Buchenwald concentration camp, the Dora labor camp (later Mittelbau-Dora) became the primary center for the manufacture of V-1 and V-2 rockets after Allied bombing raids struck Peenemunde in August 1943. The bombers did not cause extensive damage, but Peenemunde’s work was not a secret and it was vulnerable to further attack. Production and assembly of the rockets was taken over by the dreaded SS, which decided to relocate rocket production to underground factories built and manned by slave laborers from concentration camps. In late August 1943, the SS established a sub-camp of Buchenwald in an underground fuel storage facility at Kohnstein. A series of tunnels, originally excavated in the mountain for a gypsum mine, became the basis for a massive underground factory known as the Mittelwerk.
While scientific research and testing continued under von Braun at Peenemunde, the underground camp and complex were being hacked out of rock to serve as the primary production facilities for both the V-1 and V-2 rockets. From late August 1943 through to the end of the year, prisoners from Buchenwald lived in the tunnels, drilling, blasting and hauling rock in grueling twelve-hour shifts in the midst of incessant noise, dark and damp conditions that killed thousands. Jean Michel, a French resistance leader arrested by the Gestapo, who arrived at the Dora complex on October 14, 1943, described his first day as “terrifying”:
The Kapos [prisoner bosses] and SS drive us on at an infernal speed, shouting and raining blows down on us, threatening us with execution, the demons! The noise bores into the brain and shears the nerves. The demented rhythm lasts for fifteen hours. Arriving at the dormitory [in the tunnels]… we do not even try to reach the bunks. Drunk with exhaustion, we collapse onto the rocks, onto the ground. Behind, the Kapos press us on. Those behind trample over their comrades. Soon, over a thousand despairing men, at the limit of their existence and racked with thirst, lie there hoping for sleep which never comes; for the shouts of the guards, the noise of the machines, and explosions and the ringing of the bell reach them even there.
The prisoners worked twenty-four hours a day in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Tiers of wooden bunks in the dripping wet chambers served as their sleeping quarters, with oil drums cut in two serving as toilets. Very little water was available, save that which wept from the rocks and soaked everyone. Disease broke out and added to the death toll caused by overwork, falling rock and exhaustion. In such hellish conditions, the casualties were high. French historian Andre Sellier, himself a former inmate of the complex, documented the arrival of 17,535 inmates between August 1943 and April 1944. In that period, 5,882 either died and were cremated in the ovens at the complex or Buchenwald, or were “transported.” Those prisoners too ill or too injured to work were shipped to Bergen-Belsen and the Majdanek camps in “liquidation transports.” As new inmates kept arriving, the death toll grew higher. In all, some 26,500 died at Dora, according to Sellier’s research: 15,500 in the camp or on “transports,” and 11,000 at the end of the war, when the SS marched many survivors out of the camp and most of those unfortunates were killed.
The prisoners at Dora were for the most part prisoners of war— Russians and Poles — as well as French resistance fighters, German prisoners of conscience, political prisoners and, later in the war, Jews and Gypsies, who were singled out for particularly brutal treatment by the ss. Other nationalities also joined the ranks of Dora’s inmates. After Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis, the Germans turned on their former allies with a vengeance. A group of Italian officers, sent to Dora to work as slave laborers, balked at entering the tunnels, so the Germans shot them all. A Greek inmate, Anton Luzidis, spoke for all the prisoners at the end of the war when he testified: “The meaning of Dora was fright. I cannot find the proper words to characterize the conditions there. If often happened to me that I asked myself whether I was still alive in the world, or whether I was brought into this hell after my decease.”
Production of Dora’s first rockets began in January 1944 when the prisoners started work on V-2s. That same month, 679 prisoners died in the camp. By August 1944, work had started on the first V-1 rockets in the tunnels and the death toll of prisoners mounted. The V-1 factory was set up by the SS and their industrial partners in the manufacture of the weapon, Volkswagen. By March 1945, reacting against what they termed “sabotage,” which could be something as simple as using a piece of scrap leather to make a belt to hold up a pair of pants that had grown too large because of starvation, the SS began rounding up inmates and hanging them in groups from the cranes in the underground factory. The executions increased in the last month of the camp’s operation. When American forces began closing in, the SS evacuated the civilian support workers and the last remaining rocket scientists. Most of the inmates were shipped out to other camps for liquidation, while thousands were “death- marched” in the snow. At a barn in nearby Gardelegen, the SS locked 1,050 prisoners in a barn, set it on fire and machine-gunned those who made it out of the burning building. Only thirty-four men made it out alive.
The SS abandoned the camp on April 4, 1945, and the U.S. Army liberated Dora and its tunnels seven days later. Several hundred starving, dying inmates, all that remained of the approximately sixty thousand slave laborers who had filled the camp and built the rockets, greeted them. The Americans, well aware of the scientific and military value of the German rocket program, removed the parts of about a hundred V-2 rockets from the tunnels before the Russians arrived in July, because the camp and complex were within the recently established Russian zone of occupation. In October 1946, the Russians, too, removed rocket parts and equipment and shipped them to the Soviet Union. The Russians tried to destroy the tunnels with explosives but could not complete the job. In the summer of 1948, they blasted the entrances to the tunnels to seal them, supposedly forever.
As locked gates swing open, we drive past rows of bunkers, their huge blast doors hanging open, and rows of deteriorating East German MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets. Until 1989, this was part of the vast Soviet bloc, a potential foe that we were prepared to fight, and these aircraft were here to shoot down our planes in the event of war. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the German Democratic Republic, the reunification of Germany and the unraveling of the Soviet Union are such recent events that I shake my head in wonder as our vehicle speeds through the abandoned air base. Not too many years ago, my presence here with a camera would have resulted in a death sentence, just as it would have sixty years earlier when this was the heart of Hitler’s rocket program.
We stop first at the buckled concrete rails of the V-1 test firing range. Blasted and ruined by the Soviets in 1945, the collapsed bunkers and broken concrete look innocuous, and at the same time simple. Yet the weapon perfected here, and manufactured in the thousands at Dora, wrought enormous devastation and terrorized the skies of free Europe and England. Before I left Vancouver on this trip, my museum’s board chair told me about his childhood just outside London. The memory of “doodlebugs” or “buzz bombs” as the British called the V-1, were still a source of both terror and anger to him. “You could here them coming,” he told me, “and as long as you could hear them, it was alright.” Only when the rocket motor cut off would the V-1 plummet to earth and explode. That’s when you ran and hoped you were outside the blast zone. I think of him and the memories he still carries of these missiles as I gaze out at the now peaceful Baltic from the lip of the V-1 launch track.
From here, we drive into a forest and park next to a mound of broken brick, glass and twisted steel that was once the assembly building for V-2s at Prufstande (test stand) 7. Blasted flat by the Soviets after the war, it towered above the plain to house an upright rocket before it was rolled out on rails to its launch platform and the actual test stand. Nestled inside an earthwork that still rings the launch site, the firing position is now a forested glade pockmarked by bombs and designated by a small granite marker. Here, humans first reached beyond the skies into space, but any thrill connected to standing at this monument to the beginnings of the space age is tempered by the grim reality of the evil that drove the invention of these rockets and the horrific human cost of their development and use. We pick our way carefully through the site, closed to public for the very good reason that many unexploded bombs still lie here.
Our next stop is a lagoon. Frozen by the winter’s cold, it grips the protruding remains of a Lancaster bomber. As we slowly trek out across the ice, pulling our dive gear in a sled behind us, we talk about the raid that blasted Peenemunde and led to the creation of Dora. On the night of August 17–18, 1943, a force of 596 bombers set out to hit Peenemunde. In all, 560 bombers made it in, dropping 1,800 tons of bombs that hit the concentration camp and the scientists’ housing project as well as the liquid oxygen plant and the rocket-launching facilities. A diversionary
