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Death March

 Death March
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Death March
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Most modern prisons transport their inmates by bus if or when the time comes for them to be transferred to a new location, both for humanitarian reasons and for practical ones. However, another form of transportation exists, commonly used in wartime and only used in circumstances where the survival of the inmates is considered optional — if desirable at all.
The Death March is essentially a forced march for captives such as slaves or POWs, most commonly one in which the participants are not expected to survive. This can be through dangerous terrain, harsh weather, torturous extremes of climate, or even additional work duties. Guards assigned to oversee the march may torture or execute any prisoners unable to keep up.
The goal of a Death March varies. Sometimes it really is a brutal form of transportation to new territory, and any deaths along the way are considered acceptable losses or even a useful side-benefit in culling the inmate population. At other times, it's intended as execution and little else — with the march continuing until every last captive is dead.
For this reason, Death Marches are classified as war crimes, and known examples include some of the greatest violations of human rights in recorded history.
Contrast Fatal Forced March for the voluntary equivalent of this carried out by non-prisoners, and Prisoner's Work for more pedestrian, less brutal forms of labor performed by inmates.
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The Stephen King novel The Long Walk is set in a dystopian Alternate History America where the government organizes a Deadly Game known as the "Long Walk" every year. One hundred teenage boys are selected to walk from a starting point on the Maine-Canada border and down the Atlantic coast until only one boy remains. They're accompanied by soldiers in half-tracks who monitor the walkers' speed, and will shoot to kill after issuing a walker three warnings for falling below the mandatory minimum speed.
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Maus shows Vladek being forced to participate in the Auschwitz death march after an aborted attempt to hide in the camp, which the Nazis threatened to firebomb. One of his fellow prisoners tried to bribe the guards to let them escape into the woods, who took the bribe but then shot him anyway.
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In Ben-Hur, not only an enslaved Ben-Hur is forced to walk from Jerusalem to the port of Tyr on foot, but he's also denied water by the Roman officer. Fortunately, a benevolent figure steps up to give him water, and the Roman officer can't do anything about it.
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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has a one-man version when Tuco forces Blondie to march across the desert with no water or jacket as revenge for betraying him earlier in the film. Tuco (who's on horseback with an umbrella and all the water he can drink) taunts Blondie constantly throughout the march, and Blondie only survives thanks to learning the location of a stolen pile of money from a dying soldier they stumble across.
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Special Forces uses this as an Establishing Character Moment for its main villain, General Rafendek. Right in his first scene, he's commandeering his army leading over a hundred refugees from Moldonia towards the border, where they will be promised their freedom, only for Rafendek to suddenly order his soldiers to unveil a pair of heavy-machine guns, which fires away into the crowd of refugees, killing all of them including many children. A later scene reveals that General Rafendek has been doing this on a regular basis as an act of ethnic cleansing.
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Death March
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In If This Is a Man, Primo Levi explains how, at the end, he and his fellow inmates departed from Auschwitz as part of a death march.
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In Wallenberg: A Hero's Story, the Nazis resort to forcing the Jews that still remain in Budapest to march 250 km note 155 miles to the train station in Hegyeshalom at the Austrian border where the trains to Auschwitz wait. In the event that the trains aren't running, they're forced to walk the rest of the way as well, all as part of a deliberate effort to kill as many of them as possible.
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Dungeon Keeper Ami: Soon-to-be human sacrifices for a ritual in the name of a God of Evil, Crowned Death, are mind-controlled and marched to the sacrificial site, with survival only relevant if they can't last until the ritual in a few days.
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Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night describes the Buna concentration camp being evacuated due to approach of the Red Army, and the inmates being forced to walk more than 50 miles to a train hub at Gleiwitz for transport to Buchenwald.
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In Harmonic Feedback, Drea's grandma tells her that her older brother Paul died in the Bataan Death March at age 18. He paused to help someone who had fallen and was shot for it.
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In Apocalypto, a Mayan slaver gang captures an entire village of forest-dwelling tribesfolk and marches them on foot all the way to Mayan territory, leaving behind only the children: along the way, they pass through shoulder-deep rivers, along narrow cliff paths, and even into regions of the forest being cleared by loggers - forcing several of the group to dodge falling trees. No medical attention is provided to any of the tribesmen who were injured during capture, least of all the one who's clearly dying by the halfway point; however, Zero Wolf disapproves when Middle Eye makes sport of the wounded man before flinging him to his death. At the end of it, the female captives are sold into domestic slavery and the men are prepared for Human Sacrifice.
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Superman: In "The Death March!" in Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #76, Perry White's great-grandfather is accused of having lead a "death-march" in the desert. Perry then decides to re-enact the march in order to clear his great-grandfather's name, using Daily Planet staff as stand-ins for the troops and civilians involved.
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Unsounded: The Red Marches were the forced deadly relocation of Inak from northern Cresce to further south after they fought back against Cresce's stealing of their lands and resources. The Inak were also forced to convert, or at least pretend they had, to survive.
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In the Exo Squad episode "Scorched Venus", a member of the eponymous squad, Nara Burns, is captured by the Neosapiens after a botched deployment to Venus (which, in the setting, has been terraformed to have breathable atmosphere) and is forcibly marched together with other Terran prisoners to help construct a secret GRAF Shield facility. Many of Burns' fellow captives die en route, which lies right across a Venusian desert.
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In Osamu Tezuka's Adolf, in 1944 Adolf Kaufmann (an SS officer) supervises a death march of concentration camp inmates who are being taken further into the Reich's remaining territory; he's told to ensure that a percentage don't make it.
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In The Odessa File, Solomon Tauber describes being on one of these death marches in the last year of the war in the diary he leaves behind and which Intrepid Reporter Peter Miller finds after Tauber's suicide. Tauber notes that during the retreat, SS guards sometimes outnumbered their prisoners 10 to 1, using the task of escorting them as a pretense to their own escape to western Allied lines so that the guards wouldn't fall into Soviet captivity.
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Babylon 5: In the episode "Lines Of Communication", the Warrior Caste on Minbar attacks the Religious Caste, destroying their ships and forcing them to walk to the next city. Since this city was at the planet's polar region, many of them died from exposure. It is strongly implied that this was a deliberately lethal form of Loophole Abuse to get around the Minbari rule against killing other Minbari.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

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Death Tropes
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Genocide Tropes
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Military and Warfare Tropes
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Murder Tropes
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Prison Tropes
 Maus (Comic Book) / int_62c22fd4
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Death March
 Dungeon Keeper Ami (Fanfic)
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Death March
 Apocalypto / int_62c22fd4
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Death March
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Death March
 Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra / int_62c22fd4
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Death March
 Night / int_62c22fd4
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Death March
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Death March
 The Odessa File / int_62c22fd4
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Death March
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Death March
 Wallenberg: A Hero's Story / int_62c22fd4
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Death March
 Exo Squad / int_62c22fd4
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Death March