Dan Stone’s 2024 important book entitled The Holocaust: An Unfinished History documents and explains that the images of concentration camps and gas chambers do not tell the whole story of the Holocaust. The majority of those murdered did not die in gas chambers. Although this is not a new discovery, Stone explains it well:
The images of the Holocaust which still dominate the collective memory are those from the liberation of the camps, especially of Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. But Jews were only in those camps in Germany in large numbers because of the ‘death marches’. As the Red Army approached from the east, Himmler’s order that camp inmates should not fall alive into enemy hands resulted in the bizarre phenomenon of the camp evacuations, or ‘death marches’. Here the concentration camp and Germany became synonymous as the inmates passed through just about every small locality in Central Europe, especially across Silesia, Thuringia, Bohemia and Bavaria. The complicity of the population at large was assured, and claims, commonly heard after the war, that ‘no one knew’ became impossible to defend. More importantly, the marchers were killed in huge numbers, such that perhaps a third of the more than 714,000 concentration camp inmates as of January 1945 were dead by the end of the war. They died of exhaustion or were shot on the route and buried, often in unmarked graves, by the roadside where they fell or in local cemeteries.
Thus, although camps such as Belsen and Dachau had not been created to house Jews and, up until late 1944, had hardly been associated with the Holocaust at all (apart from in the training of camp guards, in the case of Dachau), by 1945 these camps were effectively functioning as death camps. This is especially so in the case of Belsen, where the British, on the surrender of the camp on 15 April, found some 60,000 dying inmates. The horror of Belsen remains a scar on the world’s conscience, and the sources from that moment remain painful to read, see and hear.
Stone, Dan. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (pp. xl-xli). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted).
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.