Dora is one of the most infamous of the Nazi slave-labor camps. Its infamy partly derives from its underground weapons factory, where slaves of the Third Reich manufactured the V1 "flying bomb" and, most importantly, Wernher von Braun's V2 ballistic missile. Dora is situated about 7 km from the town Nordhausen at the foot of the Harz mountains in central Germany (formerly DDR). In 1995 Dora was reopened as a memorial to its victims, mainly Polish, Russian and French slave laborers. Parts and components of V1 and V2 can still be seen lying around in the caves of the Dora KZ memorial (KZ = German abbreviation of Concentration Camp).
Underground mine
Officially named Mittelbau/Mittelwerk Dora Concentration Camp, the Dora V-bomb-manufacturing facilities were housed in huge underground caves in the Kohnstein hill, with two tunnels, about a kilometer long and some 17 m high and wide, connected by 48 smaller tunnels. The caves were originally the result of peacetime mining of "anhydrite", a raw material for ammonia. In the 1930s they were enlarged and used for storage of strategically important raw materials.
Bombproof factory
In 1943 the rocket development work in Peenemünde on the German Baltic coast, led by Wernher von Braun and others, had been successful enough to convince the Nazi leadership of the feasibility of using the A4 rocket (later renamed V2 -- "Vergeltungswaffe 2" = Vengeance Weapon 2) for terror bombing of England. It was decided to produce the weapon in large numbers, about 2000 rockets a month.
A special committee, Sonderausschuss A4, wisely decided to decentralize the production, planning to make the A4 rocket on 3 different sites -- Friedrichshafen (Zeppelin Werke), Wiener-Neustadt (Rax Werke) and at Dora (Mittelwerk GmbH). Wise as it may have been, this decision had to be quickly reconsidered, after the devastating Allied bombings in August 1943 of Friedrichshafen, Wiener-Neustadt and the rocket development site at Peenemünde. At the end of August 1943 it was consequently decided to produce A4 only at Dora Mittelwerk, leaving the responsibility for building and running the production facilities into the harsh hands of the SS.
Under strict SS direction
Construction was carried out by prisoners from the concentration camp Buchenwald. A camp to house the prisoners was set up, under the name of "Lager Dora". The construction was lead by an SS-Brigadeführer, Dr.-Ing. Hans Kammler.
The actual production company was called "Mittelwerk GmbH". In November 1943 it started manufacturing the A4 rockets, which less than a year later would hit thousands of innocents in London under their new name V2. Production work was carried out by forcibly "recruited" workers of many nationalities from German-occupied territories, mainly from Poland, Russia and later from France. Until its capture by the US 104th Infantry Division in April 1945, an estimated 60 000 prisoners had been forced to labor at Dora. A third of these died of maltreatment and SS executions.
Not extermination, just certain death
Dora was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka, just hell on earth, with no way to go, but out of the crematory chimney. No inmate would ever be allowed to leave Dora alive. The 12-hour-a-day work conditions were appalling, with systematic executions to discourage sabotage. The capacity of the Dora crematory was about 100 bodies a day. This was not always sufficient to take care of the daily death toll, making it necessary to transport corpses to Buchenwald by train for burning.
With the Allied forces closing in, the camp was evacuated and the SS left Dora on April 8, 1945. The evacuees, the main part of the inmates, were forced on to other concentration camps, often perishing in horrible death marches. But some 6000 inmates, who were in no condition to walk, were simply left to die. When the US 104th Infantry Division arrived on April 11, the American soldiers were met by a terrible sight - thousands of skeleton-like corpses, with a few half-dead survivors clinging to the dead.
A memorial –- but not before the Soviet collapse.
The Russians, who occupied the territory according to the Potsdam agreement, and later the East German authorities, were characteristically insensitive to the tragedy, even restarting anhydrite mining at the site. It was not until the German reunification that the site was put under the protection of "Denkmalschutz" (Memorial Site Protection). On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Dora concentration camp, the Dora Memorial and Museum were opened to the public.
Reference:
http://www.104infdiv.org/concamp.htm
http://www.warplaces.net/
On site visit by noder