could do was free the prisoners.
It was four thirty in the afternoon on April 10, 1945. The men he found waiting inside the gate were “skeletons wrapped in skin,” with an average man weighing less than sixty pounds. Private John Galione had just discovered Camp Dora.
Galione tried to break the lock while the men watched mutely. Without tools, he couldn’t force it open. He could shoot it, of course, but that would be nearly as dumb as exploring the mountain. What if there were guards still inside the camp? As a lone soldier standing in the open, he’d be an easy target.
Galione decided to go for help. But first, he needed sleep. He climbed back up the mountainside to a clump of trees above the mine openings. From there he had a clear view of the camp and road and would hear anyone climbing over loose rocks. He quickly fell asleep and awoke in the dark. Perfect for a prowling Timberwolf.
Galione began to hike back up the tracks to the American camp he had spotted on the way to Dora. He was not up to walking five more days to his own camp, if it was still where he left it. Besides, judging from what he had seen, the prisoners in the camp could die waiting for rescue.
A miracle was waiting for him when he got to the road leading to the Timberwolf bivouac, at two o’clock that morning. Sitting on the road was a stalled jeep and a tired driver. Galione tried to use his basic knowledge of auto mechanics as a bargaining chip. He told the driver about the secret openings in the mountain and the camp. He’d fix the jeep, he said, if the driver would take him back there, help him break the lock, and free the prisoners. The driver said he couldn’t. He was on a personal assignment for his commanding officer and needed his permission. He offered to take the private to his superior. Galione found a disconnected wire under the Jeep’s hood and fixed it.
The Timberwolf battalion leader not only agreed to give Galione a ride back to Dora; he insisted on going to the ghost camp himself along with one of his men. Just as the spring sun was about to rise, the three Timberwolves rounded the curve to the camp. Within minutes they broke the lock and opened the gate. A wave of prisoners swallowed them up, grabbing their hands and kissing them over and over. Like DeVito at Dachau and hundreds of other liberators in camps across Europe, the three Timberwolves could not process what they saw.
The rising sun slowly lit a scene from a horror movie. Men so thin “you could see their back bones through their stomachs.” Rotting bodies in open trenches and piled outside buildings. A prisoner led Galione to the “infirmary,” where a hundred men lay on straw in their own excrement, the dying next to the already dead. The French Resistance fighters among the living began singing “La Marseillaise” when they saw the American soldiers.
Worried that there were still guards in Dora, the Timberwolves raced back down the road to their camp to radio for backup and medical help. Then the commander drove Galione back to his platoon to face charges.
The next day, army medics, German civilian health workers, and the Red Cross streamed into Camp Dora with trucks full of medicine and bandages, blankets and sheets, and food fit for an SS officer—cold meats and cheese, coffee and milk, bread and butter and jam. They found about twelve hundred men and boys still alive, gave them first aid, then loaded them into field ambulances and trucks for transport to nearby hospitals. For some it was too late.
With tanks as backup, U.S. soldiers explored what turned out to be three camps—Dora and two sister camps. Except for prisoners and the dead, all three camps were empty. The soldiers found torture chambers. A crematorium with the smoldering corpses of men and boys as young as ten. Men hanging by their necks, some by their genitals. And corpses around every corner and in every building. Five thousand of them. Battle-hardened soldiers wept and retched along the barbed-wire fences.
One of the SS officers responsible for Camp Dora and the deaths of its slave laborers would become the crown jewel in the treasure chest of Paperclip scientists hired by the Pentagon to send the first U.S. satellite into orbit.
His name was SS Major Wernher von Braun.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wernher von Braun was a dreamer. Ever since he studied rocket science at the Technical University of Berlin in the early 1930s, he wanted to build rockets that would carry men into space. When the war shattered his dream, he turned his genius to designing for the Reich a rocket of mass destruction—the V-2 (V for
Von Braun’s problem was that his superiors, distracted by bickering and power-playing, didn’t believe in his new and as yet unproven rocket. Fortunately for the Allies, their indecision delayed the development of the V-2 for several months of the war. With the future of his rocket in jeopardy, von Braun leapfrogged his military superiors and took his case directly to the Fuhrer.
Armed with optimism and film to justify it, von Braun visited Hitler and Albert Speer, Reich minister of armament and war production, in July 1943. With Germany caught in a squeeze, his timing was impeccable. The Red Army was steadily pushing west toward Berlin and the Allies were planning an invasion. The only question was when and where. Although he was still optimistic, Hitler was looking for a reason to give his discouraged military officers a straw of hope.
Von Braun, Hitler, and Speer sat in a darkened room at Wolf’s Lair, the Fuhrer’s hideaway, on an ordinary summer day in 1943, ten months before the Allies hit the beaches of Normandy. Von Braun turned on the projector and the film began to roll. It featured, as Speer recalled, “the majestic spectacle of a great rocket rising from its pad and disappearing into the stratosphere.” Hitler was so impressed, he called the V-2 a weapon that could “decide the war.” If the Reich could rain V-2s on England—and eventually the United States—war momentum would most certainly shift. The rockets would make an Allied invasion too risky, perhaps impossible. Hitler could then use the V-2 as Truman would later use the atom bomb—to bring his enemies to their knees.
Hitler made V-2 production a top priority.
So did the British Royal Air Force. Based on solid intelligence, the RAF launched Operation Hydra, which destroyed or crippled much of von Braun’s rocket factory, lab, and launch sites at Peenemunde, a village in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Before the Peenemunde ashes could cool, Hitler gave the order to move V-2 production out of range of the RAF and into the very heart of Germany. He commissioned the SS to find a secret site. They settled on an abandoned gypsum mine in Mount Kohnstein, in the Harz mountain range. All they had to do was remove the fuel and chemical tanks stored inside the mine and expand the space. To dupe Allied intelligence, Berlin gave the future underground factory complex the bland name of Mittelwerk (Central Works).
The first stage of Mittelwerk construction was to excavate two tunnels and build two factories inside them, one to assemble V-1s for immediate launch against England, and the other to make V-2s for testing. To dig the tunnels and build the underground factories, the SS would use slave laborers from the neighboring Buchenwald concentration camp. If they needed more men than Buchenwald could supply, there were hundreds of other camps to draw from.
Usually, the SS built their camps with logic: roads and utilities first, then SS barracks, followed by camp fences and watchtowers, and finally prisoner barracks and workshops. But there was no time for logic at Mittelwerk. When the first prisoners arrived, there were no barracks, no tents, no electricity, and above all, no safe drinking water, making conditions at Camp Dora the worst of any SS camp, including Auschwitz, which became the symbol of Nazi evil.
The main excavation job of the slave laborers was to load the rock that had been blasted or drilled out of the mountain into mine wagons, then push them down narrow tracks to empty railroad cars at the mouth of the tunnel. They worked in twelve-hour shifts in constant dampness and cold—59 degrees Fahrenheit was the warmest it ever got inside the mountain. The only light came from miner lamps.
The slave miners worked in clouds of ammonia-filled dust from the blasts, without ventilation or protective clothing. After a few weeks, they turned gray-black, the color of the rocks they carried. The SS and trusted inmates known as Kapos—mostly career criminals—drove the prisoners “at an infernal speed” with clubs and cords of rubber-covered copper wire, cursing and taunting and shouting “faster, faster, you pieces of shit.”
