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Supervised by American soldiers, German civilians from the town of Nordhausen bury corpses of prisoners found at Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in mass graves. Rare colour photograph taken in 1945. Photo credit: USHMM

Dora (also Mittelbau or Nordhausen) was a Nazi concentration camp established on August 28, 1943, near Nordhausen to provide labor for the Mittelwerk V-2 rocket production in the Kohnstein.

The Mittelbau-Dora camps eventually comprised more than 40 camps.^[1][2] During its 18 months of activity, approximately 60,000 prisoners from 21 nations (mostly Russians, Poles, and French) passed through Dora; an estimated 20,000 of those died in this prison and includes deaths from air raids throughout the war and the evacuation "death marches" in 1945 (12,000 were officially listed as dead by the Nazis.^{[citation needed]}

Mittelwerk factory tunnel entrance

Following Hitler's August 22 1943 order for SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to use concentration camp workers for A-4 production,^[3][4] 107 inmates arrived at Nordhausen from Buchenwald on August 28, 1943, followed by 1,223 on September 2. Workers from Peenemünde departed on October 13, 1943.

Originally called Block 17/3 Buchenwald, the SS administration ordered Dora to be politically separated from Buchenwald at the end of September 1944 and to become the center of Konzentrationslager Mittelbau (Concentration Camp Central Construction). In effect, the camp became operational on November 1, 1944 with 32,471 Mittelbau prisoners of many nationalities.^[5] The SS used the Boelcke Kaserne, a former barracks in Nordhausen city, as a dumping ground for hopeless prisoner cases.^[6]

Tunnels in the Kohnstein were used as quarters until workers completed the Dora camp^[5] on December 31, 1943, less than a kilometre from the tunnel B entrance to the South.^[7] The underground detainee accommodations ("sleeping tunnels") were dismantled in May 1944.^[6]

With a total length of about 20 km (12 mi), a tunnel height up to 30 m (33 yd) and an area of 250,000 m² (62 acres) the tunnel system in the Kohnstein was one of the largest built by the Germans. The system consists of two parallel rail tunnels (Tunnels A and B) with a length of about 1.8 km (1 mi) each, which were at the beginning connected by 17 and later by 46 transverse tunnels.^[8][9]

SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Otto Förschner was the commandant of Dora.^[6] Richard Baer, the last commandant of the original Auschwitz camp, displaced Förschner as Dora commandant in February 1945.^[6]

On December 10, 1943, Albert Speer visited Dora.^[5][6] Wernher von Braun visited the Nordhausen plant on January 25, 1944, and returned for a May 6, 1944,^[6] meeting with Walter Dornberger and Rudolph where Albin Sawatzki discussed the need to enslave 1,800 more skilled French workers.^[5]

A drawing depicting the work on the expansion of an underground tunnel in the fall of 1943.

Although most of the prisoners were men, a few women were held in the Dora Mittelbau camp and in the Groß Werther subcamp. Only one woman guard is now known to have served in Dora, Lagerführerin Erna Petermann. Regardless of gender, all prisoners were treated with extreme cruelty, which caused illness, injuries and deaths. Examples of the cruelty routinely inflicted on prisoners include: severe beatings that could permanently disable and/or disfigure the victims, deliberate and life-threatening starvation, physical and mental torture as well as summary execution under the smallest pretext.

On the night of April 2, 1945, Royal Air Force bombers burned down much of Nordhausen city in two nighttime fire raids, killing 1,500 sick prisoners at Boelcke Kaserne.^[5][10] On April 3, 1945, prisoners began leaving Dora to the Harzungen sub-camp about 10 miles around the Kohnstein mountain.^[5]

Dead workers lie in uneven rows on floors of barracks, found by American 3rd Armored Div. when it captured the German slave labor camp at Nordhausen.

An American soldier and medical officer view the bodies of prisoners lying on the ground in a barracks in the Nordhausen concentration camp.

Mittelbau Dora was liberated on April 11, 1945 by the U.S. 104th Infantry Division, after Pfc. John M. Galione discovered the camp on April 10 and alerted liberating troops. At that time most inmates were already sent on death marches to concentration camps Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen and to the Lübecker Bucht (see Cap Arcona). Only inmates sick or dying were left behind by the Nazis. The Fedden Mission investigated the conditions in June of 1945.

In 1947, the Mittelbau-Dora^[6] war crimes trial at Dachau convicted fifteen Dora SS guards and Kapos; one is executed. A trial was also held 1959-1961 in Essen.^[5] The Tribunal also addresses the question of liability of Nordhausen scientists.^[11]

The Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial uses the former crematorium building (one of the two buildings still intact) as a museum. In 1970 the muster ground was restored and an administration building erected.

• Mittelwerk

1. ^ Outside camps of KZ Dora-Mittelbau (Map)
2. ^ Outside camps of KZ dora-Mittelbau (List)
3. ^ Irving, David (1964). The Mare's Nest. London: William Kimber and Co, p245. 
4. ^ Collier, Basil [1964] (1976). The Battle of the V-Weapons, 1944-1945. Yorkshire: The Emfield Press, p122. ISBN 0 7057 0070 4. 
5. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Béon, Yves (1997). Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age, translated from the French La planète Dora by Béon & Richard L. Fague, Westview Press, Div. of Harper Collins, (SC)pXII,XIV,XIX,XX,XXII,90,282. ISBN 0-8133-3272-9. 
6. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Neufeld, Michael J (1995). The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. New York: The Free Press, p209,212,226,227,261,270. 
7. ^ Garliński, Józef (1978). Hitler's Last Weapons: The Underground War against the V1 and V2. New York: Times Books, p107,109. 
8. ^ The tunnel system in the Kohnstein
9. ^ The tunnel system in April 1945
10. ^ Campaign Diary. Royal Air Force Bomber Command 60th Anniversary. UK Crown. Retrieved on 2007-05-24. 1945:April
11. ^ Franklin, Thomas (1987). American in Exile, An: The Story of Arthur Rudolph. Huntsville: Christopher Kaylor Company, p150. 

• Sellier, Andre (2003). A History of The Dora Camp. ISBN 156663511X - French original (2001) Histoire du camp de Dora ISBN 2707135402

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Mittelbau-Dora

• The Mittelwerk/Mittelbau/Camp Dora Mittelbau GmbH - Mittelbau KZ
• John Galione, discoverer of Mittelbau-Dora
• Article based on May 21, 1945 issue of Life magazine (in German)
• 104th Infantry Division war story

Coordinates: 51°31′59″N, 10°45′19″E