Michael Neufeld - The Rocket and the Reich

In October and November the paperwork began to catch up with the reality. On October 19 Army Ordnance finally issued an A-4 assembly contract to the Mittelwerk company, but only after pressure from the Special Committee and from Heinrich Himmler, who had toured the tunnels four days previously. According to Kammler, Ordnance budget and counterintelligence bureaucrats had held up the contract because of its huge amount: 480 million marks for 12,000 missiles. The contract’s unit price—40,000 marks per A-4, not including warhead, guidance equipment, and packing for shipment—was actually intended only as a guideline. Indeed, the company responded a month later with a more realistic estimate: 100,000 marks each for the first thousand A-4s, 90,000 each for the second thousand, and so forth down to a floor of 50,000 marks starting with the 5,001st missile. About the same time (late November), the Mittelwerk company finally concluded a contract to rent the facility from the Wifo for half a million marks a year, but a year later the formal construction contract for the factory still had not been completed by the Army. The Armaments Ministry lent at least 31 million marks for construction, but as the war went on the legal niceties seemed more and more irrelevant. 28

The real cost of the Mittelwerk must be measured, however, in human lives and suffering. By October there were four thousand prisoners in the tunnels, all male and predominantly Russian, Polish, and French. (None were Jews; in line with its racial ideology, the SS lumped them into a separate category, regardless of nationality, and assigned none to Dora until the summer of 1944.) By the end of November there were perhaps eight thousand prisoners living underground. From the outset the SS had planned a regular barracks camp on the south side of the mountain, near the entrance to tunnel B. But Kammler gave that construction a lower priority, against the objections of the SS camp bureaucracy in Berlin. Armed with special powers from Himmler, he brushed those complaints aside, allegedly stating to his construction staff: “Pay no attention to the human cost. The work must go ahead, and in the shortest possible time.” 29

The results were horrifying. The SS walled off cross tunnels 43 to 46 at the southern, uncompleted end of the factory, and prisoners constructed wooden bunk beds four levels high. Until the bunks were ready, the prisoners had to sleep on straw or bare rock. The damp, dimly lit tunnels never got warmer than about 15° C. (59° F.) and the bunks, which were often shared by two or more individuals on the shift system, became full of lice and filth. Because of the proximity of the hectic, round-the-clock operations in the uncompleted tunnel A, explosions rocked the “sleeping tunnels” and dust filled the air. Jean Michel, a French resistance leader, later described his initiation to work at Dora on October 14, 1943:

This first day is terrifying. The Kapos [prisoner bosses] and SS drive us on at an infernal speed, shouting and raining blows down on us, threatening us with execution; the demons! The noise bores into the brain and shears the nerves. The demented rhythm lasts for fifteen hours. Arriving at the dormitory… we do not even try to reach the bunks. Drunk with exhaustion, we collapse onto the rocks, onto the ground. Behind, the Kapos press us on. Those behind trample over their comrades. Soon, over a thousand despairing men, at the limit of their existence and racked with thirst, lie there hoping for sleep which never comes; for the shouts of the guards, the noise of the machines, the explosions and the ringing of the [locomotive] bell reach them even there. 30

In bed or on the job, the miserable prisoners were subjected to the brutal whims of guards, Kapos, and block captains, while the ruthless struggle for existence the SS imposed on the prisoners resulted in widespread thievery, cruelty, and rivalry among nationalities. The hygienic conditions were simply catastrophic. The water supply was completely inadequate, and washing facilities were unavailable. There were no proper toilets for the prisoners, so oil drums were cut in half and boards placed over them. Chlorine was spread over the contents every hour, but the health of the whole workforce was endangered, and the stench was terrible. The doors to the main tunnels were therefore left open, producing terrible drafts. The only time most detainees saw the outside world was during the Sunday roll calls, when they often had to stand outside in the cold for hours, clothed only in thin uniforms that were little better than rags. Michel describes the result:

Some deportees are too weak and collapse. They have dysentery. They foul their trousers. They no longer have the strength to sit over the barrels, even to get to them. The SS beat them. The blows are useless, they do not get up. They will suffer no more. Those who know in their hearts that they too are almost at the end of their tether watch in silence. Will they be the victims tomorrow? Soon?… Woe betide the man who is turned away, not ill enough for the infirmary Kapo! His days are numbered. The Kapos in the tunnel will work him until he drops. As if we are not being driven to our deaths already! Often there are no mess-tins. Food is scarce and they cut down the number of rations. 31

By December, epidemics of dysentery, tuberculosis, and pneumonia were raging through the camp. Whereas Dora recorded 18 deaths in October and 172 in November, in December the figure was 670. From that month through March, an average of twenty to twenty-five prisoners died every day, for an official total of 2,882 in six months. Of these, 29 percent were Soviet, a quarter were French, 14 percent were Polish, 13 percent were German, and Italians, mostly POWs, made up 9 percent. At first the bodies were hauled back to Buchenwald for cremation, but a portable crematorium arrived in January, and a permanent one was opened in the new camp at the end of March. To the official death toll must be added an equal number who were “selected” for three transports in the first quarter of 1944. On January 6 the SS shipped one thousand sick and exhausted detainees to Lublin-Maidenek in Poland, where those who survived the trip undoubtedly died of disease or were gassed. Exactly a month later an identical number was sent to the same destination, and at the end of March, a thousand were entrained for the northwestern camp of Bergen-Belsen (the SS was obsessed with exact numbers). Only the coming of warmer weather, the end of mining, and the movement of the prisoners into the barracks brought a significant decline in the death rate. At the beginning of 1944, 4,500 out of ten thousand still slept in the tunnels. The final dismantling of the underground accommodations did not come until May. 32

Long after the war Speer claimed credit for the improvement of conditions in the spring, even as he admitted, in his usual self-serving manner, responsibility for the horrors of Dora. His account revolves around his visit to Mittelwerk in December 1943 and subsequent efforts to upgrade prisoner health. Speer’s office chronicle reads: “On the morning of December 10, the Minister traveled to see a new factory in the Harz [Mountains]. The accomplishment of this monumental task demanded the managers’ last reserves of strength. Some were so affected, that they had to be forced to take vacations to rest their nerves.” Speer’s memoirs quote this passage to indicate that prisoner conditions so shocked the Minister’s entourage that some had to be given leave. Actually, the chronicle clearly refers to officials on the spot who were exhausted by the overwhelming pace of the conversion. Only a week after the visit, Speer wrote to Kammler praising him for turning the tunnels into a factory in two months, an accomplishment “that far exceeds anything ever done in Europe and is unsurpassed even by American standards.” 33