Industrial facilities such as arms factory Československá zbrojovka and aircraft engine factory Zweigwerk (after the war it became Zbrojovka's subsidiary Zetor) and the city centre were targeted by several Allied bombardment campaigns between 1944 and 1945. The air strikes and later artillery fire killed some 1,200 people and destroyed 1,278 buildings. After the city's occupation by the Red Army on 26 April 1945 and the end of the war, ethnic German residents were forcibly expelled. In the so-called Brno death march, beginning on 31 May 1945, about 27,000 German inhabitants of Brno were marched to the Austrian border. According to testimony collected by German sources, about 5,200 of them died during the march. Later estimates by Czech sources put the death toll at about 1,700, with most deaths due to an epidemic of shigellosis.