The history of the Dora concentration camp begins on August 28, 1943, with the arrival of the first convoy of prisoners from the Buchenwald camp. Over the course of the previous year the military situation in Germany had considerably worsened, and Dora’s beginnings were in many respects conditioned by this new situation.
On August 23, 1942, German troops had reached the Volga at Stalingrad, and the Swastika-emblazoned flag had been hoisted on Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus. By November 1942 the Germans had even reached the territory of the autonomous Checheno-Ingush Republic. In Africa, Rommel, who had been made field marshal, had reached El Alamein, at the gates of Alexandria, in July. In the West, a Canadian raid had foundered at Dieppe on August 19, 1942. The Todt Organization was pursuing the building of the Atlantic Wall. The success of U-boat and Luftwaffe attacks on Allied convoys in the North Atlantic had led to the suspension of convoys to Murmansk. The cooperation of the Vichy authorities had enabled the Vél d’Hiv roundup on July 16, 1942.
By August 1943, however, the picture was entirely different—and above all on the Eastern Front. Encircled at Stalingrad since November 22, 1942, the German Sixth Army utterly capitulated on February 2, 1943. The retreat of German troops who had adventured into the Caucasus came to a close when the Soviets took back Rostov on February 14. The front line subsequently stabilized between Moscow and the Sea of Azov, leaving a large Russian salient around Kursk, reconquered on February 8, 1943.
Anxious to regain the initiative, Hitler set about to reduce this heavily fortified salient. Operation Citadel, put off on several occasions, was launched on July 5, 1943.1 As the military historian Philippe Masson, among others, has put it, “At dawn on 5 July, began one of the most grandiose battles of all time.” Both sides, convinced of the importance of what was at stake, pitted a large portion of their tanks, artillery, and airpower against one another. The fighting was bitter and the losses considerable. On July 12, aware of his failure, Hitler halted the offensive, but the battle spread northward and southward. The Soviets took back Orel on August 5 and Kharkov (definitively) on August 22. The reconquest of the Ukraine had begun, and the Germans were pulling back toward the Dnieper.
On the Mediterranean side, developments had been no more satisfying from a German perspective. Rommel, beaten at El Alamein on November 4, 1942, had quickly retreated toward the west, and the British rolled into Tripoli on January 23, 1943. Meanwhile, an Anglo-American landing had taken place in Morocco and Algeria on November 8, 1942, and a new front had been opened in Tunisia. The fighting in North Africa came to an end on May 13, 1943, with the capitulation of the last of the German and Italian troops in Tunisia.
The next phase came with the landing in Sicily2 on July 10, 1943, the conquest of the island winding up on August 18. Meanwhile, on July 25 in Rome, Mussolini was overthrown and interned, and the king of Italy designated Field Marshal Badoglio to replace him. The month of August passed with uncertainty, but Hitler, who had no confidence whatsoever in King Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio, prepared for the occupation of Italy. It was only in September, however, that events grew precipitous. On the 8th the Italian government announced that it had concluded an armistice with the Allies and left Rome for Brindisi. On the 9th the Americans landed at Salerno and the British at Taranto. On the 10th the Germans occupied Rome and on the 12th freed Mussolini. Italian troops were taken prisoner by the Germans, both in Italy itself and in the Balkans.
In mid-1943 the Germans were faced with yet another crisis, due to the Luftwaffe’s increasing inferiority compared to British, American, and Soviet air-power. In particular, German territory was more and more often the target of Allied bombing raids.3 On three occasions, on July 24, 27, and 29, the RAF launched massive attacks on Hamburg, inflicting enormous damage. During the night of August 17–18, the rocket-testing center in Peenemünde was bombed. Simultaneously the Americans hit large factories in Regensburg and Schweinfurt. On August 18 the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, General Jeschonneck, committed suicide. Meanwhile, the most recent successes of the German submarines dated back to March, and by mid-1943 the Kriegsmarine was also in crisis.
Following the Anglo-American landing in North Africa, German troops had occupied all of France, entering the zone libre on November 11, 1942. On February 16, 1943, the STO (Service du travail obligatoire, or Compulsory Work Service) in Germany was established. There were a large number of réfractaires—people who refused this compulsory service—and a segment of French youth went underground, using fake identity papers. Some joined the Resistance movement—the maquis—while others sought to reach North Africa via Spain. Arrests of Resistance fighters increased.
This panorama of events makes it easier to understand what took place in Dora as of August 1943. The setbacks of classical weaponry, particularly at Kursk, made new arms all the more appealing. Air raids on German factories provided impetus for the development of underground facilities. Events in the Ukraine, Italy, and France enabled immediate expansion of the concentration camp workforce.
In August 1943, responsibility for setting up a new factory for the construction of V2s was above all in the hands of Albert Speer and his Armaments Ministry, whose title was still Reichsministerium für Bewaffnung und Munition. The ministry had been established on March 17, 1940, and put in the hands of Dr. Fritz Todt, born in 1891 and a member of the Nazi Party since 1922. In 1933, Todt had created the Todt Organization, a paramilitary group in charge of carrying out large works and fortification projects in Germany. It had first of all built the autobahn network, followed by the fortifications of the Westwall facing the Maginot Line.
The Armaments Ministry was created in 1940 to resolve problems in the manufacture of ammunition, but Todt had not been given responsibility for naval or aircraft construction and was not supposed to interfere with Hermann Göring’s prerogatives in the execution of the Four-Year Plan. Todt remained, moreover, at the head of the Todt Organization, which was in charge of building the Atlantic Wall. This sort of bastardized system was characteristic of how the Nazi administration operated. From late 1941 on, Todt’s essential preoccupation was to reestablish communications routes, especially railways, in that part of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans, where they had been methodically destroyed. The principal difficulties were encountered in the Ukraine, where Todt was assisted by the architect Speer, who was also a member of the government.
While on a mission in Dnepropetrovsk in early February 1942, Speer, unable to take the train because of heavy snow, returned by plane on the 7th to Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg in East Prussia.4 Todt, who happened to be there, died on February 8 at eight o’clock in the morning in an airplane crash following takeoff, the circumstances of which were never elucidated. Five hours later, Hitler entrusted Speer with all the functions previously exercised by Todt. Speer returned to Berlin by train on February 9. He was thirty-seven years old.
Speer’s career had already been exceptional. Born in 1905 in Mannheim, he was the son of a very wealthy architect. He too studied architecture in Munich and subsequently in Berlin, joining the Nazi Party in March 1931. He opened his own office and worked in the building where the Gauleiter of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, had his headquarters. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, he directed various projects for Goebbels, who had become propaganda minister. It was at this time, in the fall of 1933, that Speer was noticed by Hitler, who had a passion for architecture, and became a part of his close circle. He did the lighting design (the “cathedral of light”) for the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in 1934. In 1935 he was put in charge of studying the vast new complex planned for Nuremberg, the first stone of which was laid in 1937, which was to be completed by 1945. In 1937 he designed the German pavilion at the Paris Exhibition.
Hitler envisaged gigantic projects for the transformation of Berlin. It was in this perspective that, in January 1937, Speer was named Generalbauinspektor, giving him the rank of secretary of state. He was thirty-two years old. In 1939, while continuing to work on the Nuremberg and Berlin projects, he began studying airports, shipyards, factories, and air-raid shelters. In the summer of 1941 his organization became the “Baustab Speer.” Hitler asked him to give thought to the future German settlements in the Ukraine, but he went there above all in order to get the railways and heavy facilities operational once again. Following in Todt’s footsteps was a very heavy responsibility, but he had the requisite experience.
Speer kept Todt’s principal collaborators in place. Xaver Dorsch stayed at the head of the Todt Organization, with substantial autonomy. Karl Otto Saur, head of the Technisches Amt, was his main deputy minister. In the course of a meeting on February 13, 1942, Hitler laid out the extent of Speer’s responsibilities. He was given more leeway, for instance, with regard to Göring than Todt had been given.5 With Hitler’s support, Speer tended to rely on company technicians—whom he very frequently visited—rather than on bureaucrats or leaders of large industries. Some of these same technicians would later be involved at Dora.
One problem he faced was the distribution of raw materials and construction-related materials. The other problem had to do with the workforce, which was insufficient. Todt, like Speer after him, was unable to impose his point of view as to the need for total mobilization—of women in particular—as was by then the case in Great Britain.6 Fritz Sauckel, Gauleiter of Thuringia and one of Hitler’s old companions, did his best to overcome these difficulties by recruiting workers—both men and women—in the Ukraine and other occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Aside from these Ostarbeiter, other more or less forced workers were brought from Italy, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In France, the government itself established the STO in February 1943. But thought was also given to making use of the concentration camp labor force. What went on in Peenemünde in 1943 is entirely significant for the combining of these two sources of labor.
Some people have argued that by mid-1943 in National Socialist Germany there existed an “SS empire” constituting a state within the state. The expression used is of little importance, inasmuch as there was nothing genuinely institutional about it; rather, it was a progressively established de facto situation, open to further development.
The SS itself, the Schutzstaffel (protection squad), was the name that, in 1925, was given to the small personal guard that had been created in 1923 for the protection of Hitler, head of the Nazi Party. In 1929 this SS was put under the command of Heinrich Himmler, designated Reichsführer-SS. Born in 1900, Himmler was a long-standing Nazi, having taken part in the attempted putsch in Munich in November 1923. Under Himmler the SS became a troop with a limited number—but a highly disciplined and fanatical corps—of members; a “black order” whose slogan “Your honor is your fidelity” referred to unconditional fidelity to the führer.
The SS was thus very different from Ernst Röhm’s SA, the Sturmabteilung or assault section, a mass movement that engaged in street-level opposition to communist organizations. In the autumn of 1932 the SA counted some 700,000 men, as opposed to 50,000 in the SS. Nevertheless, right from the early years of the Nazi regime in 1933–34, the SS won out definitively over the SA and indeed played a decisive role in doing away with Röhm and his circle during the “Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934. At the end of this period, Himmler was master of the concentration camps and the police. A veritable concentration camp system was set up in Dachau by Theodor Eicke, who, in July 1934, became Inspektor der Konzentrationslager. Other camps were later set up along the lines of this early model, including Sachsenhausen in 1936, Buchenwald in 1937, Mauthausen in 1938, and Ravensbrück in 1939. These camps were devised to intern and progressively eliminate opponents of the Nazi regime.
The takeover of the police was a long and complex operation. In 1931, Himmler had already created, within the Nazi Party itself, the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst (security service), in the hands of Reinhard Heydrich. With Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, the political police depended on various states—Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and so on. Göring set up a Gestapo, or Geheime Staatspolizei (secret police) in Prussia, where he was minister-president.7 Himmler established an equivalent force in most of the other states, then also successfully gained control of the Prussian Gestapo in April 1934. On June 17, 1936, these different police groups were brought together and Himmler became chef der deutschen Polizei while conserving his role as Reichsführer-SS.8 Finally, on September 27, 1939, the Gestapo and the SD were also grouped together in the RSHA, Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Central Security Office of the Reich.9 In the meantime, the Kripo, or criminal police, and the Gestapo had formed the SIPO, or security police. Very often, members of the SS took charge of various branches of the RSHA, which ensured overall cohesion. Following Heydrich’s death (he was killed in Prague in 1942), Ernst Kaltenbrunner replaced him at the head of this organization.
The SS managed to impose itself on German society. A number of its officers came from the aristocracy or intellectual circles. Executive members who continued to work in their field were members of the Allgemeine-SS, the general SS. Himmler even created the title of “honorary leader,” which was awarded to upper civil servants, scholars, and diplomats without their actually having to carry out any real duty.10
Some SS members were quartered in barracks and comprised the Waffen-SS, the armed SS. It consisted of 7,000 men in 1935 and some 23,000 in 1939. In 1940, four SS divisions, including three motorized divisions, were deployed in Holland and then in France. One of them was Eicke’s Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division, made up of camp guards. From 80,000 men in 1940, the Waffen-SS swelled to 140,000 men in 1942 and to 300,000 by the end of 1943.
The political and military power thus acquired, however, failed to satisfy the SS and Himmler. It had to be supplemented by economic power. In 1940 the WVHA, Wirtschaft- und Verwaltungshauptamt, or Central Office for the Economy and Administration, was set up under the command of Oswald Pohl, who was in charge of carrying out this project. According to a 1942 organization chart,11 it had five departments, the first two of which, A (budget) and B (supplies and clothing), were purely technical. Department C (construction) was run by Hans Kammler, who was in charge, most notably, of building the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Department D corresponded to what had been Eicke’s concentration camp inspection unit, following his transfer into the Waffen-SS and subsequent death on the Eastern Front in 1943. The switchover came into effect in April 1942 and Richard Glücks, who replaced Eicke, became head of Department D. Department W, dealing with the economy (Wirtschaft) in general, was put under Pohl’s direct authority. A large part of the WVHA bureaucracy had already been in place since 1938 in buildings in Oranienburg—part of a vast complex, also comprising the Sachsenhausen camp, the SS barracks, and various workshops and factories.
For a long period the direct involvement of the SS in the economy was limited, and was exercised through the intermediary of the company Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke, or German Earth and Stone Works, created on April 29, 1938.12 The sadly famous Mauthausen quarry and Klinker Brickworks in Oranienburg served both repression and industrial activity. Elsewhere, in many camps, including Buchenwald as well as Dora, for example, the Quarry (Steinbruch) Kommando continued to have a disciplinary function.
On January 26, 1942, Himmler, writing to Glücks13 with regard to the deportation of German Jews, added: “Large economic tasks are to be transferred to the camps in the coming weeks. Pohl will fill you in on the details.” On March 16, on Himmler’s instructions, Pohl went to Speer’s office (minister only as of February 8) to determine the number of prisoners apt for work to be made available to the war industry.14 It would appear that he offered 25,000 men—6,000 from Sachsenhausen and 5,000 from Buchenwald.
Several options for associating a factory with a camp were thus possible. The simplest, which seems to have been adopted in late 1942 for the prisoners of Sachsenhausen, was to establish a camp in the compound of an existing factory: the Heinkel Kommando was thus set up in a building of the Heinkel aircraft factory in Germendorf, near Oranienburg. It was a very large Kommando, in 1944 comprising as many as 7,000 or 8,000 prisoners, 1,000 of whom were French. Another option was to set up a camp next to a factory, as was the case with the large Falkensee camp set up in 1943 to the west of Berlin, next to the DEMAG factory, for building railway material and Tiger tanks. There too, prisoners from Sachsenhausen were used. The fact that this camp was close to the WVHA no doubt fostered these early arrangements in liaison with Speer’s Armaments Ministry. There was even a “Speer” Kommando near the camp, devoted to the recuperation of nonferrous metals from old electric cables.
On the basis of muddled passages in Speer’s last book,15 it would seem that establishing a factory at Buchenwald next to a large existing camp (rather than putting a Kommando next to an existing factory) raised serious problems. The plan was to create a Gustloff factory for the manufacture of rifles, although the Gustloff Werke established in Weimar already employed prisoners from a Buchenwald Kommando. The factory was finally set up. As will be shown, Dora’s beginnings were of an entirely different nature: right from the beginning the point was to set up a factory and a camp simultaneously, which would together form a whole.
Making camp prisoners available for industry, and especially for the arms industry, didn’t entail any change of status for them. An extract from Pohl’s instructions, dated April 21, 1942,16 sheds light on this point: “The camp commander alone is responsible for the employment of the work potential. This employment has to be taken in the true and full sense of the word, in order to maximize the rate of yield. Work time is linked to no time schedule.”
Judging by the memo that Glücks sent to SS camp doctors on December 26, 1942, it does not appear that the camp commanders were able successfully to adapt themselves to carrying out these instructions.17 In it he states: “Attached for your information is a table of current arrivals and exits in all the concentration camps. It would so appear that of some 136,000 in-coming prisoners, 70,000 have died. With a mortality rate of this kind, the number of prisoners will never reach the level the Reichsführer-SS has ordered. [. . .] Camp doctors are to pay closer attention than previously to the prisoners’ food. [. . .]
“Furthermore, doctors are to show concern for the work conditions on the different work sites in order to improve them as may be possible.” The memo’s conclusion is unequivocal: “The Reichsführer-SS has ordered an appreciable decrease in mortality.” No heed whatsoever, of course, was paid to this memo, as can be noted, a year later, in Dora.