In-Depth Information

Find out about the history of Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp through maps, videos, blog entries or downloadable scholarly articles.

Videos

Some only available in German.

Arrest of Werner von Braun and trials

After the war, American, British and – later – Soviet rocket experts secured the construction plans and components of the A4 rocket found in the Mittelwerk. During the same period, Allied investigation committees worked to shed light on the crimes committed in the Mittelbau camps.

Millions of people suffered and died in camps, ghettos, and other sites during the Holocaust. The Nazis and their allies oversaw more than 44,000 camps, ghettos, and other sites of detention, persecution, forced labor, and murder. Among them was the Mittelbau main camp, also known as Dora.

Dora -Mittelbau also known as Dora-Nordhausen was a concentration camp in the Harz Mountains, three miles from Nordhausen, Saxony, in Thuringia, Germany.

The Dora- Nordhausen camp was first mentioned on August 27, 1943, as an external unit of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. On October 28, 1944, it became an important concentration camp in its own right, with twenty-three branches, most of them in the vicinity, inside a restricted military area. Following Adolf Hitler's August 22, 1943, order for Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to use concentration camp workers for A-4 production, 107 inmates arrived at Nordhausen from Buchenwald on August 28, 1943, followed by 1,223 on September 2, 1943.

This website explores the history of forced labor in the construction of the V–2 missiles at the Dora concentration camp and Mittelwerk underground factory near Nordhausen, Germany, during World War II. It was designed to support a 2010 exhibit at the UAHuntsville Salmon Library entitled Dora and the V–2: Slave Labor in the Space Age.

Engineers

Slave Labor

With camera and pencil, artists documented Dora and presented the perspective of the regime and its victims. Some artists left powerful visual evidence of the ambition and efficiency of the high–tech V–2 program and the efforts to sanitize its brutality. Others recorded the intense suffering and death of the prison laborers.

Image: Scene from the Underground Tunnels, featuring a Train Platform, Transport Workers, and a Kapo Wielding his Stick to Enforce Order. Léon Delarbre. Courtesy of Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Besançon.

In the early morning of April 11th 1945, the Third Armored Division, specifically Task Force Welborn from the north and Task Force Loveday from the south, led the capture of what they thought was a prisoner-of-war camp. After a few light skirmishes the nearby town of Nordhausen (in Northern-Central Germany) was secured. Once Nordhausen was seized 3AD units investigated rumors of a prisoner camp on the outskirts of the town. First person accounts note the bewilderment and nausea that the soldiers experienced upon finding the concentration camp.

Image: Citizens of nearby Nordhausen dig mass graves, April 11, 1945.

In March 1943, the iron hull of the factory hall was completed, and a topping out ceremony was held, with “prominent Nazis” present. Despite being not quite completed, the so-called “Serbenhalle” was immediately equipped with a heavy-current electric barbed wire fence. The following summer, the northern half was completed, and on 20 June 1943, the first Wiener Neustadt Subcamp was “inaugurated” with a first prisoner transport. After an air raid a few months later - on 20 November 1943 - it was closed down. The second time, prisoners arrived at Wiener Neustadt Subcamp on 5 July 1944. In April that year, the use of forced-labour prisoners in Wiener Neustadt was once again authorised.

Jewish slave laborers were brought to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, a satellite of Buchenwald, where they were forced to build the V-2 ballistic rocket, the brainchild of aerospace engineer Werner von Braun who was then working for the Nazis. Around 60,000 prisoners passed through the Mittelbau camps between August 1943 and March 1945. Two hundred Jewish inmates chose to sabotage the creation of the V-2 bomb.

Postcards and Camp Currency

   Today, a visit to Camp Dora and the Mittelwerk tunnels can be described as a haunting experience. On the day the images below were photographed the weather was appropriately overcast and raining, which added to the overall sad feeling that was experienced. With the exception of the buildings cleared from their foundations in the 1960s, the remains of the prisoner camp—along with the interior of the manufacturing tunnels—are surprisingly intact even after 60+ years. The odd silence of the surroundings only amplified the reality of what had occurred here more than 50 years ago.

All photographs copyright Ed Straten

Roll call was conducted regardless of the weather conditions. The daily ordeals associated with roll call further weakened the already exhausted and insufficiently clothed inmates. During such roll calls, which often lasted hours, inmates often collapsed from fatigue or were brutally beaten by members of the SS.  

Some gallows also stood on the roll call square, which the SS used to execute prisoners whom they accused of sabotage or a flight attempt. Mass hangings, which inmates were forced to watch, served as intimidation.

Until 1942, work was mainly used in the concentration camps as a form of punishment or even extermination; to the National Socialists, repression was more important than economic output. Only when the war led to a labour shortage was there a shift in the function of the concentration camps. The Nazi leadership now developed a plan for utilising concentration camp prisoners in the German war industries.

The inmates in the Holzen subcamp followed the Allied advance with a mixture of hope and anxiety. On 12 January 1945, the Soviets launched the winter offensive that brought the Red Army ever closer to the Oder and the Neisse. Allied troops were also forcing the Germans back in the west.

The evacuation of the “gypsy family camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau began in April 1944. By August, the SS had transferred about 1500 male Sinti and Roma to the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp. Among them were many teenagers and even some children. Almost all of them were taken to the subcamps Ellrich-Juliushütte and Harzungen, where, like the adults, they were assigned to exhausting forced labor on construction sites.

In June 1944, the first women's subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp was established on the grounds of Kamenzer Straße 10 and 12 (then Bautzner Straße) in the Leipzig district of Schönefeld. With more than 5,000 prisoners, the "HASAG Leipzig" subcamp developed into the largest women's subcamp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp within five months.

Image: Identity card of Felicja Karay, née Schächter, from 1947 (Leipzig Nazi Forced Labour Memorial)

The Harz Mountains are the land of German fairy tales: steep-roofed houses with tiny windows and narrow, cobblestone streets.

A world of dark forests, rushing streams and stormy mountains.

Alabama is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think about the Jewish experience in the United States, but it turns out that Jews have been a presence in the state's history going hack quite a long way. The earliest reference is unfortunately a negative one, involving a 1724 decree by the French governor of the Mobile region ordering the expulsion of Jews and restricting religious worship to Roman Catholicism.

On a more positive note, individual Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs began settling in Alabama as early as 1800, one of them, Abraham Mordecai, building the state's first cotton gin in 1802 near the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers. By around 1850 there were established Jewish communities in Mobile and Montgomery, each with their own synagogues. 

The Huntsville Jewish Heritage Center at the Temple B’nai Sholom explains the religion and traditions of Judaism, provides a history of Huntsville’s Jewish popula-tion, and shares the many contributions of the Jewish community to Huntsville’s civic and cultural life. Located in the original study used by Temple rabbis, the artful displays of the Heritage Center weave together an overarching narrative that offers great insight into the Jewish religion and asks visitors of all faiths to reflect upon the beliefs shared in common.

Home to four incredible STEM education programs—Space Camp®, Aviation Challenge®, Space Camp® Robotics, and U.S. Cyber Camp®—the USSRC isn't just a museum: it's an experience.

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center annually hosts visitors from every state in the U.S. and more than 80 foreign nations who come to share the spirit of discovery through immersive education and experience. The USSRC’s large rocket and space hardware collection contains more than 1,500 items that showcase the past, present and future of human spaceflight.

A vintage 1957 film on the origin of the Redstone Missile Program. The Redstone was an example of the evolution of a military defense project turned towards civilian space exploration uses. The Redstone rocket was named for the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It was first launched in 1953. A variation of the Redstone was used to launch EXPLORER 1, the first U.S. orbital satellite in 1958. On May 5, 1961, the Mercury-Redstone version carried astronaut Alan Shepard in the “Freedom 7” capsule. Shepard became the first American in space. Two months later, Astronaut Gus Grissom became the second U.S. astronaut in space, aboard another Mercury Redstone, carrying the “Liberty Bell 7” capsule. This film shares a bit of early history of the Redstone.