On February 6, 1945, the 10,000 POWs of Stalag Luft IV received their marching orders to move out. They were told it would take several days. It lasted 86, with the men covering nearly 600 miles. Prisoners were pressed onward at a grueling pace. Many soon came down with dysentery, diphtheria, pneumonia, typhus, trench foot, and tuberculosis. Frostbite resulted in the loss of limbs, toes, and fingers.
Major Leslie Caplan, one of the few doctors who endured the death march, recalled, “Some men drank from the ditches that others had used as latrines. Dysentery made bowel movements frequent, bloody, and uncontrollable. Men were forced to sleep on ground covered with feces of those who had passed before them … Our sanitation approached medieval standards, and the inevitable result was disease, suffering, and death.”
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