One use of slave labor was to obliterate traces of previous mass murders. At Himmler's instigation, a series of special units, known as Unit 10051, were forced to dig up petrefied corpses of those murdered, then burn them and scatter the ashes. This work took nearly two years and involved exhuming more than 2 million corpses. At Plaszow, in January of 1945 a Unit 10051 was forced to exhume 9,000 bodies from 11 mass graves.
Other units, working at different times at the murder sites, were themselves murdered once their work was completed. The SS wanted no trace to survive either of their crimes, or of the slave laborers being forced to hide them.
The conditions of life in Plaszow were made dreadful by the SS Commander of the camp, Amon Goeth. A prisoner in Plaszow was very lucky to survive in this camp for more than 4 weeks. After the liberation, Jan. 15, 1945 by the Soviets, Commander Amon Goeth had been turned over to the Polish officials, tried, sentenced to death and hanged. The camp shown in Steven Spielburg's film "Schindler's List" is the exact description of Plaszow. Life for the inmates was brutal and usually short.
As the Russian forces advanced further and further westward, the Germans began the systematic evacuation of the slave labor camps in their path. Many hundreds from Plaszow were sent to Auschwitz. Others were sent westward to Mauthausen and Flossenburg on January 18th, 1945. The camp was evacuated by Death Marches, during which thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, or shot if they were too weak or tired to walk. The last prisoners were transferred to Germany on January 16th, 1945.
