The decisions made in August 1943 after the bombing of Peenemünde had two important consequences. The first was to break up the geographical and administrative unity of the V2 design and production apparatus, until then held together only through Dornberger’s obstinacy. The second was to establish an organic, indissoluble link between the German rocket venture and the Nazi concentration camp system—under the worst conditions for the prisoners concerned. The new organization will be described in this chapter. The following chapters deal with “the Hell of Dora” between September 1943 and May 1944.
The most important organization-related decision was the immediate transfer of the V2 production factory from the Peenemünde base to the underground complex at Kohnstein—that is, the Dora Tunnel. This represented the transfer of materiel, German staff, and the prisoners already sent from Buchenwald to Peenemünde/Karlshagen. The two men in charge of the operation were Sawatzki, given the task of planning the entire operation, and Rudolph, who was to set up the factory and get it running. Rudolph was one of the senior rocket specialists, while Sawatzki had recently arrived from another industrial sector. Both were Nazis.
At the same time, V2 production, having escaped the control of the Ordnance Office, was entrusted to a new limited liability company called Mittelwerk GmbH, set up in Berlin on September 21, 1943, in the course of a meeting presided over by Speer (assisted by Degenkolb and Kunze), in which Professor Hettlage took part, representing the Amt für Wirtschaft und Finanzen, which was looking after the financing. Also attending were Kammler, representing the SS, and Franz Wehling, manager of the WIFO, owner of the Dora Tunnel.1 The capital was held by the Rüstungskontor GmbH, or Armament Fund Ltd., set up on May 4, 1942, and given charge of various tasks including the distribution of steel and nonferrous metals. This organization also had offices in the occupied countries and particularly in France.
Kurt Kettler, director of the Borsig locomotive factory in Hennigsdorf, near Berlin, was also present at the meeting and was appointed manager. The Mittelwerk offices were, in principle, to be set up in Berlin-Charlottenburg, but in actual fact were in the premises (a former convent, secularized in the sixteenth century) occupied by the Napola at Ilfeld.2 A certain number of directors were subsequently appointed—including Sawatzki and SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Förschner, the Dora camp commander, who was put in charge of security.
Replacing a hydrocarbon and raw materials depot with a mechanical-engineering factory in the tunnels required heavy work and much manual labor. Moreover, the tunnels themselves were unfinished. As the WIFO already had staff and material on location, either directly or through subcontractors, contracts were concluded with it for renting premises and managing the conversion work. Mittelwerk’s partner was the WIFO’s Ni Agency (derived from Niedersachswerfen), directed by Karl Wilhelm Neu since 1936.3
Beginning on October 1, 1943, Sawatzki established plans for the new underground factory.4 With an overall surface area in the order of 1.04 million square feet, the factory was meant to employ in the long run some 18,000 people, including 2,000 German civilians and 16,000 prisoners of all nationalities. Before the Peenemünde bombing, it should not be forgotten that three sites were chosen for assembling the V2s: Peenemünde, Friedrichshafen, and Wiener Neustadt. In November 1943, following the bombings, Wiener Neustadt was dropped from the list: the equipment and some of the personnel (Germans and prisoners) were transferred to Dora. In Friedrichshafen, that portion of production intended for V2s was limited to the fuel tanks and center section. The assembly of the V2s was concentrated in the Dora Tunnel.
The transfer of the production factory was not the only repercussion felt in Peenemünde after the August 18 bombing. The whole base was split up into various units for which new locations had to be found. The damage had been extensive in the inhabited zones—hardest hit—but the factories and annexed installations could have continued to function following more or less extensive repairs. That, at any rate, was what Dornberger hoped.
There exists a late (1989) testimony by a French prisoner, Roger Berthereau, who was part of a group of electricians, that has to do with the damage suffered by one of the electrical power stations. With several friends, whose names he provides, he managed to discreetly but effectively worsen the damage. He provides the first precise indications of successful sabotage on the basis of favorable circumstances, by a small group that was at once competent and able to keep a secret.5
There was one transfer from Peenemünde that in the end did not come about until evacuation in February 1945: that of the development unit, whose technical director was Wernher von Braun. In October 1943, however, it had been decided to install the unit in the early months of 1944 at Ebensee (in Upper Austria, on the south shore of Lake Traunsee) in an underground complex still to be dug. Prisoners from Mauthausen arrived on location on November 18, 1943, to begin the digging, which was to continue right up until April 1945, with other uses in mind. Von Braun took advantage of the various technical difficulties that cropped up in order to stay on at Peenemünde, in what remained an army base.6
Peenemünde ceased, however, to depend on Dornberger, whom General Fromm—commander of the army of the interior—appointed Beauftragter zur besonderen Verwendung Heer, or “army commissioner for special tasks,” on September 4. The objective, in fact, was to create and train units in charge of launching the rockets. Dornberger set up his headquarters in Schwedt, on the Oder, upstream from Stettin, and thus not far from Peenemünde. Collaboration between him and von Braun was able to continue easily. It was Zanssen, initially, who replaced him at the head of the “Wa Prüf 11.”7
The most important transfer, aside from that of the production factory, was that of much of the rocket testing. Instead of firing V2s from Peenemünde out over the Baltic toward the east, it was decided to fire them northward from Blizna—a former firing range of the Polish artillery taken over by the SS and which was situated within the General Government of Poland, ninety miles northeast of Krakow near the confluence of the Vistula and the San. The SS gave it the name of Heidelager.8
The schema decided on was as follows. The rocket would be designed in the development unit, which remained at Peenemünde, until its planned transfer to Ebensee. It would be assembled by Mittelwerk in the Dora Tunnel and sent from there to Blizna for a test flight—no small journey. When the conclusions to be drawn from the launch at Blizna implied modifications to the rocket, they would be brought back to Peenemünde where they would be studied, in order to introduce them into the assembly by Mittelwerk, before another rocket would be sent to Blizna for another trial. Things had really been far simpler when everything took place at Peenemünde. The British pilots no doubt overestimated the destruction they had wreaked on Peenemünde; they nevertheless did succeed in disorganizing the German system.
But at the end of 1943 this schema existed in theory alone. Indeed, no rocket was produced between August 1943 and January 1944, and only the eight built at Peenemünde in early August still remained.9 It took more than four months—four terrible months for the prisoners—to get the V2 production factory up and running in its new underground site. Other transfers were decided in late 1943, such as that of Rudolf Hermann’s wind tunnel to Kochel, on the edge of the Alps, south of Munich. A company bearing a code name was set up for this purpose.10 The new wind tunnel would operate only until October 1944.11
The setting up of test centers for the V2 engines in two locations—Lehesten and Redl-Zipf—was much quicker. At Lehesten, a large slate quarry situated on the border of Thuringia and Bavaria south of Saalfeld was converted for these purposes.12 At Redl-Zipf, in Upper Austria northeast of Salzburg, a hill behind a brewery had to be dug into.13 In both cases the labor force came from concentration camps. The Redl-Zipf work site was opened on October 4, 1943, by prisoners from Mauthausen. It was a Kommando from Buchenwald that, at the same time, opened the work site at Lehesten. Thus the new phase of V2 development was in all cases associated with the concentration camp system: in Dora and Lehesten as well as at Ebensee and in Redl-Zipf.
In his new functions, on October 4, Dornberger visited Hitler, who, ignoring his advice, decided on the construction of a new bunker at Wizernes,14 south of the northern French city of Saint-Omer, to replace that of Éperlecques, once again bombed on September 7. The new site was some twelve miles from the previous one, next to the Saint-Omer/Boulogne railway line. It was an enormous chalkworks, whose base could be dug out in order to safely store, within its four and a half miles of tunnels, a large number of V2s prior to their launch.
The central part had to be transformed to ready it for firing rockets in a vertical position. And, in order for the entire complex to be sheltered from bombings, an impressive-sized dome of concrete was poured over the central section: 16 feet thick and 234 feet in diameter, it had an overall mass of fifty thousand tons. The Todt Organization contracted the work out to a large Rhineland company, Philipp Holzmann. The labor force was made up of German workers, including Westphalian miners, and forced laborers, in particular Russian and Polish prisoners of war. Three teams worked around the clock.
The Éperlecques site was not totally abandoned, however. The bunker was re-built there, where a liquid oxygen factory was to be set up.
In order to appreciate the responsibilities of the various parties in subsequent events, it is worthwhile pointing out the relative positions, in the autumn of 1943, of the army, the Armaments Ministry, and the SS. The dominant authority was the minister Albert Speer, who enjoyed the führer’s full confidence. In September 1943 his ministry changed names. Since Todt had created it in 1940, it had been the Reichsministerium für Bewaffnung und Munition, giving it authority for arms and munitions production. Its new title, Reichsministerium für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion, broadened its domain of competence to all armament and war production. This had already been the de facto situation, but it was significant that it be thus made official.
Regarding rocket production, there were three hierarchical levels. At the head of it was Speer, and his assistant Saur, head of the Technisches Amt. Beneath him was the Sonderausschuss A4, with Degenkolb and his assistant Kunze. At the base was the Mittelwerk company, directed by Kettler along with Sawatzki. The SS provided the concentration camp labor force, based on Kammler’s instructions, who had received full powers from Himmler in this regard. The fact that Förschner was one of the directors of Mittelwerk was symbolic, given his lack of competence.
Von Braun appeared isolated in Peenemünde, but with his team of specialists he alone was in a position to push the project forward, with the help of the artillerymen Dornberger and Zanssen. Indeed, the V2 was still not operational, and would only become so in September 1944, in the wake of further tests carried out by Dornberger and von Braun.
While waiting for the Mittelwerk factory to provide the V2s for these tests, von Braun kept the Peenemünde installations operational away from the ruins, which were left deliberately “intact” to mislead aerial observations. He traveled a great deal in the final months of 1943 to sort out the technical problems raised by the installations in the Dora Tunnel, in Lehesten, and in Redl-Zipf. That time frame coincided with the most painful period for the prisoners at all three sites.
As already seen in chapter 2, a preoccupation with secrecy had ultimately led to name changes—Karlshagen replacing Peenemünde, for instance. Beginning in August 1943 the practice of coding became systematic, and it is necessary to take a closer look at this issue in order to avoid confusions and recognize the synonyms. “Dora” designated the Kommando that was sent to the Mittelwerk factory at Kohnstein and later to the corresponding camp. Though its usage became generalized, the name was not official at first. “Laura” referred to the Kommando working in Lehesten. Dora and Laura depended on Buchenwald.
The work sites opened in Upper Austria by the prisoners from Mauthausen were assigned names of minerals. Ebensee was given the name Zement (cement). Redl-Zipf became Schlier, a rock typical of the region. This type of coding was later applied to the work sites near Dora. There was also a coding system based on animal names. As of September 1943 the Peenemünde unit was called Kitz, the kid.15
The first plan laid out by Sawatzki on October 1, 1943, was allegedly written in Hammersfeld—a place that does not exist. This name was soon dropped. The WIFO report of December 31, which will be referred to further on, was dated “OU,” which corresponds to Ort ungenannt, or “unnamed place,” the height of camouflage.16 The postal address of the Dora camp was first Block 17 of the Buchenwald camp, and then Sangerhausen, a city some thirty miles to the east of Nordhausen, whose name, on the other hand, never appears.
The whole region around Dora—that is, the region of Nordhausen and the neighboring zones of the Harz Mountains—constituted a whole secret network. It was the Mittelraum, where the Mittelbau complex was to be found, including the Mittelwerk company.17 One can merely guess that it had to do with central, or “middle,” Germany.
From September 1943 until March 1944, “transports” of prisoners to Dora from the Buchenwald camp—chosen for the most part from within the quarantine blocks—never ceased. In general they concerned a round figure: 250 prisoners in the case of the February 11, 1944, transport, of which the author was part, including a very large majority of French prisoners who had arrived from Compiègne with the first major convoy in January.
Eventually the goal was to attain the requisite number of workers to satisfy the Mittelwerk company’s manpower needs and ensure the functioning of the neighboring camp. But first, it was above all necessary to have an indefinite mass of prisoners to carry out the task of transforming the factory and the camp. Because this transformation work led to numerous victims, whose corpses were transported to Buchenwald to be incinerated, they had to be replaced, and it was this kind of occurrence that gave Dora its justifiably detestable reputation. Further on, an attempt will be made, on the basis of available information, to draw up a statistical table of this period. But its essential features must first of all be described.
Until February 1944 inclusively, newcomers to Dora, with the exception of several rare Prominente, were immediately sent into the tunnel, where they were housed, as Sawatzki had intended right from his initial plan. On the outside, the SS barracks, indispensable collective buildings such as the kitchen, and the few prisoners’ barracks that will be discussed later (Revier, Schonung, Italian POW block) were built. Absolute priority was given to getting the factory ready, and the construction of an external camp was deliberately postponed. It was only in January 1944 that the prisoners of the Kommandos working on the outside began to be housed outside the tunnel. The others remained there until April–May. The last to come out, in May (May 29, as Henry Bousson points out), were the electricians of the Kommando AEG. Among them was Léon Bronchart and his young friend Georges Argoux, who arrived there in September 1943. Their underground stay lasted nine months.18
The ordeals common to all that resulted from overcrowding in the “dormitories,” which took the place of blocks, as well as the total absence of hygiene, will be dealt with later. But it must be added that these dormitories were not situated amid an operating factory but at the very heart of an unimaginable work site, full of noise and dust. In the tunnels and galleries at Kohnstein, the WIFO’s underground stockpile had to be evacuated, the boring of tunnel A completed, and various redigging, filling-in, and concrete-laying jobs carried out. Electrical and other networks had to be set up, with all machines, workshops, and offices installed. With everything being done in improvisation and precipitation, the disorder was as apparent as it was real. Those in charge were increasingly overwhelmed the lower one went in the hierarchy, and the blows just rained down on basic prisoners. It is an open question as to whether the outside Kommandos doing the “earthwork” for road and railway building in the mud and cold were better or worse off than those in the tunnel. In any case, for months on end the prisoners concerned returned to sleep in the tunnel.
Only at the very beginning of 1944 was the tunnel factory in a position to deliver its first V2 for trials at Blizna. And only in March–April was the factory itself more or less completed. It was then and only then, when construction of the camp was finished, that the last Kommandos were able to leave the tunnel dormitories for real blocks outside. The transports from Buchenwald to Dora in March provided the requisite workforce that did not sleep in the tunnel.
The “transports” from Buchenwald to Dora having been set up essentially for those prisoners in quarantine, their order corresponded with the convoys that arrived in Buchenwald. The progression can be tracked with regard to both French prisoners and prisoners of other nationalities arrested in France. The same could be done for the Ukrainians, for instance, but the information is not easily available. The first convoy arriving in Buchenwald from Compiègne on June 27, 1943, was comprised of 1,000 deportees, who were numbered in the “14,000” series (beginning at around “13,800”). A group of them left for Peenemünde/Karlshagen, where they arrived on July 11. The others remained in Buchenwald. Certain among them would later be part of the first transports to Dora, at the very beginning of September.
A second convoy of 900 arrived in Buchenwald on September 4. This group was numbered in the “20,000” series. A large number of them got to Dora on September 28 and 29. The convoy of a thousand who arrived on September 18 made up the “21,000” series. Beginning on October 13, many of them arrived in Dora.
A transport of sixty-one prisoners was registered on September 20 in Buchenwald, coming from Sachsenhausen. They were immediately sent to Dora. The group was made up of sixty miners from the Pas-de-Calais and from Huy in Belgium, and of Léon Bronchart, who had the number 21983. The numbers of the others went beyond “22,000.” The return of prisoners sent to Karls-hagen was registered in Buchenwald on October 14. They were renumbered, some toward the end of the “22,000” series, some at the beginning of the “28,000” series. Both groups were immediately sent to Dora.
Some French deportees were numbered in the lower “30,000”s, such as Louis Girard, Marcel Baillon, and Georges Virondeau. They did not come from Compiègne but had passed through a variety of prisons in both France and Germany. The convoy of October 30 coming from Compiègne was initially made up of a thousand deportees. There were 911 when they arrived (the number of deportees who died in the course of the “journey” varies from one convoy to another). Their numbers fell between the “30,000”s and “31,000”s. They arrived at Dora on November 20. On that same day a convoy arrived in Buchenwald from Mauthausen made up in fact of a number of the prisoners from the Wiener Neustadt Kommando. They were numbered above “31,500” and transferred to Dora as of November 23. The convoy of one thousand deportees who arrived from Compiègne on December 16 fell into the “38,000” series. But the last of the “38,000”s were from Alsace-Lorraine, coming from Natzweiler (that is, Struthof). They were transferred to Dora in December, followed by the others in January 1944.
In January 1944, in the framework of Operation Meerschaum (sea foam), fifty-six hundred French (or foreigners arrested in France) were deported in three convoys that arrived in Buchenwald on January 19, 24, and 29. The numbers subsequently go from 39400 to the upper “44,000”s. Overall, the prisoners of the two first convoys sent to Dora arrived there in several transports in February and went into the tunnel. Those from the third convoy arrived in March and remained in the camp. Of course, these indications are schematic. Some French prisoners remained at Buchenwald for some time before being sent on to Dora. André Guichard (14890) arrived only in December 1943, and Guy Raoul-Duval (21693) in January 1944.
It can be seen that in the course of this period, French deportees continued to arrive in Dora. The resulting variety of the testimonies makes it possible to have as complete a knowledge as possible of events in these dramatic months. Less is known about the prisoners of other nationalities. It is known that at the end of October 1943, Yugoslavs bearing numbers in the “32,000” series arrived indirectly from Italy; and that in mid-November, many Poles with numbers in the “33,000” and “34,000” series arrived. Italian prisoners of war were sent from various Stalag between October 14 and November 2.
Until the August 18, 1943, bombing, life for Buchenwald prisoners sent to Peenemünde had been tolerable, as mentioned earlier. The bombing brought on two major changes. The first was that the German Greens took power that was unleashed on the others: one of their number, known as Mischka, replaced the Red LÄ, who was killed. The second was the overcrowding in the shelters, the dormitories having been destroyed. Michel Fliecx devoted several pages of his memoirs to narrating the more or less useless recuperation activities in which he had to engage in the general disorder that followed the bombing: loosening and taking off bolts, scraping dirt off bricks, and so on.19 Ultimately, all the prisoners were transferred to Buchenwald, then to the Dora Tunnel, where the material saved from the production factory had been shipped along with a number of the German civilians.
Because the Wiener Neustadt site was threatened by air raids (the most recent on November 2, 1943), it was decided to stop production there. The evacuation of the site took place on November 17. The material and some of the civilians and prisoners were transferred to the Dora Tunnel. It seems that the rest of the prisoners were then sent to the Redl-Zipf work site, which had just opened with prisoners from Mauthausen.
The miners who arrived from Sachsenhausen in a special transport were designated to finish digging tunnel A at Kohnstein. They very erroneously imagined that they were being sent to a coal mine in the Saar.20 Léon Bronchart, who was with them, was an extraordinary individual, whose name will be mentioned later in connection with the AEG Kommando.