The assembly of V2s began in the Dora Tunnel factory in December 1943, since the first three rockets are known to have been rolled out in a symbolic gesture on the night of December 31. There is no information concerning the quality of the three rockets, which must have been mediocre. Indeed, the factory itself was not completely fitted out until a few weeks later.
A further complication arose in April 1944. The Mittelwerk company had to abandon the northern part of the tunnel as far as Hall 20 to Nordwerk Niedersachswerfen, a subsidiary of the firm Junkers. The decision was made by Kammler, who was in charge of putting German aircraft construction underground at the time. Thus Mittelwerk had to move part of its activity back to the area it retained. In July 1944, V1 assembly was transferred to the tunnel, but this time it had no effect on Mittelwerk, as it was carried out in the halls corresponding to the former dormitories and the southern end of tunnel A, which had already been dug out.
Mittelwerk was isolated from Nordwerk, which used foreign civilians and to which prisoners did not have access. Conversely, the latter were the only ones to assemble the V1s and V2s, and there was no need to separate Werk I (V2 construction) from Werk II (V1 construction). Yet, since all movement inside the tunnel was, in any case, strictly controlled, those who worked on V2s did not see the V1s, and vice versa.
All the tunnel workers were housed at the Dora camp as of May 1944. Every day at 11 A.M., the day shift (Tageschicht) took over from the night shift (Nachtschicht) which, in turn, started its shift at 11 P.M. The distance separating the camp from the tunnel was relatively short and the prisoners went on foot. Each Kommando was accompanied by its Kapo. The prisoners were counted at the beginning and end of their shift at the camp entrance.
Every four weeks the teams were switched, and each one did eighteen consecutive hours rather than the usual twelve. In May–June 1944, Sunday was indeed a day of rest, but that did not last long. Working hours were identical for German civilians, and each Kommando had the same Meister every day (except when he was ill or on leave). Starting in 1944 all the prisoners working in the Dora Tunnel were housed outside the camp. For this purpose a real camp had to be built.
For the first six months of Dora’s existence, between the arrival of the first prisoners from Buchenwald in late August 1943 and early March 1944, construction work on the camp itself was carried out only very partially and intermittently. The original camp, made up of marabou tents (some documents say they were “Finnish,” but in any case they were round), grouped together near the southern exit of tunnel B at Kohnstein, was replaced by various isolated barracks located in the valley farther to the west that had been chosen as the final site, on land bought by the WIFO. Here, administrative departments and general departments such as the kitchen were housed, whereas several blocks were set aside to house the Prominente, Italian prisoners of war, and the sick from the Revier and the Schonung. Then a few blocks were assigned to prisoners in the Kommandos working outside the tunnel. From March to June 1944, however, a genuine camp was built in an orderly fashion, and it soon took on its more or less definitive form. The thousands of prisoners that filled the tunnel dormitories were moved to the camp in April and May. Many of them were to live there until the evacuation of April 1945.
CONSTRUCTION OF THE CAMP. The methodical construction of the camp started with the arrival in March 1944 of French prisoners who had come to Buchenwald in January by the third train from Compiègne. Unlike their predecessors, most of them did not go directly to the tunnel. This was also true, of course, for prisoners of other nationalities, such as Czechs. What it meant was that, from this point on, the tunnel factory ceased to be the priority for employing newcomers. It is therefore not surprising that the participants at the meeting with Rickhey on May 6, 1944, decided to ask Kammler for an additional eighteen hundred prisoners to meet the needs of Mittelwerk.
The construction of the Dora camp was not makeshift. It was built like any ordinary housing development. First the wooded areas to be used were cleared. Then the roads were marked out and the “roll-call” yard was delimited. Water and wastewater pipes were laid. A sedimentation tank was even installed south of the SS camp. During the same period there were serious water and sewage problems at Buchenwald. Finally, after leveling the sites, barracks were built using components and accessories delivered at the marshaling yard south of the tunnel. Since it was a concentration camp, all of the workforce and supervisors were prisoners. There were also Kommandos for the sizable amount of “excavation work,” and a Kommando for assembling barracks known as the Barackenbau. At the same time it worked on housing for German civilians in Krimderode, north of Nordhausen. Chérif Ben Hassen was a member of that Kommando.1
There are three firsthand accounts by prisoners in the aforementioned train who were put to work on “excavation”: Alfred Untereiner (43652),2 Paul Rassinier (44364),3 and Marcel Petit (44448),4 each of whom achieved a certain degree of notoriety, though in different ways. Alfred Untereiner, born in 1906, was a priest from Lorraine who taught in Épernay. He was known primarily as “Brother Birin, of the Christian Schools” (and will be referred to in those terms hereafter). Paul Rassinier, also born in 1906, was a schoolteacher from Belfort who had first been a communist and then a socialist activist. Marcel Petit, born in 1888, was much older than the other two. He was the head of the veterinary school of Toulouse.
Their digging activities were interrupted, as will be seen later on, under a variety of circumstances. Birin joined the Arbeitsstatistik, thanks to his knowledge of German. Petit finally found an important job in “Labor” at the Revier. Rassinier was admitted to the Revier as a patient and remained there. Their comrades pulled through more or less successfully. The young Fernand, a former pupil and companion of Rassinier, subsequently died in Ellrich.
There are still other eyewitness accounts from former members of the Barackenbau: Yves Béon, Louis Coutaud, Alain de Lapoyade, François Latappy, Marcel Leprêtre, and Pierre Meunier. With the exception of Meunier (a “21,000”), they were all sent by the same train as Birin, Rassinier, and Petit. It seems that the Czechs played an important role in this Kommando. Béon recounts that one of them, a highly qualified carpenter, built a portico with great care that turned out to be a gallows for the roll-call yard.5
The camp had to be built, of course, but it also had to be closed in by an electric fence. First, electric poles had to be put up and covered with insulators, and the Zaunbau Kommando (Zaun is the German word for “fence”) was in charge of that task. It comprised a number of Frenchmen, again from the same train, such as Pierre Breton, Jacques Chamboissier, Maurice Clergue, Michel Delaval, Gustave Estadès, Louis Gamier, and Edmond Mallet.6 These Zaunbau and Barackenbau veterans would subsequently be found in the tunnel factory Kommandos, who were generally far luckier than their comrades assigned to excavation work.
Within a few months the camp had become a small city with more than fifty blocks for housing, nine blocks for the Revier, and some twenty blocks and various buildings for administration and joint facilities, including a cinema, a library, a canteen, a whorehouse, and a fire station. It will be seen, further on, how these joint facilities might be viewed. The blocks and the other buildings (including the transformers) were numbered, but the numbering, which went up to 150, was deceptive, since there was nothing in the camp corresponding to the figures between 43 and 100. Rassinier, who wrote “We’re now assembling Block 144,” was fooled by it, but that is only one of the errors with which his text is riddled.7
THE ROLE OF ALBERT SPEER AND ALBERT KUNTZ. There has been a great deal of discussion about the positive role played by Albert Speer and Albert Kuntz in the construction of the camp, each in his own field and without any direct connection between them. These roles have been, however, vigorously contested by some authors. The judgments that were made were no doubt considerably influenced by what happened to the two men afterward. Speer, sentenced at Nuremberg and then released after twenty years in prison, was to enjoy widespread recognition at the time due to his writings. Kuntz received only posthumous glory: he was eliminated at Dora before the Liberation and treated as a hero by East Germany. It is perfectly possible, nevertheless, to determine what was undoubtedly each one’s decisive role, without taking later events into account.
At the time, building barracks from prefabricated components was one of the major problems facing German industry, over which Speer had full control. It was necessary to house workers of varying status as well as factories and work sites involved in war production that were being increasingly damaged by Allied bombing. Very strict priorities were laid down, and Speer delivered the authorizations.
He visited Mittelwerk on December 10, 1943, to find out what the firm needed and make the required decisions. According to his later statements, that was when he signed the papers authorizing barracks construction.8 There is every reason to believe that this included the construction of both the concentration and SS camps, along with the pipes and various facilities, as well as housing for German civilians on other sites. All of this was in any case included in the summary drafted on December 31, 1943, by Neu, who was head of the WIFO.
Once missile production was declared an absolute priority, it was difficult to refuse the authorizations for workforce housing. It is puzzling that, subsequently, Speer linked his decisions to his observation of the prisoners’ situation. It does seem logical, however, that these decisions were made at the time of his visit on December 10. Nevertheless, why the directors of the Sonderausschuss A4 and Mittelwerk, whom Speer had appointed, waited three months before requesting the necessary authorization remains an open question. The consequences of the delay were tragic.
No one knows who prepared the decisions on-site. Clearly, the camp was built according to a strict plan. Did the Mittelwerk company or the WIFO call upon an outside firm to draw up the plans? It is difficult to determine, except with regard to AEG, the amount of outside intervention in the construction of Dora. It is now known, however, that an important role was played by the Schlempp construction group9 (linked to Speer) at Peenemünde, and Philipp Holzmann AG at the bunker in Wizernes, for the Todt Organization, not only in building but also in designing the works.
Three months elapsed between the date the authorizations were granted on December 10, 1943, and the beginning of construction in March 1944. There is no way of determining whether the delay was due to insufficient prisoner manpower, which was monopolized by the requirements of Mittelwerk, or to delays in delivering barracks components. It was not until March that Albert Kuntz was actually in a position to begin directing the works, as Bautechniker or Bauleiter (according to the sources, both designations were used).
Kuntz was a longtime prisoner and had been interned since 1933. At the time of his arrest he was a communist deputy in the Prussian Landtag. Born in 1896, he was a war veteran who had been wounded in 1918. He had been at Buchenwald since the beginning of the camp and was transferred to an outside Kommando in Kassel in 1943. From there he was brought to Dora in September and placed in charge of camp construction. Two other “Reds” or communists were sent from Buchenwald to be Lagerältester, but they were not of the same caliber as Kuntz, who was immediately considered by the prisoners to hold a central position.
Such a situation would have been impossible without the approval not only of Förschner, the commander of Dora, but also of Pister, the commander of Buchenwald, both of whom knew about Kuntz’s previous activities. No doubt they thought it would be good to be able to count on a man known for his organizational abilities when an especially important camp was being set up. Later there was a great deal of speculation about the relationship between Förschner and Kuntz, but it was no doubt in vain. Each one found advantages in their de facto partnership.
It is not exactly known what Kuntz did during the first months. He undoubtedly insisted that Förschner speed up camp construction, and he was probably consulted by those who drew up the plans and decided on the materials to be ordered. Kuntz was not an architect or an engineer, however, and his Baubüro was necessarily rudimentary. He was surrounded by a certain Fritz Lehmann in the Baubüro, August Kroneberg, the Kapo of Zimmerei (carpentry), and Ludwig Leineweber. Kroneberg was said to be a social democrat, and the others were communists. Apparently (as there are no explicit documents), this was the team in charge of camp construction starting in March 1944.
Whatever may have been the exact role played by the various participants in the construction process, by June 1944 a real Dora camp and a real factory in the tunnel had been completed, each one perfectly distinct yet related to each other, with the camp operating as a sort of dormitory town for the workers at the factory.
COMING OUT OF THE TUNNEL. For prisoners confined inside the tunnel, coming outside was a major event. Paul Bolteau describes the experience very simply: “The wonderful memory of seeing the sun again in April 1944 after spending six months underground. The tears of joy at seeing the sun that were shed by an old Russian in my Kommando, who nevertheless died a few days later.”10
Charles Spitz has also given an account: “On 1 May, work stopped at 1 p.m. and we were free after a relatively short roll-call. Free to walk about the camp. We were so surprised that we didn’t know what to do. Obviously, we could have slept, but the idea of wasting our only chance to see friendly faces was unthinkable. So, like Sunday strollers in provincial sub-prefectures, we walked all around the camp. We set off from the roll-call yard by the widest road which went in front of Blocks 27 and 22 and on to Block 13, which we called De Gaulle Avenue. We went all the way to the end, to Block 132 and then came back to the roll-call yard, passing behind the kitchens. In the distance, we could see the church steeples of Nordhausen, the only town in the area of which we could get a glimpse.”11
The site itself had been advantageously developed: the barracks were not in rows, as they are in most camps. Sadron goes even further in his observations: “In front of the Blocks, grassy yards and little gardens displayed their greenery. In front of the Italian barracks, one could even admire a statue and a white stone fountain of surprisingly sober elegance.”12
Another surprise awaited those who had just left behind the tunnel dormitories, with their filth and their latrines, “our revolting underground lairs” as Sadron13 called them. The blocks were brand-new and spotlessly clean, with bedsteads and straw mattresses intact. Above all there was water, with sinks for washing and real toilets with earthenware seats. It should be remembered that, in the everyday lives of many people in 1944, none of this was commonplace.
Rassinier who, despite his profession, is very poor at “writing,” has provided the following recollection in his memoirs of the camp at that time: “A central swimming pool with a diving board, a sports field, cool shade within reach, a veritable holiday camp, and anyone passing by who would be allowed to visit while the prisoners were absent would have gone away convinced that people led a pleasant life and particularly enviable life, filled with sylvan poetry, in any case, a life that had nothing in common with the unforeseeable events of the war which were the lot of free men.”14
This description is completely ridiculous, and the so-called swimming pool was a reservoir in case of fire. Yet behind this emotionalism lies the trace of a genuine impression, as a number of former Dora prisoners were to realize when a survey on the subject was carried out a few years ago.
One of them, Gustave Estadès, added the following testimony: “In the summer of 1944, an extraordinary convoy came to Dora, made up of numerous convertible cars flying the flag of each country. A few days earlier, some of the Blocks had been repainted and trees replanted. [ . . . ] Sheets and blankets had been placed in the first Block on the left. The camp was completely emptied of its prisoners, except for us, who were forgotten on the hill, from which we watched the farce. The visit lasted twenty minutes. The Red Cross Commission was forced to say it was a very good camp.”15
The SS selected a few camps for such “masquerades.” This was the case, for example, of the Jewish camp of Theresienstadt in northern Bohemia. Speer himself was treated to a visit of this type at Mauthausen on March 30, 1943, where he was photographed in the company of clean, well-fed prisoners.16 At Dora the prisoners were at least kept out of sight and were no doubt supposed to be working in the factory.
There is also an outside account of Dora in June 1944 by Serge Miller, who belonged to the Ellrich Kommando that laid electric cable in the upper part of Kohnstein: “Our cable went through the woods on the mountain, and from there we had a panorama of the camp. It was, indeed, set in a magnificent spot and it made all of us think irresistibly of a sanitarium or a rest home.”17 It was springtime, the weather was fine, and the camp was new. Miller stayed at Ellrich from beginning to end, and he saw Dora only this once, from afar.
RECRUITING SPECIALISTS. There were two categories of prisoners working in the tunnel: the most unfortunate ones had to carry often cumbersome V2 components to the assembly sites from outside. These prisoners belonged to the Transportkolonnen, which will be discussed later. The situation was the same for V1s.
All the others were considered “specialists,” a convenient umbrella term covering a complex reality. If it had been a well-organized assembly line, such as the lines of civilian workers building automobiles, airplanes, or tanks at the time, they might be referred to as skilled workers. This was not, however, quite accurate. It was not until July 1944, on the eve of the launchings, that the missiles ceased undergoing modifications and could finally be mass-produced. The workstations, moreover, were highly varied. Thus, by convention, the term “specialist” was used to refer to all those who worked in a specific place on each shift (Schicht), whether as a warehouseman, painter, or gyroscope inspector.
Most of the specialists were recruited between December 1943 and March 1944, as noted in chapter 5. This was the period during which the arrival of new prisoners from Buchenwald could barely offset the number of prisoner deaths and departures in “transports.” There are no German documents concerning the conditions under which recruitment was conducted. There was a prisoner-employment office called the Häftlingsarbeitseinsatz, which is known to have been run by a certain Dr. Simon. All our information comes from the firsthand accounts of a number of prisoners.
Dr. Simon is mentioned in the account given by René Croze, who joined the Kontrolle Scherer in early January 1944 and followed his Meister to carry out inspections on missiles (coming from Peenemünde). Dr. Simon sometimes accompanied them. Later, Croze no longer saw him. He described him as follows: “He was always dressed in a dark suit, with a white shirt, a tie and cufflinks. He knew our language perfectly but seldom spoke to me, except to say, for example: ‘It is 12:15; you are going to have lunch. Would it be possible for you to come back at one o’clock?’
“I tried to tell him about our living conditions, but he turned a deaf ear. Dr. Simon pretended not to know what was happening at Dora.”18 He took part in the May 6, 1944, meeting with Rickhey, like von Braun and Steinhoff, in his HAP 11 capacity. Later on, von Braun reported in a letter to Sawatzski, dated August 15, 1944, that he “went to see capable prisoners at Buchenwald [ . . . ] in the company of Dr. Simon.” One has the impression that, at least at a certain level, recruitment of prisoners for the factory was carried out by Peenemünde engineers who had been transferred to Mittelwerk and were working with Dr. Simon.19
Recruitment procedures varied. When prisoners were already working with a Meister, they followed him to the new organization. This was the case for some of those transferred from Peenemünde or Wiener Neustadt as well as those who belonged to small Kommandos already set up on the site.
Prisoners were usually brought before a small commission in charge of assessing their skills. Various accounts exist on this topic, such as the one about the ohmmeter by Paul Butet:20 “In the tunnel gallery, there was a small wooden house like a shop manager’s office. Inside, there were four civilians in charge of recruiting and assigning ‘qualified’ manpower. They examined the prisoners, asked questions about what they had done in France, their apprenticeships, jobs, etc.
“When it was my turn to go before them, no one asked me any questions. I was shown a comparator and told: ‘This is a voltmeter.’ I replied, ‘Nein, it is a comparator which is used in precision mechanics to measure the size of parts.’ I was then shown an ohmmeter. I knew what it was; I explained that it was a device used to measure the resistance to the flow of electric current from one point to another. Since I didn’t have enough knowledge or practice in German to explain, I asked for a pencil and paper and wrote: R=U/I, which is the basic formula of Ohm’s law.”
Butet thus managed to pass himself off as an engineer: “I was given a paper bearing my number (38007) and the words: Ko Scherer, hall 28.” Further details concerning the various Kommandos in the tunnel factory—particularly regarding the Ko Scherer—will be discussed later. Another account comes from André Gérard.21 He was arrested by the Gestapo while a law student at the University of Strasbourg, which had moved to Clermont-Ferrand. He finally arrived at Dora at the same time as the physics professor, Charles Sadron. They went before a small commission together. Sadron pretended he did not understand German and Gérard, who was from Colmar, served as his translator. As they had previously agreed, Gérard pretended to be one of Sadron’s laboratory assistants. Both of them were assigned to Ko Scherer, Hall 28.
The accounts concern prisoners who were not in the same situation. For some time, Butet had been assigned to “stones” in the tunnel, and his account is mentioned in chapters 5 and 6. Sadron and Gérard were deported by the second train from Compiègne in January 1944 and were part of the last major reinforcement of personnel that the tunnel factory was to be given.
It was customary practice to test prisoners’ skills upon their arrival or within a few weeks thereafter. There were, however, cases of quarantined individuals at Dachau and Buchenwald who were directly recruited under rather surprising conditions. Milan Filipcic,22 a Slovenian, recalls that in November 1943, Albin Sawatzski went to Dachau to select a hundred intellectual prisoners from among those being held in quarantine. They were immediately separated from the others and formed a “Dora Kommando,” which arrived in its entirety at Dora in late December after passing through Buchenwald. They were almost all assigned to the Kontrolle Scherer Kommando. The prisoners involved included a number of Slovenes as well as Czechs and Italians.
The author’s account is the same:23 “I arrived at Buchenwald in the first convoy of January 1944, and, like others, was summoned to meet someone who, I learned, was from the Dora factory. He was young and rather kindly and he spoke French. He asked me what my profession was. I told him I was a professor of history and geography, and that seemed to satisfy him. He was disappointed by my ignorance of German. He told me that he had classified me as an ‘electrician,’ insisting on the word. A few days later, I arrived at Dora, and the electricians were called to assemble. I presented myself, along with others. That is how I became a member of the Kontrolle Scherer Kommando where, like Filipcic, who was a young schoolteacher, I was to remain. In the list of the transport from Buchenwald to Dora on 11 February, my profession was marked ‘Elektromonteur-lehrer,’ teacher-electricity installer.” A few months later von Braun and Dr. Simon went in person to make their selection among the prisoners in Buchenwald.
There were also those who improvised a specialty, like young Christian Desseaux,24 who declared he was a fitter, tried out as a lathe operator, and ended up working on an automatic lathe thanks to the indulgence of an old Meister.
After March 1944, French prisoners were no longer systematically assigned as specialists to the tunnel factory of Dora. Only a few hardly significant groups were recorded: former workers from the Barackenbau and the Zaunbau, once camp construction was completed; a fraction of the “77,000”s who were thereby able to escape from Ellrich; a few prisoners from Buchenwald, after the Gustloff factory was destroyed. Some of the newcomers were assigned to Werk I (V2s) and the rest to Werk II (V1s). There is no clear-cut information about the assignments of prisoners of other nationalities, but everything leads us to believe that their situation was identical to that of the French.
Not only were there few new specialists, but those who joined a Kommando usually stayed in it until the evacuation in April 1945. They returned to it after stays at the Revier. The link was not broken unless an incident occurred, as in the case of Paul Butet. This permanent situation had one positive consequence: in the context of the time, the tunnel factory represented a relatively protected segment for the specialists. Nevertheless, they had previously been subjected to the tunnel dormitories for a more or less long period of time.
Due to a combination of circumstances, these men are now considered to have been relatively privileged. Assignments to the factory were not made by camp leaders, whether SS or prisoners, as they were not qualified, nor were they influenced by nonexistent political or national “organizations.” They were decided by the factory managers on the basis of their own criteria, which no doubt were not very complicated.
ASSEMBLY ORGANIZATION IN THE FACTORY AND THE MAIN KOMMANDOS. No information about factory operations circulated among prisoners in the tunnel factory, nor, in all likelihood, among mere Meister. It must be admitted that the prisoners’ primary concern was not to understand how the factory worked. For the main aspects, however, various survivors’ accounts allow us to reconstruct an overall picture, with some inevitable lacunae.
Factory work involved, first and foremost, assembling quite varied prefabricated components from all over Germany. The missiles were assembled on specially designed rail trucks, pushed along tracks from north to south in tunnel B, from the boundary of Nordwerk to the exit. This route was the Taktstrasse, where the rate of assembly set the pace for all the work in the factory. Halls perpendicular to tunnel B, numbering from 23 to 42, were used to machine additional parts or for partial assembly. They also housed storerooms and offices.
The missiles were made up of three parts, which were assembled in succession. The center section (Mittelteil) was a rather cylindrical shell (Schale), a tail (Heck) was fitted to the back, and a nose cone (Spitze) was placed on the front. The propulsion apparatus, by far the most cumbersome part, along with the engine and fuel tanks, was attached to the central part, next to the fuel tanks. The engine went into the tail, behind which there was an outlet for the nozzle. All the directional instruments were placed in the nose cone; explosives, which were located in the tip of the cone, were added in field installations. Just before launch, the fuel tanks were filled.
The main Kommandos grouped together those working on the central portion. Those in the Firnrohr Kommando took care of the shell, which arrived in the form of two half-shells (Halbschale) from the Saulgau workshop mentioned in chapter 2. According to Robert Roulard’s account,25 the Firnrohr Kommando included a sizable percentage of Russians and Ukrainians. Two Frenchmen, François Schwertz26 and François Heumann,27 worked at a joiner’s bench. They were kept busy to the very end drilling spars that were part of a device covering the shell openings at the level of the fuel tanks. Their fellow prisoner Claude de Chanteloup was put to work cutting the sheet metal.
The Haukohl Kommando was the largest in the factory, with a majority of Russians and Poles, as Albert Amate28 has indicated, but there were also a number of Frenchmen and a young Armenian (from France) named Agop (Jacques) Dayan. The engine and tanks had to be installed in the missile and were joined by a tubular frame. This required a good deal of welding: Pierre Lucas29 and François Garault30 continued the welding work they had begun at Wiener Neustadt, with the same Meister. This Kommando included a large amount of handling, under the supervision of Kapos and Vorarbeiter. The Superkapo was Georg Finkenzeller, who had already dealt ruthlessly with prisoners at Wiener Neustadt. Unfortunately, as will be seen further on, he once again made himself infamous in the tunnel.
In the early months the Kommandos working for Mittelwerk were “Sawatzski” Kommandos, who were differentiated by their numbers. André Gérard was thus assigned to Sawstzski 185, which became the Scherer Kommando. The names of their heads, Firnrohr and Haukohl as well as Bünemann and Scherer, for example, replaced that of Sawatzski. Other Kommandos were known from then on by their activity, such as the one in charge of producing the missile tail—the Heckbau Kommando—and its joining to the central portion—the Heckmontage Kommando.
Bernard Ramillon31 has provided an exceptionally detailed description of the finishing work carried out by the Heckbau: “The tails were placed vertically on moving conveyors, the cylindrical body downwards. A landing stage was erected on the side to allow us to work high up. Various tasks were performed in hall 35, such as reinforcing body discs by soldering or explosive rivets, welding a few plates with a blow torch, assembling the ‘ring,’ which was a very important, ring-shaped part made of an alloy set at the tail exit, assembling the jet-vane servomotors, etc.” The majority of prisoners working in the Kommando were French, including Jean Cormont,32 André Cardon,33 Élie Korenfeld34 (who was then called Roland Thibault), Robert Golfier, and André Guichard, a fine arts student who had become the “painter of the torpedo tail.”35
Guy Raoul-Duval has described the task of the Heckmontage Kommando as follows: “The tail, carried by a sort of hoist, was brought out of hall 35 and placed on a small conveyor. Then we fitted it to the rear of the central portion in a victorious rush, and screwed it in place.”36 Raoul-Duval, a history student at the time, used a much less technical vocabulary than Ramillon’s.
Another important Kommando was the Bünemann Kommando, which, according to Bignon,37 was in charge of “electrical cabling of the V2 control devices which were housed in the front of the engine.” For this purpose, in Hall 28, there were “long joiner benches and porticos equipped with Hauptverteiler which ‘distributed’ current to the devices in the missile ‘head.’ ” This Kommando was made up of Belgians, Dutchmen, and numerous Frenchmen, such as Paul Priser, Jean Rieg, the Ecole Centrale engineering graduate Jacques Noël,38 the young electrician Léon Navaro-Mora, and Jacques Maupoint, a former prisoner from Wiener Neustadt. Prisoners from the Zaunbau were assigned to it in August 1944 when they had finished putting the electric fence up first around the Dora camp and then around Harzungen: Breton, Gamier, and their friends suddenly found themselves to be qualified electricians! But they were made to work on reinforcing the latches of the doors on the truncated cone at the head of the rocket.
There were other Kommandos of varying sizes whose members also worked on missile assembly. It is impossible (and out of the question here) to list them all. There exists only limited information from certain accounts, such as the one by Louis Coutaud39 concerning the large press in Hall 32. Francis Dunouau40 has talked about the Lorentz mechanics’ Kommando, and he described Lorentz himself as “blond, not very tall, light-colored trousers and riding boots.” Henry Mas41 belonged to the Tischlerei carpentry Kommando, Guy Tartinville42 to the “painter-galvanizers,” and Jean Gouvenaux43 to the Askania Kommando.
It is interesting to note that work in the tunnel factory was very fragmented but the pace always remained moderate. Ramillon and Raoul-Duval talk of twenty to twenty-five missiles a day, which meant a dozen per shift (Schicht), at best. There were, however, frequent interruptions of the assembly line.
INSPECTORS, TECHNICIANS, SECRETARIES. Operations in the tunnel factory were dominated by the inspection function—called Kontrolle in German. Checks were carried out at every step in assembly, on every aspect, as well as prior to assembly, on components such as gyroscopes provided by subcontractors.
In the Mittelwerk organization chart, Abteilung Kontrolle is shown separately, with its fifteen engineers and its own acronym Ko, which was reproduced on metal plates that the prisoners in the corresponding Kommando wore on their sleeves. As already mentioned, for more than half a year, until July 1944, the missiles that left the tunnel factory were intended for test firing in Blizna or Peenemünde, and determining which defects had to be corrected made no sense unless they were rigorously checked. The final inspection was carried out on the missile while it was standing in a vertical position in a hall dug out especially for this purpose. The final verification, called Prüfung, was performed by officers of the Wehrmacht, artillerymen under Dornberger who were in charge of accepting delivery of the missiles. Among the prisoners who helped them for several months were Claude Fisher44 and Michel Bedel. The verifications continued, of course, after the first firings on September 8, 1944.
Ko engineers, who were headed up by a certain Scherer, were assisted by a number of specialized Meister and by prisoners from the Scherer Kommando. The latter were primarily recruited among the French (or their Belgian or Dutch counterparts) or Yugoslavians, Slovenes, and others, under the aforementioned conditions.
There is precise information on this Kommando thanks to Charles Sadron’s firsthand account, published under the title “A l’usine de Dora” (“At the Dora Factory”) in Témoignages strasbourgeois, an anthology concerning the concentration camps. He talks mainly about the small group in Hall 28 in charge of checking the gyroscopes prior to assembly (the Vertikant and the Horizont) and the Mischgeräte, the “mixing devices.” As already mentioned, in von Braun’s letter to Sawatzski, Sadron took care of the Mischgeräte. The author, along with several fellow prisoners, was concerned with the Vertikant right up to the last day. Sadron knew what the Mischgeräte were, whereas the author had no idea how the Vertikant were made. This did not matter, however, as there was no need to know. The head of the section was an engineer named Wellner, an Austrian, who is described by Sadron,45 along with his various deputies Neumann, Jansch, Wells, and finally Krüger, whose name will come up again.
All sorts of verifications took place: Germain Roche46 was in Heckmontage, Marcel Coulardot47 checked gauges in Hall 20, and Claude Douay48 the electromagnets used for rear-aileron control. Aside from the Scherer Kommando, factory organization offered a few relatively quiet jobs. Marcel Baillon,49 one of the leaders of Résistance-Fer, arrived at Dora after being imprisoned for a long time, and ended up as a Feinschlosser in a remarkably well-equipped precision tool workshop. Robert Berthelot was in a precision mechanics Kommando.
In the same hall was a Kommando of draftsmen set up on a wooden floor which made up the Techniches Büro. While the camp was being fitted out, there was the Vermessung, a surveyor Kommando. The Kapo of that Kommando was a Frenchman named Robert Deglane, who arrived at Dora wearing a green triangle; he had been sentenced as a common-law criminal in Germany. Gustave Leroy, an aviation officer in the first train from Compiègne in January, was an early member of the Kommando, along with Henri Calès.50 They were later joined by well-known Resistance fighters due to the intervention of Birin, who had become a part of the Arbeitsstatistik in the spring of 1943. This was especially true of Dejussieu-Pontcarral, one of the “77,000”s, who had succeeded General Delestraint (who was deported to Dachau) at the head of the Secret Army.
On the eve of the evacuation, the group also included Gabriel Lacoste, René Cogny, and Pierre Julitte. With Leroy’s support, another aviator, Jean Demuyter,51 was able to join the team in February 1945. He was a longtime prisoner whose account has already been quoted in chapter 5. He came by way of the Haukohl Kommando. He really was a draftsman, and he proved it.
André Ribault52 found himself in an unusual situation. He arrived at Dora in February 1944 and was immediately assigned to the central drafting office, the Zeichnungsverwaltung, where all the missile drawings were kept that had to be updated throughout the modification process, copies of which had to be made on request. On carefully sealed-off premises, four prisoners—one Latvian, one Slovak, one Pole, and Ribault—worked with a few German civilians. As Ribault drew the plans, he was thus the only Frenchman to have seen the whole missile.
A number of secretarial tasks entrusted to prisoners required knowledge of German and were at first carried out by the Greens. They often proved incompetent, however, in sensitive areas such as the factory’s civilian payroll. In early 1944, two Czechs, Otakar Litomisky53 and Vlada Hlavac, became accountants after an examination on a calculating machine. They managed to gain the upper hand, bringing in other Czechs and gradually eliminating the Germans. At the same time, Jiri Benès54 was in charge of secretarial tasks for the military commission that carried out acceptance procedures on the missiles and noted the particular characteristics of each one that affected their firing.
Due to their knowledge of German, Czechs and Dutchmen were more often successful than the French in getting this type of work. Jacques-Christian Bailly,55 an eighteen-year-old high school student, recounts how he managed to obtain one of the two available secretarial positions during an interview at the Arbeitseinsatz. He was asked if he knew how to write German, and he replied by writing Goethe’s famous poem, Erlkönig, in Gothic script. The other position went to a consultant at the Dutch embassy “who was responsible for physical inventory at a spare parts warehouse.” Bailly joined Jean-Paul (Father Renard), who was performing a similar task.
From then on he belonged to the Schreiber Kommando and wore the corresponding armband. This Kommando, whose members were scattered throughout the factory, was very cosmopolite, with a majority of Germans, many prisoners from Czechoslovakia and Poland as well as from the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and a few from France.
THE TRANSPORTKOLONNEN. In a factory like Mittelwerk there was room for a minority of privileged employees and a mass of specialized workers. There was also room for an indeterminate number of unskilled workers in charge of transporting various loads from exterior warehouses into the factory. They formed a miserable, ill-treated lumpen proletariat mainly made up of Russians and Ukrainians. They willingly took it out on the French, Belgians, or Italians who were unlucky enough to find themselves in these same Transportkolonnen Kommandos.
There are no consistent accounts from former members of these Kommandos, as they have not written their memoirs, nor are there any texts by Soviet prisoners, for reasons that will be explained in the final part of the book. The Kommandos were designated by various codes: Dunouau56 mentions BAU 5. Alfred Lacour57 has provided the code TU and Paul Pagnier58 TO 1 and TO 2. Marcel Pierrel,59 who spoke German, was in TU 185. Albert Vuillermoz60 and Raymond Zilliox61 did not specify their codes.
The best account on the subject comes from Charles Sadron, who was in contact with the Transportkolonnen only occasionally. During the time when the prisoners came out of the tunnel in May–June 1944, those working in the factory were allowed to rest on Sundays. One Sunday, however, they were conscripted for transport into the tunnel in place of the usual Kommandos. The Ko Scherer, like the others, was forced to do this chore, which explains the following text by Charles Sadron:62 “At seven o’clock, we were on the work site, in the network of railway tracks in front of the entrance to Tunnel A. Our job was simple: we had to transport large tanks into the factory which, when filled with liquid or alcohol, formed the body of the torpedoes. The tanks were made of sheet duralumin, and, when empty, weighed nearly three hundred pounds apiece. They were cylinders measuring nearly ten feet long and about five feet wide. It took six of us to carry one, which meant fifty pounds per person. The weight was not excessive, but we didn’t know how to get hold of it. Three of us stood on either side, spread out along the length of the cylinder. Each man on the left side reached out with his right hand and took hold of the left hand of the man facing him on the other side. The load lay on these three pairs of extended arms. And off we went. We had to cover more than fifty feet. In the beginning, it worked, but very soon, it became unbearable. The grip of the hands clutching each other loosened. The sweat made our hands slippery. If someone lost his grip, the tank would fall, and that would mean brute punishment for us. Our shoulders were aching and the hearts of all of us undernourished men were beating fast. There was no question of slowing down. We marched in front of the SS who yelled and drubbed us.
“There were also civilians, but it was not the same as in the workshops, for they abused and hit us. One of the men in front tripped and dropped to his knees. The others continued holding up the enormous load, which gradually slipped and fell, making a huge racket. An SS was there in a second, laying into the man with kicks and blows from his club as he stood up slowly and shakily, with the look of torture victim on his face.
“We quickly speeded up our pace. Finally, we reached the goal and handed our load to the warehousemen. It was too hard; we slipped away in the halls. The SS ran after us, striking us with the butts of their guns or their clubs and brought us back to the work site. I don’t know how many trips I made. We were dazed from weariness and blows.”
Andrès Pontoizeau63 has also given a very vivid account of the transport of half-shells, and, above all, tanks. There is no information available on the mortality rate of prisoners in the Transportkolonnen, but it must have been high. The activity of these Kommandos continued right up to the end, under the same detestable conditions. Fifty years later Michel Depierre,64 who arrived late in the tunnel and was assigned to transport V1 components, is still cursing the Polish Kapos and Vorarbeiter he had to deal with at the time.
ENGINEERS AND MEISTER. The prisoners who were assigned to secretarial work or to relatively delicate operations such as checking gyroscopes were put in barracks inside the tunnel along with their Meister and often with engineers. Their relations were usually acceptable and sometimes became cordial. That was the case for Ribault, Baillon, Jean-Paul Renard, and Bailly. It was also the case for the Czech Benès with Major Dutzmann of the Wehrmacht.
Krüger, whom Sadron65 talks about, was less refined. “He was a brutal Pomeranian and a long-standing member of the party whose insignia he wore. He had been an SA member. The SS were his friends, and he had been wounded in June 1940 on the French front. He didn’t hate us. He behaved without any wickedness towards us, like a good master towards his slaves. He saved a Belgian comrade from probable hanging who was convicted of having put together a portable stove from the pieces of an old radiator. He certainly spared me more than ten blows on the buttocks with a club, when I was caught warming my coffee with my soldering iron. On the other hand, he did accept small gifts. He liked French and Belgian tobacco, which induced him to close his eyes to our small pranks. He also helped himself generously to radio equipment in the repair cupboard; he would wink at us and we kept silent.”
Raoul-Duval66 describes the relationship with German workers in the Heckmontage: “Some of them were swine, some were good men, but most often they were stupid bastards, not really malicious but fierce, worn out by an interminable war, often devastated, always cut off from their families and reduced to living a communal life, terrorized by the police and the engineers, profoundly weary, and convinced of the inevitability of the Reich’s defeat, yet not resigned to believing the disaster was imminent, and thus continuing, out of habit, the pace they had acquired.” Raoul-Duval shows more esteem for the Obermeister, a certain Holz, a distinguished and kindly man, and for the noncommissioned officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht, either wounded or ill, who carried out various inspections in the factory.
Some witnesses were eager to pay a tribute to certain Meister: in the case of Croze67 it was to Hahn and Heusner; in the case of Amate68 it was to Aschenbach; in the case of Bignon69 it was to Seifert and Sebroot; in the case of Jazbinsek70 it was to Hamm and Jancke. They had either intervened just in time to prevent punishment or they discreetly provided food. This was only possible within small groups. In the large Kommandos and especially the Transportkolonnen the civilians hit out just like the others.
The prisoners did not know the names of the real camp directors, whom they saw only occasionally. The only name they really knew was Sawatzski, the eponym of a number of Kommandos, at least at the beginning.
From time to time a large group of personalities would come through the tunnel. Marcel Berthet and Joannès Méfret,71 who belonged to the AEG Kommando, were required to supply maximum lighting one day to allow photographs of the V2S by the army cinema department. The general whom they noticed on that occasion had to be Dornberger, and not von Braun, who was a civilian. Another time, as already pointed out in chapter 7, both of them visited the factory in the company of the participants at the May 6, 1944, meetings.
Two French prisoners, Guy Morand72 and Georges Jouanin,73 were convinced they had dealt personally with von Braun under unpleasant circumstances. Morand had received twenty-five blows for damage (made by someone from the other shift to a chronometer used for a verification). Jouanin was violently slapped for having pressed his wooden-soled shoe a against servomotor while installing cabling in the tail of a missile.
SS AND KAPOS. Behavior within the hierarchy of prisoners also varied, depending on the Kommando. The Kapo of one of the two Ko Scherer shifts, Peter Sommer, never struck a single prisoner in fifteen months. They saw him only on the trips back and forth between the camp and the factory. The same was true of the Kapo of the other shift. They seem to have been designated personally to play that role. The Schreiber armband worn by Finelli and Sadron’s Vorarbeiter were, under the circumstances, purely tokens. Nor was the Heckmontage Kapo particularly present, but Raoul-Duval74 thinks that in this case it was the Obermeister who did not want him around.
The situation was altogether different in the Haukohl Kommando, whose Oberkapo was Georg Finkenzeller, a Green and, incidentally, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion. He was first interned in Mauthausen before being sent to the Wiener Neustadt Kommando, which he ruled by terror. When he was transferred to Buchenwald at the end of November 1943 he did not come to Dora with the other prisoners. At the time the prisoners thought that those in charge of Buchenwald would have him eliminated due to his behavior, but he turned up again a few months later at Dora, having been promoted after who knows what sort of scheming.
He was the “Big George” who went through the tunnel looking for prisoners to thrash. Amate75 has given us this description of him: “He strolled through the halls where the prisoners were working under his authority, his tall silhouette stooped, his eyes on the look-out, his mouth hanging open, a truncheon hidden behind his back; ready to spring into action at the slightest escapade. The Russians were his bête noire; he would not let them get away with anything.” He was the “Kapo,” the central character in Dominique Gaussen’s account.76 A remarkable drawing by Léon Delarbre77 dating from December 1944 shows him with his club behind his back in search of another victim. The caption reads: “One of the biggest brutes in the service of the SS.”
And yet it was not even Finkenzeller but rather SS-Hauptscharführer Erwin Busta who was the principal terror in the tunnel. Benès78 describes him as being almost six-foot-six: “His head was so elongated at the top and the bottom that it looked like a horse’s head [Pferdekopf]—which was his nickname in every language. He was the most vile of all the SS. He beat whomever he could. Tirelessly. No one knew when he slept. He was in the Tunnel first thing in the morning, at noon and in the evening, and never absent during the night. He prowled from one tunnel gallery to another, poking his nose everywhere, beating people on the spot, as well as writing reports to bring further punishment upon them.”
One scene reported by Bailly79 shows the terror he inspired in a secretarial office. “Two Poles were discussing their homeland, and the German engineers were bored. Suddenly the door opened. A Polish professor, who held the neighboring Schreiber position, rushed in with a terrified look on his face: ‘Pferdekopf, Pferdekopf,’ he cried.
“Usually, a prisoner preceded the SS man Busta, one of the most dreaded torturers of Dora, whom we nicknamed ‘Horse Head,’ due to the peculiar shape of his face. He made regular inspection rounds inside the factory and a prisoner was assigned strictly to him to warn the workshops when he was coming. Busta had no doubt fooled his guide. He went through the halls and offices, sowing panic along the way. The civilians quickly returned to their secret dossiers. Jean-Paul hid on his person the poem he had been writing.
“Busta entered. We feigned indifference, absorbed in our work. The SS came closer and Jean-Paul sunk further into his seat. Busta knew that he wrote poetry, having once discovered some harmless verses. Since then, he scornfully called him ‘der Dichter.’ The SS came prowling up behind us. He grabbed my lexicon: ‘What is this?’—‘I’m improving my German vocabulary.’
“He put down the paper, and the silence in the office grew heavy. Busta circled around us, encompassing both the civilians and prisoners in the same mistrust, smelling sabotage without being able to detect the source. He didn’t dare indulge in any excesses in front of the engineers. He looked around the room one last time, his eyes filled with hatred, and walked out, clicking his heels. Our bodies, on edge from the tension of waiting, relaxed.”
Busta’s name will come up again in part 5, which deals with hangings in the tunnel.
AN INCOHERENT SITUATION. The preceding eyewitness accounts, all of them significant, show how inconsistent the situation in the factory tunnel was. A considerable part of the leadership, both civilians and military, wished to see the factory operate under ordinary conditions and the prisoners treated normally as long as the work was done. This could not go smoothly, obviously, with a missile that took months to perfect, and an improvised setup that was not always efficient. Indeed, the German civilians themselves were far from being all competent and dedicated. Under such conditions, the ongoing threat of SS forays weighed on everyone, thereby adding to the general gloom.
Busta and the other SS could not help but sense the hostility they generated. According to Raoul-Duval,80 the Wehrmacht soldiers in his segment were the ones who warned the prisoners of the arrival of the SS. On the pretext of Geheimnis, or secrets, Ribault’s81 Meister continually locked the premises that contained plans and forbid access to the SS. At least they were visible, whereas everyone knew that the SD and the Gestapo had their own agents in the factory.
There is no information about the personal reaction of Mittelwerk authorities such as Sawatski, Rickhey, Rudolph, Haukohl, and others. Apparently they decided to play the card of kindness. The company distributed cigarettes to good specialists (Makhorkowe cigarettes made in Bialystok) and above all bonuses in the form of duly numbered camp marks (Werkmarke) in the name of the Mittelbau Arbeitslager, which were supposed to be honored at the camp canteen. The canteen will be dealt with in the next chapter.
From the beginning, however, as mentioned in chapter 4, one of the directors of Mittelwerk was Otto Förschner, the Dora camp commander. He was in charge of security and was the immediate superior of Busta and the other SS in the tunnel. What game did he personally play as head of the camp? That question will be examined in the next chapter. In any case he was well aware of Kammler’s position concerning security in the Mittelraum, particularly at Dora. The natural tendency was to increase the constraints rather than relax them, as will be seen later regarding the final months.
SABOTAGE. One of the plainly obvious concerns of those responsible for factory security was preventing sabotage (the Germans used the French word sabotage). A circular went around Mittelwerk on January 8, 1944, drawing attention to this point. Their fears were justified, for prisoners of all nationalities, except for the German Greens, loathed working for the Reich war industry.
Literature on this subject has amassed over the years, tending first to attribute the frequent missile failures to sabotage, and second, to suggest that sabotage was carried out on instructions from clandestine organizations. It is therefore important to look at firsthand accounts for mention of any acts of sabotage committed and of instructions given with regard to missile production.
Spontaneous accounts, whether published or not, were supplemented in 1988–89 by a survey taken among the members of the Association of Former Dora-Ellrich Prisoners. The observations that follow are based on these documents. The first observation concerns the entirely individual and spontaneous nature of the acts that were reported. Witnesses had no knowledge of any organization whatsoever that could have launched a watchword from one moment to the next. With very few exceptions, no one sought complicity or revealed anything, even to their closest comrades. The topic was never discussed; it was far too dangerous for everyone.
The second observation concerns the absence of any spectacular actions resulting in the deterioration of a missile or of equipment. Whatever attempts that were made had to be discreet; they had to go unnoticed at the time and have an impact only at a later stage. The third observation concerns the generally unprofessional nature of such acts. The prisoners were often not sufficiently qualified to realize how far-reaching their intervention could actually be.
There is good reason to question how much prisoners knew at the time about V2 missiles and how they worked. They would have had to be in a position to examine one, at least in its essential features, and possess the scientific and technical expertise required to understand what they saw. As noted earlier, André Ribault,82 who handled and reproduced the plans, was the best placed Frenchman to know what V2s were all about.
Another person in the know was Serge Foiret,83 an aviation construction technician, who was able to make a critical assessment about production conditions. There is also a 1952 document from René Davesne84 regarding the various verifications he carried out. Finally, there were a few scientists in the factory such as Charles Sadron, the Mischgeräte inspector, and Louis Gentil, who was immediately assigned to the V1s upon his arrival. Working at their side, however, were some highly incompetent fellow prisoners, including the author himself.
There are few detailed accounts of sabotage that was successfully carried out, and it is difficult to outline the various types, given the few cases involved. The most subtle category consisted in taking advantage of a certain amount of negligence on the part of German civilians to increase already existing administrative disorder. Two examples of this have been provided by the Czech Benès,85 one by himself and the other by his fellow Czech Jelinek. Ribault86 and Bailly87 have given similar accounts. A subsequent attempt was unthinkable at the time. Benès, who explained what he did in detail, played for high stakes and was very much afraid.
A relatively simple form of sabotage was to be overzealous in checking materials brought in from outside, once it was acknowledged that the quality of the material varied enormously. Deliberately clumsy handling could easily increase the number of rejects.
Most of the sabotage mentioned, however, corresponded to producing slight defects, the consequences of which could be serious, particularly when they involved weld seams. Of course, the defects had to escape final verification. Two accounts, one by Bernard Ramillon and the other by Joseph Béninger, situate the problems clearly, although they did not involve the same types of weld seams.
According to Ramillon,88 “One of the early problems with the missile must have been the quality of the seams made by multiple spot welding that held the outside plates to the reinforcement discs I mentioned earlier. This was remedied either by rivets or by electrode spot welding all around the discs inside the tail body. Thus, quite a number of our reinforcement welding spots were sabotaged, since metal was not always deposited, and holes were often hidden by the slag from the electrode.”
Béninger89 has given an account of a later stage: “I was checking under the supervision of a Hauptverteiler Meister. It was a metal box about two feet wide, three feet high and four inches deep. On the top and the bottom of the box were two or three rows of small electromagnetic relays. Four or five terminals were positioned vertically between the relays. A myriad of electric wires were soldered to the relays and terminals with pewter.
“At one point, I noticed that a few seams were cold junctions. A few technical details: when a pewter seam is done properly, the surface is smooth and shiny; the wire is incorporated into the terminal or relay to which it is attached. On the other hand, a cold junction looks gray and dull, and the surface is not smooth. The person who had done this cold junction had not allowed the pewter to heat up sufficiently and the conducting wire was not incorporated in the terminal or relay. The wire might become detached under the effects of vibration and interrupt the circuit. It was clearly an act of sabotage. I did not inform my Meister who, by the way, knew nothing about weld seams, and the continuity tests were good.
“Some time later, the Meister gave me an electric soldering iron, some pewter and flat long-nosed pliers. I was ordered to re-solder any seams that looked suspect and use the flat pliers to draw all the conductors to the spot where the weld seams were made. Not a word was said about why a further verification had to be carried out. Moreover, I was given self-sticking diamond-shaped papers (with 4- or 5-centimeter sides), carrying the official stamp of the Reich. I had to write my identity number on the paper. It was a sort of seal, which had to be glued across the structure and cover of the Hauptverteiler once the verification was completed. I no longer carried out my inspections with the same couldn’t-give-a-damn attitude. Our relations with the Meister were no longer the same. There were three or four prisoners doing this job. Needless to say, we all had a few strange thoughts.”
That is the real story about attempted sabotage and how the Germans kept an eye out for it. Certain heroic acts did not have the impact they were alleged to have had on the outside.
DAILY LIFE IN THE TUNNEL FACTORY. For more than ten months the majority of the thousands of prisoners spent most of their time in the tunnel factory. For them the camp was literally a dormitory. There was no question of sleeping at the factory, even when there was nothing to do. Prisoners were there to work without stopping—or to appear that way when an SS came prowling around. There were places of refuge, at least for the specialists, in some barracks and corners, but the SS knew where they were and a lookout was always necessary.
A lookout was also required during slack periods, the time being used to make small crafts. Raoul-Duval,90 who was not good with his hands, recalls: “More than once, I found myself facing a difficult problem and every time a comrade would help me out with touching kindness. The same was true for objects we needed: a knife, a spoon or a margarine box which I would make very crudely and then regularly lose. I can’t remember how many times one of my comrades would spontaneously offer me something pretty he had made himself.”
Prisoners sometimes took their crafts a bit far. Butet mentions his “electrolysis system” and the risks he took. The same was true for Bignon91 and Herrou.92 He also made “cigar lighters” that he supplied to civilians in Hall 28.
Along with talking, these occupations were used to kill time, which seemed endless. Raoul-Duval93 recalls a genuine obsession with the time for the toilet break, just to be able to go in front of a clock. Lingering there was out of the question, however.
The various accounts show that small, quite stable groups were formed. Raoul-Duval belonged to the Heckmontage group. Amate94 mentions his comrades who were employed in assembling engines in the Haukohl Kommando, with their Belgian Vorarbeiter. There was another group in the Heckbau, led by André Guichard, and the Breton-Clergue-Belaval-Garnier group, which went from the Zaunbau to the Bünemann (to which Herrou also belonged).
A solid group formed around Charles Sadron, the “Old Man” (he was born in 1902), including Guy Boisot, René Bordet, Francis Finelli, André Fortané, Pierre Gáti, André Gérard, Marcel Gouju, Bernard Gross, Pierre Hémery, Raymond de Miribel, Yvon Navet, André Sellier, and René Souquet. With the exception of Hémery and Miribel, who were “21,000”s, they all arrived at Buchenwald by the first two trains in January 1944 and were more or less quickly assigned to the Ko Scherer in Hall 28. Mathieu Anfriani, Michel Bedel, Jean Guyon des Diguères, and René Fourquet, a “14,000” who had gone through Peenemünde, were in the vicinity.
There was also an outstanding character in the Ko Scherer named François Le Lionnais, a scientific writer who belonged to the Oulipo group, who used to give lectures on the most varied topics to his neighbors such as Pouzet95 and Béninger. He was an “absent-minded professor,” always lost in his thoughts and bringing blows upon himself.
These examples are taken from French accounts. Naturally there were also Slovene groups (Milan Filipcic, Emil Cucek, Franc Svetic, Anton Peskar, and Aleksander Kump, all of them from Dachau), Czechs, and others. Language was the basis for these groups, but friendships also grew between Frenchmen and Soviets in the Ko Scherer, such as Béninger, a Russian from Leningrad and a young Bachkir, who has already been mentioned. The harder the Kommando, however, the stronger the national antagonisms.
WAITING FOR THE “LIBERATION.” The big thing for everyone was the likely date of the “Liberation,” and the ups and downs in the news about the war that reached the tunnel generated alternating highs and lows of rash excitement and despair, which took their toll on the weakest prisoners.
Our main source of information was necessarily German news broadcast on the radio (called the “wireless” at the time) or printed in the newspapers. Some German civilians in the tunnel listened to the radio. In the Ko Scherer this was particularly true of Krüger, who shared an office in a Hall 28 barracks with numerous prisoners, including Gérard, who was fluent in German and took note of everything he heard. The members of the Schreiber Kommando were often placed in similar situations. The only accessible press was usually the big Nazi daily, Völkischer Beobachter.
The problem, of course, was to determine the veracity of the information being disseminated. One has to acknowledge that German news releases were seldom inaccurate, which is confirmed by reading the press of the period after the fact. The difficulty lay in interpreting the information, which required paying careful attention to the geographical names mentioned, especially the cities and rivers. If a German counteroffensive on the Eastern Front was said to be taking place west of a large city, it meant that the city had been recaptured, or was at least surrounded by Soviet troops, which may not have been clearly stated beforehand.
These comments are quite banal, and anyone who has ever put flags on maps in a game of Kriegspiel has had the same experience. Yet it must not be forgotten that the tunnel prisoners had neither flags nor maps available at the time, and they could not be sure they had heard all the news releases.
Sadron96 discusses the problem in these terms: “A map was pinned to the wall above Neumann’s desk. From where I was sitting, I could see it clearly and I followed the progress of the Allied armies. Moreover, one of the prisoners had taken his degree in geography, and he was amazingly knowledgeable. He had a collection of maps he had drawn from memory on the back of verification sheets.”
Indeed, the author himself had useful knowledge concerning the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Pripet, and the Berezina rivers. He also knew how to locate Tschernigow and Czernowitz with their German spelling. He did not, however, have a collection of maps—which would have been crazily imprudent. He had to improvise every time. Whenever new information became available, his chief problem was to remember what point had been reached the previous time, for there was no way of referring to notes. Long afterward, while reading the memoirs of his colleague and friend Raoul-Duval,97 he realized that he had played the same role in his own Kommando.
It is easy to reconstruct the stages by which the morale of French prisoners at Dora gradually improved. The first event was the Allied landing, which took place on June 6, 1944, and was immediately known by the shift in the tunnel who announced it to those taking over in the new shift. There was considerable excitement, and some comrades, such as Edmond Caussin,98 manifested their joy too openly and were punished for it. Our excitement gradually diminished as the battle of Normandy raged on while the civilians in the factory (Krüger, for example) exulted at the announcement of the launching of the first V1s on London. After the breakthrough at Avranches the news kept coming, and each piece of information was more extraordinary than the last: the Americans were in Brittany, the Allies had landed in Provence, Paris had been liberated, then Brussels and finally Luxembourg. At that pace nearly everyone thought they would be home for Christmas at the latest.
The landing in Normandy and the gradual liberation of France had one unexpected consequence: France’s prestige rose in the eyes of the Czechs and Poles. On July 14 the French sang La Marseillaise on their way down into the tunnel, and the SS did not react until the Russians took over with their own songs. There were no regrettable repercussions. Behind the euphoria there was still evident anxiety.
After the failed assassination attempt against Hitler it was clear that the Nazi regime would fight to the finish. There was also fear that those who were working on secret weapons would ultimately be eliminated. In October, illusions of being home for Christmas began to disappear. German propaganda emphasized two events: the first firings of V2s on September 8, and the British failure at Arnhem at the end of September. Once again the situation appeared to be at a standstill. In truth it was not easy to follow the battles being fought for control of the port of Antwerp and the Allies’ progress in Lorraine and Alsace.
Those who were able to follow simultaneously what was happening as of June 1944 on the Eastern Front, in the Balkans, and in Italy from German news releases were able to put the importance of what was taking place in the West into perspective. They knew that continuous progress was impossible anywhere, and also that the German armies were everywhere on the defensive.
That is not entirely true, for on the eve of Christmas a German offensive (the last one) was continuing in the Ardennes. For the Dora prisoners as for many others at the time, the year drew to a close in painful disillusionment.
THE KOMMANDOS OF NIEDERSACHSWERFEN, ROSSLA, AND KELBRA. At the Mittelwerk factory in the Dora Tunnel, V2s were assembled from components shipped by railway from suppliers located throughout Germany. The factory had a large stock of these components, which was particularly necessary as the Allied bombing of factories and communication routes might interrupt the supply at any moment. There was only limited warehouse space in the factory itself, and only the most fragile things were stored there, such as instruments and gyroscopes. The rest included very cumbersome objects such as engines, tanks, and half-shells as well as sheet metal, crates of metal parts, packages of glass wool, and so on.
Warehouses belonging to Mittelwerk were set up outside the factory at various points in the surrounding area. Three of them are known to us through firsthand accounts from the corresponding Kommandos. No doubt there were others. The first warehouse was connected to an open-air warehouse (Freilager) located at the northern exit of tunnel A of the Kohnstein, hence on the territory of Niedersachswerfen. The Kommando that took care of loading on this site came on foot from the Dora camp. It was primarily made up of Czechs, with Kapos and Vorarbeiter who were also Czech. One Frenchman, Émile Nérot,99 belonged to it.
The second warehouse was in Rossla, thirteen miles east of Nordhausen on the railway line leading to Halle. There was an old building on the site flanked by a former lime oven or Kalkofen, which gave its name to the entire storage area. Only tanks covered by camouflage nets were left outside. The corresponding Kommando is well known from the account of Max Dutillieux,100 which is particularly suggestive. This was the Kommando that had been assigned to loading in the tunnel, whose Kapo was Willy Schmidt mentioned earlier in chapter 6. With Willy Schmidt still in authority, it was put in charge of the Rossla warehouse. Starting on August 1, the prisoners, about a hundred strong, were taken there by train every day from Dora. In September they were put into a minicamp set up specifically for them, where they remained isolated until the evacuation in April 1945.
Life in the Kommando for the Poles, Czechs, a few Frenchmen, and many Russians, under mild German supervision, was peaceful, and the Unterschar-föhrer in command of the SS was not overzealous. Few prisoners fell ill. Two of them were operated on at the Revier in Dora and came back. As Max Dutillieux has observed: “Willy Schmidt’s Kommando spent eight months in Rossla without any loss of life, either among the French or among the others. [ . . . ] Not a single death! Rossla was really a sort of intermission.” Afterward, Dutillieux learned that there had been one death.
A third warehouse was located a few miles to the south, in Kelbra according to the account provided by Edmond Caussin,101 with an equally peaceful Kommando. Caussin was the victim of a real work-related accident due to a broken hoist cable. He was operated on at the Revier in Dora by Dr. Jacques Poupault for a fractured hip, recovered, and was assigned to Hall 28 in the tunnel.
Conditions there were unusually favorable, whereas at that very same time tragic situations were developing in Ellrich, Nordhausen, and Blankenburg. Similarly, again at the same time, the Mülhausen Kommando, under the authority of Buchenwald, was spared in the north the hellish conditions of Ohrdruf. In the same vein, Langbein102 has mentioned the Brieg camp on the Oder River, operating under the authority of Gross Rosen, which only had one death out of a thousand prisoners over a period of two months.
The fact that such situations existed demonstrates that the slaughter could have been avoided. The death of prisoners was the result of a deliberate attitude at one level or another of the hierarchy.
THE KLEINBODUNGEN KOMMANDO. A sizable number of V2S were destroyed simply by a successful firing. Others disintegrated in the air without reaching their target. In the case of other missiles, however, particularly during the final testing period in Blizna and Peenemünde, the firing aborted, leaving the engines in a more or less damaged state. Lastly, the missiles had to be transported by railway over long distances, the trips marked by various vicissitudes, accidents, or bombings. As a result, by the middle of 1944 the Wehrmacht had acquired a stock of V2s that was useless except for salvage.
In the summer of 1944, Mittelwerk decided to set up a site for dismantling damaged missiles that was served by a branch line and located at a former potassium mine in Kleinbodungen, near Bleicherode. A Kommando from Dora (with Charles Spitz)103 first had to remove all traces of former activity in the buildings, as it had been a munitions factory with a powder magazine in the former galleries two thousand feet underground.
At the same time, a camp going by the code name of “Emmi” was being set up for a new Mittelwerk Kommando, which operated until April 1945. The Kommando sent components that could be recycled to the tunnel factory warehouses as fast as they could be salvaged. Since many parts were numbered, those who had access to the files could see how long it took before they came back.
The prisoners who were sent from Dora came from various countries. As far as the Frenchmen were concerned, Fernand Rousseau, a “14,000” from Buchenwald, had already been at Peenemünde and the Dora Tunnel, Marcel Gouju had been in the Ko Scherer, Raoul Giquel104 and Jean Voisin had come via Wieda (see chapter 11).
THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIS BY MITTELWERK. Production of Vis in the tunnel by Dora prisoners employed by Mittelwerk did not begin until September 1944. Until then production had been carried out by various Reich mechanics firms, particularly Volkswagen. Whereas the A4/V2S had been developed by the army Weapons Office on its own premises, particularly at Peenemünde East, the Fieseler firm (Gerhard Fieseler Werke) in Kassel turned out Fi 103s, baptized “Richard” and later known as V1s, for the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe base in Peenemünde West was used only for testing.
The V1s that were fired on London from France, starting on June 13, 1944, were mounted either by Fieseler in Kassel or in Cham (in Bavaria northeast of Regensburg), or by Volkswagen in Fallersleben (Wolfsburg) or in Burg (northeast of Magdeburg), or by Opel in Rüsselsheim (near Frankfurt), or even in France in Thil-Villerupt, in the northern Meurthe-et-Moselle.
At some point Hitler’s headquarters decided that V1s should henceforth be assembled in an underground factory, and Paul Figge, one of the directors of the Sonderausschuss A4, was put in charge of transferring the equipment and personnel from Fallersleben to the Dora Tunnel. That set off a violent conflict with Anton Piëch, managing director of Volkswagen, who had no choice but to comply.
As noted earlier, the Mittelwerk Werk II factory, in charge of V1s, was set up in the southern tip of tunnel A and in the halls corresponding to the former dormitories. Until the new factory was commissioned, production was concentrated in Burg and Cham, and was gradually transferred until, by February 1945, Dora was the only factory, producing 2,275 V1s.
As mentioned, a team of Hungarian Jews came from Fallersleben to Dora. The other Werk II prisoners came partly from Werk I, such as Jacques Chamboissier, Claude Lauth, and Xavier de Lisle. Didier Bourget, who had come back from Bergen-Belsen via Buchenwald, found a job there painting V1s. Edmond Debeaumarché and Louis Gentil were in the “77,000” train. Olivier Richet and Marcel Ranchain, who had been in a verification Kommando in a bombed-out Buchenwald factory, were again given jobs checking V1s. They did not belong to the Ko Scherer, however, for Werk I and Werk II Kommandos were totally separate. Thus, Werk II also had its own Transportkolonnen, which were just as dreadful as those of Werk I.
V1 missile inspection and acceptance continued to be carried out by Luftwaffe officers, whereas the army was responsible for the V2s.