This was an instance of what one might call unplanned annihilation, though one should add that intention was clearly present, since the humane thing to do was to leave the prisoners in camps for the Allies to capture. The decisions to withdraw them under horrendous conditions and then to try to maintain control of them for as long as possible were, in effect, murderous, and the number of resulting deaths was about as large as in the massacre of Hungarian Jewry in the spring of 1944.
