Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp

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Mittelbau-Dora (also Dora-Mittelbau and Nordhausen-Dora) was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany (including evacuated survivors of eastern extermination camps), for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners. The inmates at Dora-Mittelbau were treated in a brutal and inhumane manner, working 14-hour days and being denied access to basic hygiene, beds, and adequate rations. Around one in three of the roughly 60,000 prisoners who were sent to Dora-Mittelbau died. Today, the site hosts a memorial and museum.

Main article: V-2 Rocket In early summer 1943, mass production of the A4 (later better known as V-2, V standing for Vergeltung or retribution) ballistic rocket started at the Heeresanstalt Peenemünde on the Baltic island of Usedom as well as at the Raxwerke in Wiener Neustadt, Austria and at the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance.

On 18 August 1943, a bombing raid by the Royal Air Force on Peenemünde (" Operation Hydra ") seriously damaged the facilities and ended construction of V-2s there. Other air raids had damaged the other two sites in June and August. As a result, the Nazi leadership accelerated plans to move military construction to areas less threatened by Allied bombers. On 22 August 1943, Adolf Hitler ordered SS leader Heinrich Himmler to use concentration camp workers in future A4/V-2 production. One of the sites selected was at the mountain known as Kohnstein, near Nordhausen in Thuringia. Since 1936, the Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft (WIFO) (English: Economic Research Company ) had been building a subterranean fuel depot for the Wehrmacht there. By late summer 1943, this was almost finished.

To oversee the creation and operation of the new construction facility, Albert Speer, Himmler and Karl Saur agreed on the foundation of Mittelwerk GmbH [ de ] (the name referring to the works' location in Mitteldeutschland ). Its board consisted of Hans Kammler, who was head of Amtsgruppe C at the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) and two of Speer's armaments managers, Karl Maria Hettlage [ de ] and Gerhard Degenkolb [ de ], the former seconded from Commerzbank. To actually run the plant, Albin Sawatzki [ de ], who had earlier been in charge of producing the " Tiger I " tank at Henschel, was appointed. Operational security for the project was overseen by SS-Oberstürmbannfuhrer Helmut Bischoff, a former Gestapo official and a member of Kammler's staff. The initial contract for Mittelwerk was for 12,000 rockets, valued at 750 million Reichsmark for a standard price per unit, once production reached 5,000 units, of 50,000 Reichsmark per rocket.

Only ten days after the raid on Peenemünde, on 28 August 1943, the first 107 concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald arrived with their SS guards at the Kohnstein. The official name of the new subcamp of Buchenwald was Arbeitslager Dora. Another 1,223 Buchenwald prisoners followed on 2 September and workers from Peenemünde came in mid-October. Over the next months, many more prisoners were brought to the area in almost daily transports from Buchenwald. By late September, the number of workers had risen to over 3,000, by late October to 6,800 and by Christmas 1943 to more than 10,500. Since there were initially no huts, the prisoners were housed inside the tunnels – in specially designated Schlafstollen with four levels of beds stacked over each other.

There were no sanitary facilities except for barrels that served as latrines. Inmates (the majority of them from the Soviet Union, Poland or France) died from hunger, thirst, cold and overwork. During the first months, most of the work done was heavy construction and transport. Only in January 1944, when production of the A4/V-2 began, were the first prisoners moved to the new above-ground camp on the south side of the mountain. Many had to sleep in the tunnels until May 1944.

In these initial months, from October 1943 to March 1944, out of a total of 17,500 slave labourers, almost 2,900 died at Dora. Another 3,000 who were very ill or dying were sent to Lublin-Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Few of them survived. At the end of 1943, the Dora work squads had "the highest death rate in the entire concentration camp system".

By late 1943, production had started. On 10 December, Albert Speer and his staff visited the tunnels, observing the terrible conditions and finding them littered with corpses. Some members of Speer's staff were so shocked that they had to take an extra period of leave. A week later, Speer wrote to Kammler, congratulating him on his success "in transforming the underground installation... from its raw condition two months ago into a factory, which has no equal in Europe and which is unsurpassed even when measured against American standards. I take this opportunity to express my appreciation for this really unique achievement and to ask you also in future to support Herr Degenkolb in this wonderful way."

Inmates came from almost all countries of Europe; many of them had been arrested for political reasons. After May 1944, Jews were also brought to Mittelbau. With the dissolution of the so-called Zigeuner-Familienlager (Gypsy family camp) at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the SS transported many Roma and Sinti to Mittelbau between April and August 1944.

The prisoners were subject to extreme cruelty. As a result, they often suffered injuries, including permanent disability and disfigurement, and death. Severe beatings were routine, as was deliberate starvation, torture and summary executions.

In total, around 60,000 prisoners passed through the Mittelbau camps between August 1943 and March 1945. The precise number of people killed is impossible to determine. The SS files counted around 12,000 dead. In addition, an unknown number of unregistered prisoners died or were murdered in the camps. Around 5,000 sick and dying were sent in early 1944 and in March 1945 to Lublin and Bergen-Belsen.

Of those killed, around 350 were hanged (including 200 for sabotage). The rate of executions notably accelerated after the personnel from Auschwitz arrived: in February and March 1945, the SS on some days hanged 30, on one occasion even 50 prisoners.

On 1 January 1944, the Mittelwerk delivered its first three rockets, all of which suffered from serious production defects. The SS considered those prisoners who had expanded the tunnels in autumn and winter of 1943/44 as unusable in actual production work, because they were either too weakened or not qualified for work on the assembly lines. As a result, new prisoners were brought in from other concentration camps. From March 1944, the others were moved to newly created subcamps in the area around Nordhausen where they continued to be used for digging new tunnels or working at construction sites above ground.

By late January, 56 rockets had been produced. By May, monthly output was 400 units. There were still defects, resulting in launch-pad and mid-air explosions. Output was still far below the goal of 1,000 units per month. Wernher von Braun visited the Nordhausen plant on 25 January 1944 and again on 6 May 1944, when he met Walter Dornberger, Arthur Rudolph and Albin Sawatzki, discussing the need to enslave another 1,800 skilled French workers.

On 8 September 1944, the first V-2 built at Mittelbau was successfully launched targeting London. That month, production hit 600 units, a pace that was kept up until February 1945.

On 31 December 1943, construction of the above-ground camp, less than a kilometre from the tunnel B entrance was sufficiently completed for the workers to move in. The underground detainee accommodations ( Schlafstollen or "sleeping tunnels") were dismantled in May 1944.

Besides the main camp Dora, housing an average of 15,000 prisoners, the main subcamps were Lager Ellrich [ de ] (established 2 May 1944, averaging around 8,000 prisoners), Lager Harzungen [ de ] (1 April 1944, 4,000 prisoners), Lager Rottleberode [ de ] (13 March 1944, 1,000 prisoners) and the SS construction units III and IV (totaling around 3,000 prisoners, distributed among several small camps along a newly constructed railway line between Nordhausen and Herzberg am Harz. More subcamps were added once Mittelbau was officially independent. By spring 1945, the number of inmates totaled over 40,000 in around 40 camps.

From spring/summer 1944, the camp became the centre of a subcamp system of its own. Originally, these still were part of the Buchenwald system. With the creation of the Jägerstab (Fighter Staff), led by Speer, as an institution to oversee a boost to fighter plane production and the move of military production underground, facilities for the production of fighter planes for the Junkers company were to be created around Nordhausen – along with the necessary infrastructure. In addition, after the creation of the Geilenbergstab (named after Edmund Geilenberg ), over the summer of 1944 more underground construction was requested for the German petroleum industry. Demand for workers for these projects was satisfied with concentration camp prisoners, but also with foreign forced labourers, POWs and drafted Germans.

The SS administration separated Mittelbau-Dora from Buchenwald at the end of September 1944 and Dora became the center of it. In effect, the new camp became officially operational on 1 November 1944 with 32,471 prisoners.

By the time Dora became operational in November 1944, the decline of Mittelbau-Dora was already beginning. With the subcamps overcrowded and the weather turning colder, conditions in all camps deteriorated and the death rate rose significantly. After peaking in March 1944 at 750, this had declined to 100 to 150 per month by the summer. From November it picked up and in December 1944 the official tally was 570, of whom 500 died at Lager Ellrich.