By the second half of 1943 the Allied bombing campaign had made it impossible to run the German armaments industry above ground. The decision was taken to move the most important production into tunnels. Albert Speer’s ministry, the SS Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt under Oswald Pohl, the Organisation Todt and a network of construction firms drove the programme. The labour came from the camps. Tens of thousands of men died digging the tunnels and tens of thousands more died working in them.
The largest of the underground sites was Mittelwerk in the Kohnstein hill above Nordhausen, where the V-2 ballistic missile and parts of the V-1 cruise missile were assembled. The labour camp attached to it was Mittelbau-Dora, a satellite of Buchenwald until October 1944 when it became its own concentration camp with its own subcamps. The first prisoners arrived in August 1943 and slept in the tunnels themselves while they widened them, in conditions that killed roughly a third of the early intake. Around sixty thousand men passed through Mittelbau-Dora. Around twenty thousand of them died, most of them in the tunnels or on the death marches that followed in spring 1945.
Wernher von Braun, the technical director of the V-2 programme, visited Mittelwerk repeatedly. He selected prisoner specialists from Buchenwald himself. He requested skilled labour by name. After the war he claimed he had no choice and was overruled when he objected to conditions. The documentary record does not support that claim. He went on to lead the American space programme. He died honoured.
Mittelwerk was one site among many. Bergkristall at Sankt Georgen built Me 262 fuselages with Mauthausen prisoners. REIMAHG at Kahla tried to build the same fighter with Buchenwald prisoners. The Richard II project at Leitmeritz, a Flossenbürg satellite, dug tunnels for Auto Union and Osram. The B8 Bergkristall sub-project pulled in further Mauthausen labour. The B12 project at Ebensee, also a Mauthausen satellite, was supposed to house refinery and rocket research; thousands died on the digging. Project B3 at Porta Westfalica used Neuengamme prisoners on Philips and Ambi-Budd work. The Quarz project at Melk was for Steyr-Daimler-Puch ball bearings. Bunker Valentin at Bremen, where U-boats were assembled in concrete cathedrals, was built by men from Neuengamme and the Bremen-Farge subcamp. The pattern is the same in each case. A construction firm dug. A weapons firm took the contract. The SS supplied the prisoners. The directors knew.
The conditions inside the tunnels were extreme. The dust did not clear. Ventilation was poor or absent during early construction. Water seeped through the rock. Men slept in cages built into the walls of the galleries until barracks were built outside, sometimes months later. Tuberculosis spread fast. Hangings of suspected saboteurs took place inside the tunnels themselves, with the bodies left up as a warning. Mittelwerk has photographs of these. The civilian foremen and engineers walked past them on the way to their offices. They did not stop work.
The military output of the underground programme was modest in proportion to the human cost. The V-2 killed more men in its construction than it ever did in flight. The Me 262 was too few and too late. The U-boats from Bremen-Farge never sailed. The mountain factories were the regime’s industrial response to defeat, and they killed in the tens of thousands without changing the outcome. The companies involved survived the war and most of them prospered after it. The men who dug the tunnels are buried in the woods around the sites or were scattered on the death-march routes that emptied the camps in April and May 1945.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards