Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age (review)

From late August 1943 until early April 1945, some sixty thousand prisoners labored in the Nazi missile production program. At least one in three died. Many of them worked underground at a concentration camp called Dora, near Nordhausen, in conditions of cruelty and deprivation extreme even in the concentration camp system. Dora’s inmates extended a system of mining tunnels, fitted them with tools, and began producing Hitler’s fabled vengeance weapon, the V-2, after Royal Air Force attacks drove the program from its aboveground site at Peenemünde. Planet Dora is Yves Béon’s description of the laborer’s experience of missile production.

Béon was a member of the French resistance, captured and sent to Dora in March of 1944. His is a collective rather than personal memoir, drawing on the experiences of his friends within the camp and on the memories of other survivors he has met. It consists of a series of specific and discrete vignettes detailing brief episodes in inmates’ lives as they traveled through Dora’s missile factory and often on to death, at the hands of the Nazis, of the SS, or of other prisoners, through starvation, exposure, industrial accidents, torture, beatings, or disease: typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, or pneumonia. Béon identifies the inmates by first name only, and most appear only once: Lucien, Marcel, Albert, Stani, Charles, Roger, and Sergei, to name but a few. The men Béon names survived the episodes in which they appeared, but we do not learn of their ultimate fates. Lucien survived a brutal and choreographed beating in the barracks, for example, then found himself unable to stand. A falling sheet of iron caught Flavio as he carted material into the tunnel, slicing him open from abdomen to knee. He went to the infirmary, a fearful place from which no one emerged alive. Christian, caught searching for a friend in the wrong section of the tunnel, escaped torture and hanging because he was the thirteenth prisoner rounded up, and the hanging ritual accommodated only twelve per show. Béon’s vignettes make the scale of the savagery immediate, tangible, and overwhelming, as body counts cannot do.

Missile production provided both the context in which Dora’s inmates lived their lives and the camp’s prevailing logic, alongside patterns of murderous cruelty seen in other SS camps. Prisoners were plentiful (and new ones kept arriving), but machinery and time were precious. The earliest stage of work at Dora, excavating the tunnels, was the most murderous. Prisoners lived in the tunnels for weeks at a time, emerging only for a monthly roll call, slept on straw infested with lice and fleas, and worked in areas fouled by their own excrement. Prisoners acting as foremen kept laborers near the face during blasting, and many died beneath tons of falling rock. Fewer inmates died during the later stages, when fitting the tunnels with machinery and beginning missile assembly, principally because they moved to barracks aboveground and with better sanitation.

As long as the Nazis wanted to produce rockets the inmates knew they served a purpose, and within that purpose they worked out strategies of existence, if not ultimately of survival. These strategies included forming groups around shared ethnicity, culture, and language, the largest groups being Russian, Polish, French, and Czech (Béon observed only one group of Jewish prisoners, Hungarians, whom the commandant left standing in the roll call square until most dropped dead from dehydration, hunger, and exhaustion). Other strategies included learning to appear inconspicuous, keeping hold of one’s shoes, clothes, and spoon, hiding injuries and illnesses, and engaging in sabotage where possible. For some, the strategy included choosing a death with dignity, and they took themselves off to the infirmary, where they might at least die in peace. These strategies depended upon continuing missile production, and inmates worried about anything that threatened...