The last stage of the "Final Solution" occurred in the closing months of the "one-thousand-year Reich." As Soviet troops advanced from the East and American and British troops from the West, the Germans began dismantling their death camps and moving the remaining prisoners on extended death marches towards Germany. The ovens of Auschwitz were kept operating until the last possible moment, in order to accommodate the Jews of Hungary, who had recently come under the direct control of the Nazis. With German defeat now certain, it was possible to save a large percentage of Hungarian Jews from deportation. However, until the very end, the Germans held on to as many Jews as possible. Thousands of Jews who had survived the concentration camps died in the last days of the war.
