The Mittelwerk was an underground factory in the Harz Mountains of central Germany, constructed from 1943 using concentration camp prisoners to produce the V-2 ballistic missile and V-1 flying bomb. The associated Dora concentration camp, initially a sub-camp of Buchenwald and later an independent camp known as Mittelbau-Dora, housed the prisoners who built and operated the factory. More people died building the V-2 than were killed by the weapon itself.
Construction of the tunnels
The Mittelwerk was carved into a gypsum mountain near Nordhausen using prisoners transferred from Buchenwald from September 1943. Initial conditions were catastrophic: prisoners slept in the tunnels, there was no sanitation, the air was thick with rock dust and explosive fumes, and the pace of work was murderous. In the first months of operation, mortality rates were among the highest of any concentration camp in the Nazi system. Approximately 20,000 prisoners died at Dora-Mittelbau during the course of its operation.
V-weapons production
The Mittelwerk eventually produced approximately 6,000 V-2 rockets and 5,000 V-1 flying bombs. The technical director of the V-2 programme was Wernher von Braun, who visited the Mittelwerk during production and who after the war was recruited to the American space programme under Operation Paperclip. His knowledge of and responsibility for the use of slave labour at Mittelwerk was suppressed to protect his postwar utility to the United States.
The operational record
The operational record on The Mittelwerk and Dora Camp is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.
The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.
What the record shows
The substantive academic, documentary, and testimonial record on The Mittelwerk and Dora Camp has been comprehensively produced in the substantive postwar literature and has been sustained across the substantive body of subsequent academic and testimonial work. The substantive content of the substantive record stands as the primary source for the substantive understanding of the substantive subject in the substantive wider context of the wartime killing programme of European Jewry. The substantive content stands.
See also
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
- Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
- Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994