Commemorating Hell: The Public Memory of Mittelbau-Dora

2. The Camp Mittelbau-Dora

2. The Camp Mittelbau-Dora Today, in the twenty-first century, more than sixty years after the end of the Second World War in Europe and the end of the Nazi Reich, the whole world recognizes that the Hitler regime was synonymous with a reign of terror, a major part of which was the gigantic network of concentration camps. Mittelbau-Dora, one of the approximately twenty thousand camps established by the Third Reich, was the site of the largest underground factory in the world where the V-1 and V-2 missiles were assembled. Nordhausen, a city in the northern region of the German state Thuringia (Thüringen), almost in the middle of Germany, now has a population of more than forty-three thousand. It lies on the southern border of the Harz Mountains and has no direct connection to major train lines or roads. Today a highway skirts the town, but it is still awkward to connect to middle Germany . There are good roads north through the Harz Mountains and south through Thuringia, but until most recently, there were no major highways. The central location of this region in Germany, and its being somewhat removed from important transport connections, must have entered into the thinking of those who planned the development of Mittelwerk, for the rocket assembly and end-production plant would be hard to find from the air and safe from damage by Allied bombing. Within the Kohnstein, a very small mountain outside of Nordhausen, a small mining operation for anhydrite and gypsum had begun in the 1920s by the I. G. Farben Company. It was taken over by the Economic Research Company (Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft or Wifo) in the mid-1930s, as early preparations for rearmament began. A plan for enlarging the tunnel system in the future and storage space for large fuel tanks envisioned the coming aggression of the German state.1 The location was also well suited for constructing such an underground facility because of the geological features of the region near Nordhausen. The area of northern Thuringia has many hills and outcroppings of anhydrite, a relatively common sedimentary mineral that forms massive rock layers, caverns, and caves as a result of dehydration. The resulting contraction leaves deposits of anhydrite, a rock that is so hard that it does not need shoring up to support internal open spaces. Thus, it was relatively easy to enlarge the tunnels’ already naturally occurring caverns. Seven years before the establishment of the camp, in 1936, engineers had enlarged some of these spaces in a small ninety-seven-meter “mountain” called the “Kohnstein,” just two and a half miles north of Nordhausen. This was originally done to store reserves of oil and other strategic fuels as part of the prewar secret rearmament plans of the Nazi government. This underground facility needed housing and at least minimal infrastructure for its workers, and in the summer of 1943 that concentration camp became known as “Dora.” Germany’s able-bodied men were at war, and, therefore, the use of slave labor had become not only the solution to the labor shortage in weapons plants throughout the country but also a given 20 chapter two The Kohnstein “Mountain” in which the Mittelbau-Dora tunnels were dug and the factory, Mittelwerk, where rockets were assembled for the German war effort. (Gretchen Schafft, photographer, Nordhausen Collection) by the populace at large. Dora had a terrifying reputation among the prisoners in other camps, who had heard of it through rumors that spread rapidly throughout the camps. In the winter of 1942–43, it appeared clear that the Nazi army had met its match at Stalingrad, and the end of the Hitler regime was in sight.2 The only hope was to develop “wonder weapons”—specifically, the missile weapons that had been under development for a decade. A variety of rockets and “flying bombs” were already close to being successfully launched in Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.3 Peenemünde The German government signed the Versailles Treaty at the close of World War I. This set in place decisions made by the Constitutional Assembly that had met in Weimar in January 1919, establishing the Weimar Republic and forbidding a military rebirth in Germany. By 1935, however, Germany abandoned the treaty, began conscription for the armed forces, announced its new air force (the Luftwaffe), and openly rearmed.4 The treaty had forbidden not only a standing army...