“It was a hunger march!”
The Nazis sent many concentration camp prisoners on death marches before the Allied troops arrived.
Petro Mishchuk’s suffering was not over when the US Army liberated the Ohrdruf SIII concentration camp near Gotha on April 4, 1945 . The SS drove him and his fellow prisoners out of the barracks as the American tanks approached. Around 13,000 prisoners were forced to leave the camp and march in groups to Buchenwald.
Forcibly displaced from Ukraine
Born on July 10, 1926, Petro Mishchuk came from Kysylyn, a town near the Polish and Belarusian borders. “We were a very poor family, a very poor village,” he said years later, describing his early childhood. German troops occupied Kysylyn in late June 1941. They seized the 14-year-old boy in the forest, tied him up, and took him to the Jewish ghetto in the belief that he was a partisan. In the spring of 1942, he was put in an overcrowded railroad car at the nearest station and deported first to Auschwitz, then to Berlin, and then via Magdeburg to Buchenwald. Petro Mishchuk was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp on March 9, 1944. He was assigned prisoner number 105105.
Forced labor, hunger, and death in Ohrdruf
He passed through 13 camps in total and was required to perform extremely hard forced labor. “The worst camp of all was Ohrdruf SIII ,” he says looking back. Petro Mishchuk was initially forced to fence in the camp grounds – which were miles away – with barbed wire. Later, he worked day and night in the tunnels of the Jonastal quarry, heaving sharp-edged boulders onto the wagons of a small construction train with his bare hands. Meager rations of spinach and turnips were served once a day. “People were dying every day,” he later remembered. He had to stack the dead bodies in a barrack “like firewood” and watch as SS guards levered the gold teeth out of the jaws of the corpses before burning them in mass graves in the forest.
Endless, grueling marches
The rumbling of advancing American tanks already audible, the SS initially drove the prisoners from Ohrdruf to Buchenwald concentration camp starting on April 1, 1945. Sick prisoners who were unable to walk were shot in the roll call square. But with US troops approaching, this camp was also evacuated on April 7, 1945. The SS forced 28,000 prisoners to set off on a march. One in three of them did not survive the death marches.
After seemingly endless, grueling treks, Petro Mishchuk arrived in Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin. But this concentration camp was being cleared too. The prisoners were sent further northwest in a long convoy.
There was nothing for them to eat along the way. Villagers would sometimes toss them some cabbage or potatoes, often half-rotten. Petro Mishchuk collected beechnuts when they reached a forest. Some prisoners became so desperate that they even ate grass and tree bark. “It was a hunger march,” the Ukrainian citizen recalled, decades later. “The International Red Cross distributed food parcels once. Three people had to share a single ration.” When they arrived at the North Sea, rumors spread that they would be herded onto a ship and drowned.
His group was liberated by American troops before this plan could be put into action. But Petro Mishchuk had lost all faith in humanity. Like many other concentration camp prisoners, he escaped and made his way back home – without money, clothes, or a suitcase. He clung to railroad cars and hitched rides in passing automobiles until he reached his Ukrainian homeland.
Extreme violence
In a 2023 interview he gave as a very elderly man, he summarized his time in Nazi captivity as follows: “I spent five years in the camps. It was the same as being dead. They took me away in the spring of 1942. And I was gone until 1945. […] I passed through 13 camps in total. I saw how people were herded like cattle, burned and tortured, how their teeth were knocked out… Yes, I saw! I also carried – carried the dead! I am the only survivor from there.” Petro Mishchuk’s memories reflect the extreme violence meted out by the Nazis in the final phase of their rule – intended in part to eliminate witnesses to their crimes.
A long road to liberation
The liberation of Germany from the Nazi regime was more than just a single date – it was a long, dramatic process that lasted many months. It began with the landing of Allied troops in Normandy and continued with fierce battles, while a steady stream of reports revealed the horrors of the concentration camps. As the Allies advanced, the Nazis tried to cover up their crimes – they destroyed files, cleared camps, dispatched prisoners on death marches and committed the cruelest acts of violence right up to the very end. At the end of the war, there were around 11 million displaced persons in Germany, i.e. people who had been deported by the National Socialists from their home countries for forced labor or imprisonment in concentration camps. Criminal prosecution began in the midst of this scenario. Tens of thousands of accused war criminals were tried in international, national and military courts. At the same time, numerous perpetrators of the Nazi regime sought and found ways to evade accountability.
Perspectives on liberation
Our dossier marking 80 years of liberation presents a range of perspectives on the end of Nazi rule and its aftermath.
