Book: German civilians killed Holocaust survivors

LONDON: It wasn't only Adolf Hilter who exterminated Jews, even German civilians went "zebra hunting" and slaughtered many concentration camp survivors during the closing days of World War II, a new book has claimed.

According to the book, many ordinary Germans were so indoctrinated with Nazi hate that they killed a number of concentration camp survivors as they moved through their towns and villages on "death marches" back into the shrinking Reich. 'The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide', by Daniel Blatman, is the first book to research what actually drove these civilians to acts of cold-blooded killings at the time when Germany was in ruins.

Some 500,000 prisoners from the concentration camps, both in and outside Germany, were on the move in early 1945. As the Allies advanced, the shocking fate of approximately half of them became all too apparent. "... as was the case in Gardelegen, a town in east-central Germany, where US soldiers found hundreds of charred and mangled bodies in a barn. They were the bodies of prisoners from various camps who had been forced inside," Blatman writes.

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