On this day in 1945, the death marches from the Auschwitz concentration camp system began. The Germans, not wanting the true nature of the camps to be revealed, began to move the prisoners out of camps close to the front and towards concentration camps inside Germany.They were made to march in unbearable conditions outside in the bitter cold, with hardly any food, water, or rest. The largest death marches occurred in 1944-45 when the Soviets began to liberate Poland. Just nine days before the Soviet army arrived at Auschwitz, the Germans began to evacuate the camp.The SS quickly evacuated Auschwitz and its satellite camps, forcing around 60,000 prisoners, mainly Jews, to march to the city of Wodzisław. Anyone who was unable to keep up or who fell ill was shot dead; over 15,000 died from the death marches alone. Once in Wodzisław, the prisoners were put on freight trains and sent to different concentration camps further west in Germany, such as Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Gross-Rosen. Following the marches from Auschwitz, other concentration camps in Poland also began to be evacuated. On January 21, the Blechhammer camp was evacuated, sending 4,000 prisoners off. This pattern of evacuating the camps continued into March and April of 1945, as the war's official end drew closer. At least 250,000 prisoners were sent on death marches as camp after the camp was evacuated. The marches lasted until the Nazis surrendered on May 7, 1945. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners were murdered or died on the death marches that occurred during the last 10 months of the war. Nearly one-third of them were Jews.The term ‘death march’ began to be used widely amongst prisoners and is now used by Holocaust historians worldwide. On January 27, 1945, the Soviets entered Auschwitz and liberated the few surviving prisoners, marking that day as “Holocaust Remembrance Day.”