Katrin Greiser's revised dissertation on the death marches to and from the Buchenwald concentration camp is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature, much of it stimulated by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's focus on the marches as the culminating demonstration of Germany's deep-seated “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, on what Schmuel Krakowski describes as “the last organized mass crime of Nazi Germany.” Adopting Raul Hilberg's typology, Greiser's detailed and generously illustrated study, much of the research for which she draws from camp survivors' reports and eyewitness accounts of occupational administrations and relief agencies, approaches the Buchenwald death marches from the radically divergent perspectives of the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders as she analyzes Buchenwald's dissolution and the difficult postwar task of coming to terms with the past.

Buchenwald, as Greiser reminds us, was a not a single camp but a huge “complex.” In addition to the original camp, Buchenwald as of March 1945 incorporated some sixty satellite camps for men scattered in fifty-eight locations and twenty-six women's camps for a total of more than 106,000 prisoners. Overall, according to Greiser, the dissolution of the Nazi camp system occurred in three phases. The first, from the early summer to the end of 1944, entailed the relatively orderly transfer of prisoners, usually by railroad. The second, from January until mid-March 1945, entailed the murderous movement of prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen either on foot or in open animal wagons, most toward Buchenwald where the SS envisioned the use of the evacuees as laborers in armaments factories. The third phase, from mid-March until May 1945, brought the complete evacuation of even the original Buchenwald camp as prisoners were marched hither and yon, many to the south, until the arrival of Allied armies. Earlier thoughts of SS leaders to deploy prisoners to armaments industries evaporated, initially because the exhausted and ill captives who survived the marches were not up to the task and later because German war production became moot as German defenses collapsed.

Despite the apparent chaos that surrounded the evacuations, especially in the last few months of the war, Greiser argues compellingly that the bureaucratic structures and procedures of the Nazi concentration camp system functioned to the bitter end. Although the lines of authority and the issuance of orders did become confused before and during the evacuations, Himmler continued to exercise his authority from the top, entertaining for a time the transfer of Jewish prisoners from Buchenwald to Theresienstadt where they would be used as hostages to turn the British and Americans against the Soviets. The death marches simply meant that the Buchenwald complex became mobile, consigning its prisoners in the process to death by marching in the cold and deprived of nourishment, or by the beatings and shootings of camp guards, who as defeat approached, had even less regard for the worth of their captives than they had before. Taking issue with Goldhagen, Greiser demonstrates that the marches incorporated all prisoners and not just Jews, meaning that “eliminationist anti-Semitism” could not have comprised the primary motivation. Although racial hierarchies among prisoners, which placed Jews at the bottom, certainly remained in force, the huge death toll from the evacuations did not distinguish Jewish victims from others.

In addition to its inherent value in multiplying the perspectives through which one can examine the death marches, Greiser's discussion of the victims and German civilian bystanders is crucial to her argument that the concentration camp universe continued to function as the Third Reich collapsed. No longer behind barbed wire and locked within the forbidding structures of the camp, Buchenwald prisoners, many of them previously transported from the occupied territories, now regularly crossed paths with German civilians. Physical proximity, however, did little to encourage sympathy from the witnesses of the Nazi regime's viciousness. Aside from some notable exceptions, most Germans remained convinced that the prisoners were criminals who deserved their fate, with some even denouncing the relative few who attempted to escape. Prisoners who died were refused burial in village cemeteries and instead hastily covered over and left to rot on the sides of roads or in town squares, an indication, ironically that bystanders were not invested in concealing Nazism's crime because doing so would have implicated themselves along with the Nazi leadership. Instead, civilians routinely considered themselves to be the “real” victims of the regime, who now suffering from the Reich's impending defeat would face the revenge of the Allies. In turn, the correct awareness among prisoners that they could expect neither succor nor protection from German bystanders was as effective as the continued brutality and regimentation of SS guards in discouraging attempts to escape. Greiser's evidence, in fact, causes one to question whether the term “bystander” is appropriate at all, given the consequences of the complicity that existed.

The denial and defensiveness of German civilians laid the groundwork for the half-hearted and obfuscating efforts to identify and memorialize Buchenwald's victims, which followed during the occupation and the difficult births of the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic. In Bavaria where thousands of camp prisoners ended up dead or alive, American attempts to reeducate civilians by forcing them to exhume, identify, and re-inter bodies deepened popular feelings of victimization. Although modest, the American effort to register victims and bring perpetrators to trial, aided especially by Jewish survivors until their departure for Palestine or the U.S.A., would provide a foundation for a more complete and honest remembrance much later. In the early postwar period, however, the memorials that were established lumped diverse “victims” together, those of the camps, civilians killed by the Allied advance, and German soldiers. In the Soviet zone, occupation authorities gave priority to recovering the bodies of their own soldiers, leaving camp victims to the Germans under their command. Except for the communist survivors of Buchenwald, who pushed for the creation of memorials to those who had not survived, the effort to recognize the distinctive horror of Nazism was at best half-hearted. Following the Stalinization of the GDR in the early fifties, however, communist survivors, who had assumed important positions during the occupation and at the GDR's founding were removed, solidifying the dominance of communists who had returned from exile in the Soviet Union. The ruling Socialist Unity Party did turn the former Nazi concentration camps in its territory into memorials honoring “anti-fascist” victims of the Third Reich, yet the deployment of memory to legitimize the GDR's leaders was all too transparent.

Greiser's study of the death marches as the high and end point of the concentration camp system makes for grisly but compelling reading. Aside from its contribution to our understanding of the camps' functioning in the Nazi regime's final months, Die Todesmärsche von Buchenwald is especially revealing in its examination of the complicity of German civilians.