Guards’ duty to prevent prisoners from escaping

The guards’ duty to prevent prisoners from escaping is presented as a rule of camp custody that survives into the death march and becomes central to the trial over the women locked in a church. The defendants invoke the guards’ presence and responsibilities to explain their conduct, but the same duty sharpens the contradiction at the heart of the case: the prisoners were kept under guard while the church burned, and the women guards did not unlock its doors.

The Duty in the Trial Record

During the trial, the defendants denied that they had remained in a position to rescue the prisoners, offering explanations that included injuries, shock, and attending to wounded guards. A report discussed in court suggested a different account: some women guards stayed behind after a transport took the wounded to a field hospital, with responsibilities that included preventing fires from spreading and preventing escapes under cover of the fires. The report also referred to the prisoners’ deaths. The defendants’ names did not appear in it, but the judge treated the report as suggesting that they were among the guards who remained behind and kept the church doors locked.

The record did not establish its account without qualification. The narrator distinguishes what it suggested from what could be stated as a direct finding in the SS archives. That distinction matters: the duty to prevent escape is not merely an abstract rule but part of a contested reconstruction, assembled from a report, the defendants’ denials, and the testimony available to the court. The mother and daughter who survived the fire had been inside the church and could not testify about what the guards did outside it; other witnesses had to reckon with their own possible responsibility for failing to rescue the prisoners.

Hanna’s Explanation

When Hanna was asked why the guards had not simply allowed the prisoners to escape, she answered that they could not let them go: they had guarded the women in the camp and on the march, and preventing escape was the point of that duty. She added that the prisoners were weak and many had already died, and that the guards did not know how many would survive the coming days. Her explanation makes the rule sound continuous, extending from camp to march and from ordinary custody into the emergency of the bombing.

That continuity does not exonerate her. Hanna recognizes that her answer is damaging, yet cannot replace it with another account; the more she tries to explain, the worse her position becomes. Her appeal to the presiding judge—asking what he would have done—reveals her difficulty in seeing the prisoners’ immediate peril as overriding the responsibility she understood as guarding them. The duty thus functions both as an explanation of her reasoning and as evidence of the moral failure in that reasoning.

Custody and Responsibility

The church fire gives the rule its starkest consequence. Several hundred women were locked inside; the defendants could have unlocked the doors but did not. The guards’ asserted responsibility to prevent escape therefore coincided with the continued confinement of prisoners who were in danger and had no means of opening the doors themselves. In the trial, the question is not simply whether the guards were assigned a duty, but whether that duty could account for leaving the doors locked as the fire spread.

The novel also places the guards’ reasoning against a broader account of indifference. A speaker rejects the idea that obedience to orders alone explains camp crimes, describing the executioner instead as someone for whom the victims have become matters of indifference. In that context, the guards’ custodial rule cannot be treated as a neutral technical obligation: its enforcement, detached from the prisoners’ lives, becomes part of the machinery that leaves them exposed to death. The rule’s significance lies in the conflict between guarding people as objects of custody and recognizing them as lives for whom the guards remain answerable.