Trucks bearing piles of corpses left every other day for the crematorium ovens at Buchenwald.Īs the facility neared completion all the manufacturing plant was brought from Peenemünde and reassembled by hand by the prisoners at Mittelwerk. As they became too weak to continue they would fall to their death from the scaffolding only to be replaced by another prisoner. Many of the inmates were working on top of 30 foot scaffolding using picks to enlarge the tunnels. There was no running water or sanitary facilities, disease was rife and death was often a relief. The prisoners were forced to eat and sleep in the tunnels, crammed into stinking, lice infested bunks stacked four-high in the cross tunnels.
Many prisoners were killed by frequent rock falls when the overloaded trucks came off the narrow gauge rail tracks and they were regularly kicked and beaten as they reloaded the wagons. The regime within the tunnels was very harsh with the prisoners working under inhuman conditions to enlarge the mine galleries. Construction at the Mittelwerk site started in October 1943 with the driving of two parallel ‘S’ shaped tunnels right through Kohnstein Hill from north to south A private company was established on 24th September 1943 under the control of SS Brigadier General Hans Kammler who had been responsible for building a number of extermination camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau.Ī sub-camp of Buchenwald was established within the Wifo mine in August 1943 in order to provide the workforce for the construction of the new underground facility, this later developed into the Dora (or Mittelbau) concentration camp which was eventually sited in more traditional barrack accommodation close to the south entrance but this wasn’t completed until October 1944. The site was to be known as Mittelwerk (Middle Works). The mine had opened in 1917 and having been abandoned it was commandeered by the Wehrmacht in 1936 for the storage of fuel and poison gas by mid 1943, the complex was the largest fuel and oil depot in Germany One of the sites chosen was the former Wifo gypsum mine in the Kohnstein Hill on the southern border of the Harz mountains close to Nordhausen. In order to maintain this workforce the SS set up a small concentration camp within the Peenemünde site.įollowing a devastating air attack by the Royal Air Force on Peenemünde on 17th August 1943, it soon became clear to the German High Command that missile assembly would need to be moved to protected underground sites. The main German V2 rocket production and assembly facility was at Peenemünde on the north east coast where, since July 1943 the main workforce consisted of concentration camp inmates, a ratio of up to 15 detainees to 1 lowly paid German worker. Nordhausen V2 Factory and Dora Concentration Camp
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