Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp

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.

Background

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. One of the sites selected was at the mountain known as Kohnstein, near Nordhausen in Thuringia. Since 1936, the Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft (WIFO) () had been building a subterranean fuel depot for the Wehrmacht there. By late summer 1943, this was almost finished.

Especially for Kammler, this became a prestige project.

Establishment

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. 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.

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.

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. The underground detainee accommodations (Schlafstollen or "sleeping tunnels") were dismantled in May 1944.

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. Also from January to April 1945, at least 1,700 V-2 and over 6,000 V-1 rockets were built.

Along with the inmates from Auschwitz arrived several hundred SS guards who joined the staff at Mittelbau, including Richard Baer, who succeeded Otto Förschner as overall Mittelbau commandant on 1 February 1945. Baer replaced most senior personnel with people from Auschwitz. Franz Hössler became commandant of the Häftlinglager Dora. Eduard Wirths became the new Standortarzt. became head of the Arbeitseinsatz-Dienststelle which coordinated the use of forced labour. became head of the Politische Abteilung (the local Gestapo office).

Allied attacks

On 3 and 4 April 1945, Nordhausen was attacked in two waves by several hundred Lancasters and Mosquitos of Nos 1 and 8 Groups of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. Around 75% of the town was destroyed, the medieval old town was hit particularly hard. Out of 40,000 inhabitants, roughly 8,800 people died, 20,000 lost their homes. Among the dead were also an estimated 1,300-1,500 Mittelbau prisoners, who were confined at the Boelcke-Kaserne at the time.

Evacuation

In early April 1945, as US troops were advancing towards the Harz, the SS decided to evacuate most of the Mittelbau camps. In great haste and with considerable brutality, the inmates were forced to board box cars. Several trains, each with thousands of prisoners, left the area through 6 April for Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. Others were forced to walk through the Harz hills towards the northeast. Those unable to keep up with these death marches were summarily shot by the guards.

The worst atrocity occurred at Gardelegen, known as the Gardelegen massacre. More than 1,000 prisoners from Mittelbau and Neuengamme subcamps were murdered in a barn that was set on fire. Those who were not burned alive were shot by SS, Wehrmacht and men of the Volkssturm.

War correspondents took pictures and made films of the dead and dying prisoners at Dora. Like the documentation of Nazi atrocities at Bergen-Belsen, these were published around the globe and became some of the best-known testimonies of Nazi crimes.

Belsen Trial

Some of the SS personnel who had come from Auschwitz with the evacuation trains went on to Bergen-Belsen when Mittelbau was itself evacuated. A few of them, notably Franz Hössler, were prosecuted by the British military authorities at the Belsen trial in Lüneburg in September 1945. However, charges at this trial related only to crimes committed either at Auschwitz or at Bergen-Belsen, not at Mittelbau. Hössler was among those found guilty and executed on 13 December 1945.

Dora Trial

Following the June 1945 Fedden Mission investigation of conditions at Dora, the trial "The United States of America versus Arthur Kurt Andrae et al." trial commenced on 7 August 1947 at the Dachau internment camp against 19 defendants. Otto Förschner was not a defendant in the Dora Trial, since he had already been executed after being convicted in the Dachau camp trial.

The court convicted 15 Dora SS guards and Kapos (one of them was executed), four defendants were acquitted. The trial also addressed the question of liability of the engineers and scientists — former Generaldirektor of Mittelwerk Georg Rickhey was acquitted.

Apart from Rickhey, Rudolph, and von Braun, several dozen former Mittelwerk engineers and scientists quickly hired on with the US government. They first constructed rocket weapons or jet planes and then mostly went on to join the American space program. The Soviets also hired some of the engineers.

Umsiedlerlager

Once the last forced labourers had left, Dora camp was used from December 1945 by German authorities as a holding camp for Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia. They were then distributed among various municipalities in northern Thuringia. The number of expelled housed in the camp averaged about 5,000. The camp was dissolved in July 1946.

Demolition

After that, the town of Nordhausen had the huts at Dora dismantled and re-erected at other locations in the district as emergency housing for the homeless. Only the camp's crematorium, the fire station and the camp prison remained. Nature reclaimed the area of the camp. The Soviets briefly continued to use parts of the tunnel network for manufacturing rockets. In 1947, the entrances and some internal parts were blown up in accordance with the Allied agreement to destroy military facilities in Germany.

Similar to what happened at Dora, most of the subcamps were soon dismantled and the wood used for heating or new construction. Local authorities decided in 1952 to demolish the Dora camp prison – in the face of protests by former detainees.

By contrast with Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, the communist government of the GDR never raised Dora to the status of Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte (national memorial). In the early 1970s, the local authorities turned the completely overgrown muster ground into an Ehrenplatz der Nationen with a rostrum, flag poles and an eternal fire. In 1988, an attempt was made to access one of the tunnels inside Kohnstein, but it was abandoned due to a lack of funds that same year.

References

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External links

Official site of the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial
Oral history interview with James Roberts, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, who participated in the liberation of the camp from the Veterans History Project at Central Connecticut State University