. The commander was SS-Oberscharführer Karl Hermann Jeschke (August 17, 1890 – Death in Polish Prison After 1947, Date Unknown) On the way, the prisoners passed through other camps, and more women were added to the march. At least 150 were shot, or perished from hunger and exhaustion on the way to Grünberg. On January 25, after having marched more than 40 km, some 40 women, the weaker prisoners, were murdered in the vicinity of the village of Alt-Hauland, today Stary Jaromierz. Their bodies were later moved to a mass grave in the cemetery in nearby Kargowa. On February 4, the group was witness to a public execution of captured escapees, which was especially traumatic. There were more executions along the way to Helmbrechts for the suspicion of stolen bread. On March 6, 1945, 621 prisoners reached the Helmbrechts camp. Jäschke and his men left them to the mercies of the commander of Helmbrechts, SS Unterscharführer Alois Dörr (January 14, 1911 – June 18, 1990) and his staff. On arrival their clothes were taken away for fumigation, for fear of the spread of disease. They were forced to stand naked for hours, until their damp clothes were returned to them. Their stay in the camp is described by the survivors as hell on earth – the hardest part of the death march. They were housed in 2 new huts, with neither heating nor even minimal sanitation. 1 hut was designated for the sick, and a few dozen women were housed there on wooden bunks. In the 2nd hut, a thin layer of straw covered the cold floor. At night, the hut doors were bolted, and the prisoners were not allowed out. The hut had 2 buckets for waste, which were woefully inadequate for the hundreds of prisoners, many of whom had dysentery. In the morning, they were whipped because the hut was dirty. 44 Jewish prisoners perished in Helmbrechts. These women were later buried in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery in the nearby city of Hof. For many days, the marchers were not given food or drink. On “good” days, they slept in granaries along the way, but on many nights, they slept on the snow in the open field where they stopped for the night. Each day, their numbers diminished. Every morning, the women found the bodies of those who had perished in the night, finally defeated by exhaustion, starvation and cold. On April 25, the prisoners left Wilkenau. After they had marched some 1.5 kilometers (1 mile), a guard shot 1 of them in the chest near Neugramatin, and left her where she lay. That day, the women crossed the border between the Sudetenland and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia (today part of the Czech Republic), and reached the city of Taus (today the Czech city of Domažlice). The locals tried to give the prisoners food and drink, and were openly hostile towards the German guards, who tried to disperse them by shooting into the air. Some of the women took advantage of the situation and escaped. Further along the way, the Czech residents of the village of Mraken tried to feed the marching prisoners. Dörr became careful to avoid the main roads and to veer the march towards Sudeten settlements that had been evacuated of their Czech inhabitants, leaving only Germans. As both the Red Army and the United States Army closed in on the SS column, the guards fled, leaving the women in small groups to enter Volary. The townspeople called for the doctor and began to treat the starving, lice-ridden, sore-covered women. On May 5, 1945, after covering a distance of over 800 kilometers (500 miles), the march ended in the town of Volary (“Wallern” in German) in Czechoslovakia, not far from the border with Germany and Austria. 106 days of rigorous marching through snow. 106 days of gnawing hunger and sickness, humiliation and murder. Of the approximately 1,300 women who marched to Volary, some 350 survived. They were treated for exhaustion, starvation, and wounds in a German Hospital; the wounded Nazi Germans were evicted. On the instruction of the United States Army, German citizens were ordered to collect and bury the corpses of Jewish women who were murdered toward the end of the death march. Rabbi Herman Diker (January 30, 1914 – November 28, 1997), 3rd Army, 5th Infantry Division, was responsible for the proper burial. He was accompanied by 1 of the survivors of the death march, Mina singer The soldier with the hands in the pocket was identified as Dudley Carp by his granddaughter. Under the supervision of Rabbi Dicker, German civilians exhumed a mass grave containing the corpses of Jewish women who died at the end of the death march. A woman, Minna Zinger (September 26, 1921 – December 12, 1998), a survivor of the march, and the oldest of the group, told Dicker where the bodies were buried. Zinger married Simon Waksburg (September 10, 1921 – February 18, 2010) and immigrated to the United States in 1949, where they ran a grocery store for 25 years. Most of the survivors that recuperated left Volary in July 1945, and made their way to the Displaced Persons (DP) camps. The Americans established a cemetery for victims of the march in Volary. Accompanied by some of the survivors, they retraced the steps of the women, as far as was possible within the time constraints, and buried the women who had perished along the way. There are 95 graves in the cemetery in Volary. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0544.jpg |
| Image Size | 1.02 MB |
| Image Dimensions | 2334 x 2946 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | May 11, 1945 |
| Location | |
| City | Volary |
| State or Province | Prachatice |
| Country | Czechoslovakia |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NLR-PHOCO-A-65639(48) |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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