Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The next day, army medics, German civilian health workers, and the Red Cross streamed into Camp Dora with trucks full of medicine and bandages, blankets and sheets, and food fit for an SS officer—cold meats and cheese, coffee and milk, bread and butter and jam. They found about twelve hundred men and boys still alive, gave them first aid, then loaded them into field ambulances and trucks for transport to nearby hospitals. For some it was too late.

With tanks as backup, U.S. soldiers explored what turned out to be three camps—Dora and two sister camps. Except for prisoners and the dead, all three camps were empty. The soldiers found torture chambers. A crematorium with the smoldering corpses of men and boys as young as ten. Men hanging by their necks, some by their genitals. And corpses around every corner and in every building. Five thousand of them. Battle-hardened soldiers wept and retched along the barbed-wire fences.

One of the SS officers responsible for Camp Dora and the deaths of its slave laborers would become the crown jewel in the treasure chest of Paperclip scientists hired by the Pentagon to send the first U.S. satellite into orbit.

His name was SS Major Wernher von Braun.

Wernher von Braun was a dreamer. Ever since he studied rocket science at the Technical University of Berlin in the early 1930s, he wanted to build rockets that would carry men into space. When the war shattered his dream, he turned his genius to designing for the Reich a rocket of mass destruction—the V-2 (V for Vergeltung , or Vengeance). As the first long-range ballistic missile ever built, the giant V-2 was destined to replace the small V-1 “buzz bomb” that destroyed much of London.

Von Braun’s problem was that his superiors, distracted by bickering and power-playing, didn’t believe in his new and as yet unproven rocket. Fortunately for the Allies, their indecision delayed the development of the V-2 for several months of the war. With the future of his rocket in jeopardy, von Braun leapfrogged his military superiors and took his case directly to the Führer.

Armed with optimism and film to justify it, von Braun visited Hitler and Albert Speer, Reich minister of armament and war production, in July 1943. With Germany caught in a squeeze, his timing was impeccable. The Red Army was steadily pushing west toward Berlin and the Allies were planning an invasion. The only question was when and where. Although he was still optimistic, Hitler was looking for a reason to give his discouraged military officers a straw of hope.

Von Braun, Hitler, and Speer sat in a darkened room at Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s hideaway, on an ordinary summer day in 1943, ten months before the Allies hit the beaches of Normandy. Von Braun turned on the projector and the film began to roll. It featured, as Speer recalled, “the majestic spectacle of a great rocket rising from its pad and disappearing into the stratosphere.” Hitler was so impressed, he called the V-2 a weapon that could “decide the war.” If the Reich could rain V-2s on England—and eventually the United States—war momentum would most certainly shift. The rockets would make an Allied invasion too risky, perhaps impossible. Hitler could then use the V-2 as Truman would later use the atom bomb—to bring his enemies to their knees.

Hitler made V-2 production a top priority.

So did the British Royal Air Force. Based on solid intelligence, the RAF launched Operation Hydra, which destroyed or crippled much of von Braun’s rocket factory, lab, and launch sites at Peenemünde, a village in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Before the Peenemünde ashes could cool, Hitler gave the order to move V-2 production out of range of the RAF and into the very heart of Germany. He commissioned the SS to find a secret site. They settled on an abandoned gypsum mine in Mount Kohnstein, in the Harz mountain range. All they had to do was remove the fuel and chemical tanks stored inside the mine and expand the space. To dupe Allied intelligence, Berlin gave the future underground factory complex the bland name of Mittelwerk (Central Works).

The first stage of Mittelwerk construction was to excavate two tunnels and build two factories inside them, one to assemble V-1s for immediate launch against England, and the other to make V-2s for testing. To dig the tunnels and build the underground factories, the SS would use slave laborers from the neighboring Buchenwald concentration camp. If they needed more men than Buchenwald could supply, there were hundreds of other camps to draw from.

Usually, the SS built their camps with logic: roads and utilities first, then SS barracks, followed by camp fences and watchtowers, and finally prisoner barracks and workshops. But there was no time for logic at Mittelwerk. When the first prisoners arrived, there were no barracks, no tents, no electricity, and above all, no safe drinking water, making conditions at Camp Dora the worst of any SS camp, including Auschwitz, which became the symbol of Nazi evil.

The main excavation job of the slave laborers was to load the rock that had been blasted or drilled out of the mountain into mine wagons, then push them down narrow tracks to empty railroad cars at the mouth of the tunnel. They worked in twelve-hour shifts in constant dampness and cold—59 degrees Fahrenheit was the warmest it ever got inside the mountain. The only light came from miner lamps.

The slave miners worked in clouds of ammonia-filled dust from the blasts, without ventilation or protective clothing. After a few weeks, they turned gray-black, the color of the rocks they carried. The SS and trusted inmates known as Kapos—mostly career criminals—drove the prisoners “at an infernal speed” with clubs and cords of rubber-covered copper wire, cursing and taunting and shouting “faster, faster, you pieces of shit.”

The only liquid the slave miners got was a daily ration of soup. Sometimes not even that. If a prisoner was lucky, he might find moisture dripping from the rocks. If a slave was driven to drink the polluted water used for mixing cement, he would soon die of typhus or dysentery. Thirst drove some of the men insane. Dora survivor Jean Michel, a former French Resistance leader, recalled a crazed miner gulping rocket fuel. “He died in agony.”

At first, while the camp was still under construction, the Dora miners slept inside the mountain in granite chambers on four-tiered bunk beds with lice-infested straw pallets. The smell and the noise assaulted them constantly: the warning bell before a blast, the explosion with falling rocks, the shouts of the guards, the sounds of drills and machines, of stone clanging in metal boxcars, of the cars rolling down tracks—all bouncing off the walls, turning the tunnels into echo chambers. “Over a thousand despairing men,” recalled one Dora survivor, “at the limit of their resistance and racked with thirst, lie there hoping for sleep which never comes.”

The slave miners saw daylight only on Sundays during roll call. The SS needed to know how many men they had lost during the week so they could replace them with fresh bodies. The human moles were marched out of the tunnels in rows of five, arms linked, the strong holding up the weak. Suddenly exposed to bright light, many of the men permanently injured their eyes, a death sentence. Unable to see well, if at all, they were bound to make a mistake. Their replacements were waiting a few miles away at Buchenwald.

There was no medical help for the men injured by falling rocks. They either bled to death or died of infection. Exhausted and weak, men fell off scaffolds. Some were crushed to death by falling stones or by the heavy machinery they carried from the trains into the mine. A slave worker task force (Kommando) stacked the dead outside the tunnel, an average of one hundred a day. A lorry from Buchenwald would pick up the corpses after the SS logged their prison numbers in a ledger and take them back to the crematorium at Buchenwald.