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Revision as of 09:27, 15 May 2012editLuke 19 Verse 27 (talk | contribs)673 edits Trying to soften the language for our Ottoman friends. Also, I removed a redundancy. If most perish, of course there will be few survivors. "I blew my wad of cash at the burlesque house, now I have few surviving dollars." Redundant.← Previous edit
A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees. Those marching must walk over long distances for an extremely long period of time and are not supplied with food or water. Prisoners who collapse are left to die or killed by guards.
Examples of death marches
As part of Indian Removal in the United States, in 1831, around 6000 Choctaw left Mississippi for Oklahoma, and around only 4000 arrived in 1832.
In 1836, after the Creek War, 2.500 Muskogee were deported from Alabama by the United States Army in chains as prisoners of War. The rest of the tribe (12,000) followed, being deported by the Army. Upon arrival in Oklahoma, 3,500 died of infection.
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.
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.
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.
During the 1915 Armenian Genocide, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were forced to march through the desert of Deir ez-Zor to the Deir ez-Zor Camps where most of them perished. Today there is a memorial in Deir ez-Zor for the marchers.
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 World War II in Europe when over 80,000 Allied PoWs were force-marched westward across Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany in winter conditions, lasting about four months from January to April 1945.
