During the final weeks of the war Willi Bleicher was identified as a co-organiser of a celebration undertaken to commemorate Ernst Thälmann, the communist leader whom the authorities had recently murdered at the camp. Bleicher was tortured and removed from Buchenwald to the Gestapo in Ichtershausen. Then, as the authorities raced to empty out the concentration camps and prisons in the east of the country ahead of the advancing Soviet troops, the Ichtershausen inmates were sent on a death march in the direction of the Erzgebirge (mountains) and the border with Czechoslovakia, which gave Bleicher one last chance to witness the deaths of more comrades, worn out with physical mistreatment and starvation. Bleicher, however, survived.