Mittelbau-Dora

Encyclopedia : M : MI : MIT : Mittelbau-Dora

German civilians preparing a mass grave for camp victims after liberation by the U.S. Army

Tunnel entrance to V-2 storage at the Mittelbau-Dora complex

Mittelbau-Dora, or Mittelbau concentration camp complex was formally established in 1944 near Nordhausen, Germany, south of the Harz mountains from the already existing Buchenwald camps. Eventually it comprised around 40 camps. The main goal of the complex was to establish the underground production of armaments, notably the V-2 rocket.

Most of the prisoners were men, but a small contingent of women were held in the Dora Mittelbau camp and in the Groß Werther subcamp. Only one woman guard is known today to have served in Dora, Lagerführerin Erna Petermann. Treatment towards the women prisoners was horrific and the same as the men.

Of 60,000 inmates, 12,000 deaths were officially recorded by the Nazis. The total death toll is estimated at around 20,000 and includes deaths from air raids and during the evacuation "death marches" in 1945.

A detailed first-person account of the extreme brutality endured by the inmates who laboured to produce and assemble the V-1 and V-2 rocket components in the huge underground tunnel complex is detailed in: PLANET DORA: A MEMOIR OF THE HOLOCAUST AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SPACE AGE by Yves Beon [see References below]. Of note in this book is the role played by Wernher von Braun at the Dora facilities. Von Braun later went on to become one of NASA's top ranking directors after having been secretly smuggled into the United States. A reviewer of this book at NASA's headquarters' library would later write that ...the greatest technological achievement of the twentieth century had its origins in the enslavement and murder of thousands of innocent people, the down payment of a Faustian bargain that still tarnishes our reach for the stars.

See also

• List of subcamps of Mittelbau

External link

• [Mittelbau-Dora official website]

References

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.