The only liquid the slave miners got was a daily ration of soup. Sometimes not even that. If a prisoner was lucky, he might find moisture dripping from the rocks. If a slave was driven to drink the polluted water used for mixing cement, he would soon die of typhus or dysentery. Thirst drove some of the men insane. Dora survivor Jean Michel, a former French Resistance leader, recalled a crazed miner gulping rocket fuel. “He died in agony.”
At first, while the camp was still under construction, the Dora miners slept inside the mountain in granite chambers on four-tiered bunk beds with lice-infested straw pallets. The smell and the noise assaulted them constantly: the warning bell before a blast, the explosion with falling rocks, the shouts of the guards, the sounds of drills and machines, of stone clanging in metal boxcars, of the cars rolling down tracks—all bouncing off the walls, turning the tunnels into echo chambers. “Over a thousand despairing men,” recalled one Dora survivor, “at the limit of their resistance and racked with thirst, lie there hoping for sleep which never comes.”
The slave miners saw daylight only on Sundays during roll call. The SS needed to know how many men they had lost during the week so they could replace them with fresh bodies. The human moles were marched out of the tunnels in rows of five, arms linked, the strong holding up the weak. Suddenly exposed to bright light, many of the men permanently injured their eyes, a death sentence. Unable to see well, if at all, they were bound to make a mistake. Their replacements were waiting a few miles away at Buchenwald.
There was no medical help for the men injured by falling rocks. They either bled to death or died of infection. Exhausted and weak, men fell off scaffolds. Some were crushed to death by falling stones or by the heavy machinery they carried from the trains into the mine. A slave worker task force (Kommando) stacked the dead outside the tunnel, an average of one hundred a day. A lorry from Buchenwald would pick up the corpses after the SS logged their prison numbers in a ledger and take them back to the crematorium at Buchenwald.
The lucky ones died in boxcars on the way to Dora. Those who arrived alive but unable to work were promptly killed. “I had to deal with the sick who could no longer get out of the railway cars,” one Nazi guard confessed. “They didn’t want to stand up. I had to crush their larynxes by stomping on them with my boots to finish them off.”
Albert Speer inspected the Mittelwerk tunnels a few months after work had begun. “The conditions of these prisoners were in fact barbarous,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and a sense of profound involvement and personal guilt seizes me whenever I think of them.” Speer’s staff became so ill that “they had to be forcibly sent off on vacations to restore their nerves.”
Some relief came for the slave miners when the barracks were completed in March 1944—seven months after the work had begun. By then, the slave labor population had grown from 1,000 to 12,000. And when Dora became too small because Speer decided to dig more tunnels in the Harz Mountains for more factories, the SS constructed two neighboring camps—Ellrich and Harzungen—and added a crematorium to dispose of the growing number of corpses. The population of the new three-camp complex, now called Mittelbau-Dora, climbed steadily to 30,000—French, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Russian and Italian POWs, Slovenians, and Gypsies. The largest groups were the French and Russians. Jews were a minority, and the SS reserved the worst jobs and most brutal treatment for them and the Russians.
The first group of mostly young Hungarian Jews arrived at Mittelbau-Dora in the spring of 1944, among them children ages eleven to fifteen. Broken by work, starvation, and haunting despair, they didn’t last long. For one survivor, their nighttime cries and whimpers became his “most distressing memories” of the camp. A second group of several thousand Jews began to arrive early in 1945. They were the last of the Polish Jews at Auschwitz, evacuated in advance of the Soviet army.
The V-2 factory inside the mountain mine was completed in December 1943, an incredible four months after the first thousand slave laborers began digging. It was a marvel of German engineering. Reinforced with concrete and steel, it was forty-six feet wide and thirty-three feet high. Brilliantly lit and powered by electric generators, it stretched nearly two miles north to south, from one end of Mount Kohnstein to the other. Branching off from the main tunnel were smaller connecting tunnels and a string of side chambers, some as high as 125 feet to accommodate the giant V-2 rockets. Two silent electric trains ran down the entire length of the tunnel.
On the left side of the tunnel was a conveyor belt that carried V-2 rocket parts for assemblage. At the mouth of the tunnel stood a huge crane that transferred the finished missiles onto flat railcars for transport to testing sites. A description by survivor Abraham Biderman of his first day on an assembly line would have made Henry Ford proud.
Biderman worked in Kommando 147 under the supervision of a German civilian called
As soon as the conveyor belts began to roll, Mittelbau-Dora became a tale of two cities. In one, slave miners worked digging tunnels 3, 4, and 5, driven to exhaustion and death by starvation or accident. In the other were “skilled” slave workers—welders, solderers, drillers—who assembled rockets in a comfortably heated tunnel equipped with pumps to replace the air. They ate better, lived in cleaner barracks, received some medical care, and had time to rest between shifts. Nothing could illustrate the difference between the two “cities” better than the latrines.
Assembly line workers used clean, white-tiled bathrooms. The miners used empty fuel tanks, which they cut in half with hammers and chisels. The half-tanks sat in a row inside the tunnel, a wood plank resting on the rims. Every hour, a latrine Kommando would pour chlorine over the waste, and when a tank was full, the Kommando would carry it outside and empty it in a hole. From time to time, bored or angry guards and SS officers would topple a slave miner off the plank into the waste. Some miners were so weak from work or dysentery they couldn’t climb back out. They drowned in shit. Those who were strong enough to hoist themselves out cleaned off as best they could by rolling in the mine dust before going back to work.
Work on the assembly line could be dangerous as well. Always worried about sabotage, especially by the French Resistance fighters and the Russian POWs, the Gestapo planted spies everywhere and “interviewed” suspects in their special torture chambers. Anything unusual could be interpreted as sabotage. Dropping a screw, missing a beat as the pieces rolled by, whispering. Or having money, which spelled bribery to the Gestapo.
Suspected saboteurs were hanged each day either on the gallows in the roll-call platz, six at a time, or from the construction crane gallows, an even dozen at a time, while the entire camp watched in silence. Workers entering or leaving the tunnel where the crane stood had to pass through the bodies dangling only five feet off the ground, puddles of urine under them. March 12, 1945, was a typical Dora day. The SS hung fifty-eight “saboteurs”: fifty Russians, five Poles, two Czechs, and one Lithuanian.
The relentless driving of the mine and assembly line slaves turned out to be a two-edged sword. Von Braun tested the first batch of V-2s on an island in the Baltic Sea in April 1944, two months before the Allied invasion of Normandy and just nine frantic months after tunnel digging had begun. But the sword had cut too deeply. Due to haste, sabotage, and untrained workers, the rockets were defective: bad welds, poor connections, and faulty parts caused tail explosions, engine cutoffs, in-flight breakups, erratic trajectories, and crashes.
Von Braun rushed back to his blueprints and made a “blizzard” of changes. Four months later, in September, the Reich launched the first V-2s into West London from Holland. Not five thousand at a crack as Hitler had dreamed of doing, but twenty-five over a ten-day stretch, causing only scattered damage and few deaths. The Allies lucked out. The V-2s were too late to change or delay the course of the war.
Once it was clear that the Americans would soon be at Dora’s gate, the SS evacuated the camp, as they had at Majdanek and Auschwitz in Poland. The plan was to herd all the prisoners into the tunnels, pump in poison gas, then blow up the evidence, but they ran out of time, as they had at Dachau. Five days before Private Galione discovered Dora, and just as he began his hundred-mile hike, the SS crammed most of the thirty thousand Mittelbau-Dora prisoners into trains and trucks, or formed them into death-march columns. Most were destined for Bergen-Belsen, another hellhole, a hundred miles north.
While the twelve hundred prisoners remaining at the Dora camp waited for death or liberation, von Braun gathered his precious rocket blueprints and plans and buried them deep inside a nearby abandoned mine. For insurance, he blew up the mine entrance before fleeing to the Bavarian Alps. Like the Dora prisoners, he was waiting. For a chance to surrender to the Allies. For a job in America.
American army ordnance scavengers led by Major Robert Starver, an intelligence officer in the Ordnance
