Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora

Introduction

Introduction Gedenkstätte: a place of remembrance, a memorial. The importance of the concentration camp memorial, or Gedenkstätte, is that it helps its community of stake-holders, those who care about what happened there, to build and transform knowledge, understanding, values, and memory. Changes in the exhibits’ themes, characters, media presentations, and structure occur over time, but these changes are less important than the stability of the site itself. Events that the Gedenkstätte commemorates are interpreted in large measure through the place where they occurred and individual interactions with it. This book is about the Nazi concentration camp “Mittelbau-Dora,” which controlled the lives of up to sixty thousand slave laborers from twenty countries for about nineteen months from August 1943 until April 1945. Although Mittelbau-Dora was not a death camp in which planned extermination was carried out through gas chambers, in the short time that Mittelbau-Dora existed, approximately twenty thousand of the sixty thousand prisoners in the main and subcamps died. However, died is the wrong word to use, for the prisoners were given little chance to live, and, indeed, their survival was of no concern to their captors. Toward the end of the camp’s existence, at the end of the war, there was a plan to exterminate those remaining in the camps through a Nazi policy called “Death through Work” (Vernichtung durch Arbeit), in which the goal was to eliminate each prisoner within a few months of their coming to the camp. The prisoners were engaged in the final stage of World War II as slave laborers in the complex public-private enterprise of the “Mittelwerk,” an underground rocket-assembly plant in the middle of Germany. Encyclopedic works have been written in German and English about the establishment of the camp and the rocket development over a period of decades. Linda Hunt bravely explored the postwar importation of Nazi rocket scientists and hundreds of their technical people to the United States, where their pasts were ignored or hidden and their contributions exalted as an irreplaceable contribution to the U.S. space and weapons programs. It was Hunt’s dogged efforts through the Freedom of Information Act that released much of the previously unknown documentation about the link between Mittelbau-Dora and U.S. space exploration and won her the respect and admiration of survivors of Dora. Jens-Christian Wagner, as a young doctoral student, conducted extensive research that led to the most complete German documentation of the camp. On the other side of the ocean, seasoned rocket historian Michael Neufeld, working within the structure of the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, culled archival research and literature to document the development of German rockets and the life of Wernher von Braun. All three are still involved in the story. Not wishing to repeat these contributions by trying to rewrite the wellcovered history, the current authors looked in a different direction, that of exploring the meaning of the camp and its public memory primarily through the eyes of witnesses of events in three wartime and postwar periods. These witnesses included the survivors of Mittelbau-Dora and the outer camps with whom the authors had worked and been associated for many years, the townspeople of Nordhausen who had integrated the events of the 1940s in various ways in their writing and recorded memories, and the local historical record to the extent it existed in archival form. Interviews, review of prisoner testimony and memoirs, and public records of commemorative events offered differing views of Mittelbau-Dora and the memorial that was established decades later. The authors also found that the war itself played a crucial role in the relationships of the citizens of Nordhausen to the camp itself and its memory. Strategic bombing raids by the British and Americans devastated the city’s infrastructure and killed thousands of the city’s inhabitants only days before the camp was liberated, leaving an ambiguity about how to assign blame and guilt, perpetrator as well as victim status. This book is unmistakably an anthropological work. The disciplines of history and anthropology differ, even when the anthropologist is looking at events in the historical past and even though the historian sometimes uses anthropological theory and methods. The historian views events and assembles evidence that took place in a certain sequence and in a certain context. The anthropologist looks at how people find meaning in events, how that meaning is produced, and how and by what means it changes over...