Description

Mittelbau-Dora, the last large concentration camp to be built by the Third Reich, was created as a factory for the famous Vergeltungswaffen (translating approximately to "vengeance weapons") rockets, more commonly known as the V-1 and V-2.

Physically, Mittelbau-Dora was composed of a massive underground factory, nearly two miles in length, near a medium-sized and fairly typical aboveground complex housing the camp's primarily French and Polish slave laborers.

While Dora was never a death camp in the sense of Birkenau, death rates remained very high thanks to disease, starvation, and overwork. Of 60,000 total inmates in Dora's history, 20,000 did not survive.

As the Allied bombing campaign intensified, further industries deemed to be critical to the Nazi war effort were moved into Dora's tunnels. Although the V-1 and V-2 rockets were always the camp's main product, the "Taifun" and "Orkan" anti-aircraft missiles were also made at the site by the end of the war, as were jet engines for the Me 262 and Ar 234 aircraft.

History

Since 1917, gypsum mines had existed near the city of Nordhausen, Germany. This left a rather extensive network of tunnels, and around 1934 plans were made to enlarge the tunnel system in order to store petroleum. Work proceeded to this end, and by 1943 the facility was the largest such storage area in Germany.

By mid-1943, however, the aboveground facilities for the production of the V-1 and V-2 rockets (a pet project of sorts for Hitler) had been destroyed, and the decision was made to move production to an underground factory near Nordhausen. As no suitable facilities existed at the time, a new compound was to be created from the existing fuel storage tunnels.

In order for the storage tunnels to be efficient in this role, they had to be greatly enlarged, and to this end an extension of the Buchenwald concentration camp was established near the site and named Dora. Slave laborers drawn from Buchenwald were directed first to enlarge the tunnel system and eventually to assemble the rockets themselves.

By April 1944, work had finished on the final tunnel system, which comprised two large, parallel tunnels connected by 47 lateral chambers in a ladder-like formation.

On October 1, 1944, the V-2 effort was deemed important enough that Dora was made an independent concentration camp, with the name of Mittelbau. By the end of the war, Mittelbau-Dora had more than forty of its own subsidiary camps.

On April 11, 1945, the camp was liberated by the U.S. Army 3rd Armored Division. Due to Dora's connection to the German rocket and aeronautics programs, few camp officials were ever tried as were those of less strategically important locations. Many of the scientists and engineers at Dora ended up in the United States, working for the budding space program.

The Soviets took over the site along with the rest of East Germany in July 1945, took what was considered to be needed from the tunnels, and sealed the tunnel entrances by the simple expedient of blowing them up. The tunnels were reopened after German unification in 1989, and explorers found an abundance of discarded V-1 and V-2 components, presumably too heavy, damaged or incomplete to have been removed by the Soviets or Americans. As with many other concentration camps, Mittelbau-Dora is now the site of a large museum.

Sources

http://www.reichinruins.simonides.org/mittelwerk.htm
http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Creek/7185/Books/nord_dora.html
other Web sites
a couple old Air and Space articles that I barely remember