"The March" refers to a series of forced marches during the final stages of the Second World War in Europe. From a total of 257,000 western Allied prisoners of war held in German military prison camps, over 80,000 POWs were forced to march westward across Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany in extreme winter conditions, over about four months between January and April 1945. This series of events has been called various names: "The Great March West", "The Long March", "The Long Walk", "The Long Trek", "The Black March", "The Bread March", and "Death March Across Germany", but most survivors just called it "The March".
As the Soviet Army was advancing, German authorities decided to evacuate POW camps, to delay liberation of the prisoners. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of German civilian refugees, most of them women and children, as well as civilians of other nationalities, were also making their way westward on foot, in hazardous weather conditions.
Notorious examples include:
The March can refer to:
The March, also known as The March to Washington, is a 1964 documentary film by James Blue about the 1963 civil rights March on Washington. It was made for the Motion Picture Service unit of the United States Information Agency for use outside the United States – the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act prevented USIA films from being shown domestically without a special act of Congress. In 1990 Congress authorized these films to be shown in the U.S. twelve years after their initial release.
In 2008, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The March (titled Martin Luther King and the March on Washington in the United Kingdom) is a BAFTA-nominated documentary directed by John Akomfrah and narrated by Denzel Washington. It is about the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom - largely remembered for Martin Luther King's famous and iconic "I Have a Dream" speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It formed the centrepiece of a special week of programs and online events and activities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the March.
The film features interviews with some of the key people involved in the event: members of the inner circles of the core organizational groups such as Jack O'Dell, Clarence B. Jones, John Lewis, Julian Bond, Norman Hill, A. Philip Randolph and Andrew Young; Hollywood supporters and Civil Rights Movement campaigners including Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poitier; performing artists at the March such as Joan Baez and Peter Yarrow; as well as John F. Kennedy administration official Harris Wofford; the CBS broadcaster who reported from the March, Roger Mudd; Clayborne Carson, the founding director of Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute and a participant in the March; as well as those who witnessed the march on TV and were influenced by it, including Oprah Winfrey.