Chapter 6 presented an estimate of the loss of human lives in the Dora camp from its inception at the end of August 1943 to the end of March 1944. It is possible to estimate the overall death toll at the end of May 1945, just over a year later. The estimate must take into account not only the Dora camp as such but also the satellite camps and Kommandos added on to the Dora camp. It also must take into account the sizable loss of human life during the evacuations of April–May 1945.
There are a number of problems involved in establishing such an assessment, as will be seen, and they must be overcome one by one. The author has taken for his guides the Polish prisoner Wincenty Hein1 and the German historian Joachim Neander.2 The first played a leading role in the pretrial investigation of 1947, which will be discussed in chapter 23, by studying the various incomplete documents abandoned by the SS. The second has attempted in his recent thesis to measure the consequences of the evacuations in particular while taking the necessary precautions. To understand what happened it is best to proceed in chronological order.
THE DEATH TOLL AT DORA UNTIL MARCH 1944. Between August 1943 and March 1944 the Dora “camp” barely existed. Most of the prisoners, whether working inside the tunnel or digging out exterior access routes, were still housed in the tunnel itself. There were not yet any satellite camps. The mortality rate was high but there was no crematorium on the site, and corpses were transported to Buchenwald to be incinerated. The camp had a dreadful reputation, for good reason.
During this period, as explained in chapter 6, there were 2,882 Dora prisoners incinerated at Buchenwald. Hein’s statements, based on Dora documents, show 2,844 deaths. The difference is insignificant given the conditions prevailing at the time. What is important is the percentage of deaths compared to the average head count during the four months from December 1943 to March 1944. In February it was 4.5 percent and in December and March it was 6.5 percent.
These figures, however, do not remotely account for the true gravity of the situation at the time. Indeed, the two convoys of sick prisoners sent to Maïdanek at the beginning of January and in early February and the convoy that left for Bergen-Belsen at the end of March also must be taken into consideration. Each of these convoys had a thousand prisoners, and, as is well known, only a very small number of them survived. The others died either during the “transport” or more or less quickly after their arrival at the destination camp. Presumably most of them would have died at Dora had they remained there. The above-mentioned statistics on deaths at Dora are therefore greatly underestimated if they are viewed in terms of loss of human life during this initial period.
A chart by Neander covering the period from September 1943 to April 1944, taking into account the transports, gives a cumulative figure of 5,987 deaths for a head count of 17,382, which corresponds to 34.4 percent.
THE MISLEADING RESPITE OF THE SUMMER OF 1944. The number of deaths recorded at Dora suddenly dropped from 766 in March 1944 to 149 in April and stayed at a relatively low rate until September. The lowest level was reached in July with 105 deaths, or 0.87 percent of the head count. Various factors can explain this respite. It is undeniable that the figures for April, and even for May, are somewhat fallacious due to the transport of sick prisoners at the end of March. Yet it cannot be denied that improved living conditions at Dora later played a role. The improvement mainly involved transferring prisoners from their “dormitories” in the tunnel galleries to the new barracks in the camp, an event that coincided with the arrival of spring. Furthermore, the factory was completed, and the work of the “specialists” was less exhausting than the digging and loading done earlier.
A second factor was the arrival of “fresh troops” in January to fill the vacancies left by the deaths of members of the first convoys. Finally, the new work sites, whether the underground sites of the Sonderstab Kammler or the Helmetalbahn railway sites, were still in their initial phase. The sudden rise in the mortality rate was to manifest itself particularly among workers in these areas.
THE TURNING POINT IN THE AUTUMN OF 1944. According to Neander’s calculations, the total population of Dora and of the satellite camps was some 16,700 prisoners at the end of May 1944. By October 28 it had reached nearly 31,000. The population of the Dora camp itself remained virtually stable, rising only from 12,400 to 13,800. The increase was due to the satellite camps, above all Ellrich and Harzungen as well as Blankenburg, Rottleberode, Kleinbodungen, and the various camps of the Baubrigaden.
The number of prisoners who were unfit to work, arbeitsunfähig, whether in the Revier or the Schonung, estimated at 1,670 at the end of May, had reached 4,040 by October 28. Instead of 10 percent of the total, they now represented 12.9 percent. This marked the beginning of a deterioration that would only accelerate until March 31, 1945, the eve of evacuations.
THE TERRIBLE WINTER OF 1944–45. From the end of 1944 onward it is extremely difficult to keep close tabs on the evolution of the population of the entire complex, which had taken the name of Mittelbau. The prisoners tended to be scattered, with higher head counts at Blankenburg, Rottleberode, Kleinbodungen, and particularly at the Boelcke Kaserne in the new camp of Nordhausen. On the other hand the population at Ellrich and Harzungen as well as in the Baubrigaden remained more or less stable. The population rose, however, at the Dora camp itself.
Throughout the winter months there was constant movement between the camps. The evacuations of Auschwitz in January and Gross Rosen in February brought to the Mittelbau complex, along with numerous corpses, a mass of prisoners in increasingly poor condition that had to be housed, especially at Dora. As the Revier was overcrowded, some of the ill were transferred to the new camp at Nordhausen, which originally housed only workers employed in the area.
When the figures for October 28, 1944, are compared to those of March 31, 1945, it may be observed that the total head count rose from 31,000 to 41,300, and at the same time the number of those unfit to work doubled from 4,040 to 8,470. The percentage of the unfit compared to the total head count thus reached 20.6 percent by March, compared to 12.9 percent in October. As was seen earlier in chapter 19, the situation was exactly the same when the Langenstein camp was evacuated.
The number of prisoners unfit to work at the end of March is all the more startling as two factors must be taken into consideration that actually reduced these figures: the high mortality rate of the final weeks and the departure of a “transport” of sick prisoners to Bergen-Belsen. According to the figures collected by Hein, the number of recorded deaths was 6,757 from October 1944 to March 1945, including 2,341 in February and 2,542 in March. The transport that left the Boelcke Kaserne on March 6 carried 2,252 sick prisoners, about half of whom had been transferred from Ellrich three days earlier.
Thus a population that was largely in extremely poor health was about to be quickly dragged into evacuation operations.
THE DEATH TOLL OF THE EVACUATIONS. Joachim Neander has taken the risk of estimating the loss of human life that occurred during the evacuation period. He has taken every precaution, without claiming to achieve any sort of fallacious exactitude. After carefully examining all the evacuation processes himself, the author considers that these estimates, reported below, are quite plausible.
In early April 1945 there were about 40,000 prisoners still in the Mittelbau complex, and overall their ultimate fate is not a mystery. Some 3,500 among them were not affected by the evacuation: the prisoners at the Boelcke Kaserne, which was bombed on April 3 and 4, and those left behind at the Dora Revier. Between the patients, who were often gravely ill and died during this period, and those who were killed in the bombing raids, Neander has estimated the loss of human life at 2,500, which leaves a thousand survivors. The 36,500 other prisoners at Mittelbau, i.e., more than 90 percent of the total, were evacuated in three days, either by railway convoys or on foot in columns.
The majority of them, about 20,000, were involved in evacuation operations that ended up at Bergen-Belsen. Their losses have been estimated at 2,500. Some died in transit, particularly the sick prisoners from Harzungen. Others were victims of the terrible conditions at the Bergen-Belsen camp, particularly members of the convoy from Woffleben.
Neander does not include (for good reason) the 3,000 or so prisoners who reached the Gardelegen Kreis. He estimates that 2,000 of them died either in the barn or as victims of the manhunt that took place in the surrounding area, or from exhaustion in the case of sick prisoners from Rottleberode, Ellrich-Theater, or Wieda. The figure of 1,000 survivors is necessarily only a very rough approximation.
Another group concerned the convoys or columns, many of which found themselves at Sachsenhausen or Ravensbrück before setting off toward the Schwerin region. This group also concerns the Blankenburg prisoners. Three thousand prisoners are believed to have died out of a total of 11,500. This significant proportion can be explained by the high number of sick prisoners from Ellrich and Dora at the start of the evacuation. It also takes into account the length of the train journey and of the march as well as the deadly character of the Sachsenhausen evacuation.
Finally, Neander groups isolated evacuations together, particularly those that ended in Saxony and Sudetenland, with 1,000 victims out of a total of 2,500 prisoners.
A recapitulation shows a total of 8,500 deaths out of 36,500 evacuated prisoners. Taking into account the losses at Nordhausen and Dora, the head count of 40,000 prisoners at the beginning of April translates, a few weeks later, into 11,000 dead and 29,000 survivors. The 11,000 figure should be compared to the figure of 8,470 corresponding to the unfit as of March 31. A number of those who were unfit at the time fortunately survived, but for most of them a further ordeal was simply more than they could bear.
THE OVERALL DEATH TOLL OF DORA-MITTELBAU. Based on the figures just presented, an overall death toll can be quickly estimated. For the whole concentration camp complex, which finally reached about 40,000 prisoners, the loss of human life during a period of slightly more than twenty months amounted to some 26,500 victims—15,500 in the camp and the “transports” and 11,000 at the time of the evacuations.
THE CONDITIONS OF THE SURVIVORS’ RETURN. The conditions for the survivors’ return differed widely depending on their nationality. Roughly speaking, returning prisoners were grouped into six categories: the Germans and Austrians, the Western Europeans, the Czechs and Yugoslavs, the Poles, the Soviets, and the non-Western Jews.
German and Austrian prisoners returned home under the same conditions as their compatriots at the time. It was impossible to return to the territories beyond the Oder-Neisse line, Kapos and others wearing armbands who could be held accountable were in danger of arrest, those captured from the ranks of the Volkssturm had POW status, etc. The account by Margarete Buber-Neumann gives a good idea of the problems facing a woman prisoner from Ravensbrück returning to her family in Franconia after twelve years of exile and imprisonment.
Western Europeans returned home by various routes. Collective repatriation, which was more or less well organized, concerned those from Buchenwald, those at Bergen-Belsen, and those more or less scattered throughout the Schwerin region. National groups for repatriation comprised people of varying status (prisoners of war, civilian workers) in various regions, e.g., in the area of Seesen, south of Schönebeck, and in the Gardelegen area. Hospital transports, often by air, brought patients hospitalized at Dora, Bergen-Belsen, Sulingen, Halberstadt, and Schwerin back to their home countries.
The main problem was to ensure the return of those who had been liberated by the Soviet troops in Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, and the Sudeten. Delays were due to transport problems as well as to the determination of the Soviet authorities to recover those among their citizens who had been liberated in western Germany.
The prisoners who had been evacuated by the Red Cross, women from Ravensbrück and men from Blankenburg, went home from Sweden. Jews deported from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were repatriated along with non-Jews. The same was true for Spanish Republican refugees in France, who were prisoners in the large camps such as Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
The return of the Czechs and Slovenes was delayed by the fact that their countries had remained under German control until the moment of the German surrender or thereabouts. There were also political delays for those among them who had been liberated by the Soviets. For example, the Slovenes who were liberated in Mecklenburg went home in one of two ways. Either they tried their luck individually, like Emil Cucek, or, like Filipcic, they remained with their women compatriots, were grouped together in Neubrandenburg, and returned home to Maribor on August 28, 1945, by train via Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, and Zagreb.
Little is known about the conditions under which the Poles returned to a territory that had become very different from the one that existed in 1939, both in the east and the west. Some of them, incidentally, did not wish to go home, for political reasons. That was also the case for a large number of Soviets who did not expect to be well received, and their fears were justified. The American and British authorities nevertheless automatically sent camp prisoners home at the same time as prisoners of war and Ostarbeiter. The only exceptions were made for Balts, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, for the annexation of their countries by the USSR was not recognized by the Western governments.
Jews who came from Western countries were repatriated according to their wishes. The others, particularly Polish Jews, generally did not wish to return to their countries. They remained in Germany in camps for “displaced persons,” often for several years, before they were allowed to emigrate to Israel or the United States or to another Western country.3
In the immediate postwar period there were three dominant images of Dora, which did not coincide.
THE FIRST IMAGE: THE HELL OF 1943–44. The first images came from the veterans of Buchenwald who still remembered, long afterward, their fear of being sent in a “transport” to the Dora Kommando. The idea of death was not foreign to the Buchenwald prisoners at the end of 1943, but in November, when the trucks began returning from Dora loaded with corpses to be incinerated at the crematorium, this fear gradually penetrated the entire camp. For the trucks kept coming until the end of March 1944, when Dora was equipped with its own incineration system.
Christian Pineau (under the name of Jacques Grimaux) arrived at Buchenwald on December 16, 1943, and received the identity number 38418. Luckily he managed to avoid a transport and later learned that it was a transport to Dora. When he published an account in 1960 of his years in the French Resistance and deportation under the title La Simple Vérité, he gave one chapter the title “Kommando for Dora,” as if to exorcise his fear in retrospect.4
Jorge Semprun, in Quel beau dimanche! published in 1980, talks about a dreaded transport being organized at Buchenwald with its destination as Dora.5 He writes: “A terrible camp, Dora! It was a work site where they were digging the tunnels of an underground factory for manufacturing V1s and V2s.” He came back to this topic in 1994 in L’Écriture ou la vie:6 “Dora was the work site of an underground factory where V1 and V2 missiles were going to be produced. It was a hellish work site, where the prisoners were driven like slaves to perform exhausting work, in the dust of the tunnels, by the Sturmführer SS themselves, without any other intermediaries between themselves and the deportees than the common-law prisoners who added an extra dose of stupidity and brutality to consolidate their power. In short, avoiding Dora meant avoiding death. Or avoiding, at least, increased chances of dying.” Semprun believes that the fact of being classified at the time as a stucco layer saved him from a transport to Dora. His identity number was 44904, and he had arrived at Buchenwald on January 29, 1944. Paul Le Goupil, 53354, was part of the convoy of the “tattooed” who went through Auschwitz on their way to Buchenwald on May 14, 1944. At the time “there were numerous rumors about our destination. There was talk of Dora, a name that everyone whispered with horror. It was an underground factory where the mortality rate was appalling.” That is what he wrote7 in Un Normand dans . . . , published in 1991.
Thus fear of Dora continued unabated in the middle of May, even though the truckloads of corpses had stopped coming at the end of March. It would appear that the prisoners at Buchenwald did not know about the three “transports” of sick prisoners that left Dora for Lublin-Maïdanek and Bergen-Belsen, as Pineau, Semprun, and Le Goupil do not mention them.
One may wonder about the causes of this fear. There were no doubt three main ones. The first was the pace at which the deaths occurred, even though the prisoners had just come out of quarantine at Buchenwald and therefore were not yet weakened by a long stay in the camps. The second was the high number of victims, which in fact appeared lower than the reality, however, because they did not know about the transports of sick prisoners. The third was the way the corpses looked, completely emaciated.
THE SECOND IMAGE: THE MASS GRAVE AT NORDHAUSEN. The second image resulted from the grisly discoveries made one after another that took the American forces completely by surprise at the time of their offensive toward the Elbe in April 1945. The first of these discoveries, on April 5, was Ohrdruf, where a Buchenwald Kommando, the sinister S III, had been ordered to dig out an underground command post for Hitler.
A few days later, on April 11, the Americans arrived in Nordhausen and found the corpses of the Boelcke Kaserne. There the SS had gathered together the weakest prisoners from Dora and the neighboring camps. The site, south of the city, was bombed, and the bombs often fell on the dead or the dying. A few miles away, in the Dora camp itself, the inhabitants of which had been “evacuated,” the Americans saw nothing but abandoned, gravely ill prisoners and again, emaciated corpses.
Still later, on April 14, they were told about a burned-out barn in Gardelegen containing the remains of the prisoners who had been shut inside and perished in the fire. They belonged to two evacuation convoys of exterior Kommandos of Dora.
On April 12, Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf with Patton and Bradley, and he decided to alert American officials and journalists to the discoveries made in the camps. Everyone still remembers the photographs taken at the time at Nordhausen, Dora, and Gardelegen, like those at Ohrdruf and the “little camp” at Buchenwald, because for fifty years they have consistently been used to illustrate books and articles on the German concentration camps. Yet the dates and places are generally not indicated. When the names are shown, Nordhausen is necessarily mentioned more often than Dora.
THE THIRD IMAGE: THE TUNNEL FACTORY. The third image, a forceful yet indistinct one, is that of the underground factory devoted to producing “secret weapons,” the V2s and, secondarily, V1s. For years what is now commonly called the “Dora Tunnel” was more a figment of the imagination than an object of knowledge, as the extravagant film entitled Operation Crossbow demonstrated. The Americans found the factory in April 1945 practically intact. It remained a secret under their control. Once it passed into Soviet hands with the rest of Thuringia on July 1, it again remained secret. Then it ceased to exist physically in 1948. The Soviets dismantled and carried off everything that could be removed, and then blew it up with explosives to cause some of the galleries to collapse and completely obstruct the four entrances. There is nothing left but the memory of what once was, or so it was said, the largest underground factory in existence at the time.
For a time the mass of prisoners who were dragged unwillingly into this historical adventure were ignored. Only gradually did the writers of these more or less scientific works realize that Dora, once a mere Kommando under the authority of Buchenwald, had in fact become one of the most dreaded concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The prisoners and their sufferings were mentioned in the accounts but only incidentally, as they were merely supernumeraries, which, by the way, they have remained. How the camp actually operated was never dealt with either.
A FOURTH IMAGE: THE ANTIFASCIST STRUGGLE. East German propaganda strove to popularize a fourth image: that of a camp controlled by a group of communist activists and their associates who led the resistance and sabotage. Naturally things were not that simple, if only due to the fact that very few of the Germans there could truly be considered political prisoners. Here again in a sense, the camp was being viewed from outside.
DORA SEEN FROM FRANCE: THE CEMETERY OF FRENCHMEN. Dora: le cimetière des Français is the title of a small book recently published by André Rogerie. The importance of this camp for French deportees has been brought to the fore in several documents, including the following two examples.
Annette Wieviorka, in an appendix to Déportation et Génocide in which she discusses her sources,8 analyzes “firsthand accounts and books published prior to 1948” concerning deportation. The breakdown of the camps is not easy because prisoners were moved back and forth among them. The result is roughly as follows: seventeen texts on the Auschwitz complex and twenty on Ravensbrück and its Kommandos, twelve texts on Buchenwald alone, nine on various Buchenwald Kommandos, and seventeen on Dora as well as thirty-three on all the other camps put together, including twelve on Mauthausen, eight on Neuengamme, and seven on Dachau.
The other document is the list of the dead from the University of Strasbourg shown in Témoignages strasbourgeois.9 Sixteen people died in France, either shot or killed under other circumstances. Eighteen died in Auschwitz, mainly Jews. Thirty-four died during deportation outside of Auschwitz, including twenty-five in identified camps: fourteen at Dora and eleven at all the other camps combined.
As mentioned earlier, the situation was the same for the Belgian deportees.
THE PRODUCTION AND USE OF V2S. Although the subject of this book is the history of the Dora camp and of its prisoners, and not the history of the missiles, it may be useful to give some information about V2 production, firing, and the number of its victims. Taking into account the conditions of the period, some of these statistics are only approximate.
According to Irving, who is quoted by Bornemann,10 production is believed to have started in January 1944 with 50 units and was increased until May, with 86 in February, 170 in March, 253 in April, and 437 in May. It is then believed to have dropped sharply: 132 in June and 86 in July before starting up again with 374 units in August. It is noteworthy that firing operations did not begin until September. The V2s produced until July were thus used only for tests in Blizna and Peenemünde. Regardless of whether the firings were successful or failed, the V2s were destroyed except for those that were damaged in transport or before firing, which were brought back for dismantling and recycling in Kleinbodungen. Presumably the low point in June and July corresponded to the last fine-tuning and the first missiles that were supposed to be operational that were produced in August.
Starting in September 1944 until March 18, 1945, production remained more or less steady: 629 in September, 628 in October, 662 in November, 613 in December, 690 in January, 617 in February, and 362 in March. The total from August 1944 to March 1945 is therefore held to be 4,575 missiles.
According to another source11 the total number of successful V2 firings is believed to have been 3,255, including 1,403 on the United Kingdom (1,359 on London), 1,696 on Belgium (1,610 on Antwerp and 86 on Liège), and 156 on other continental targets (19 on Paris). The difference is thought to correspond to failed firings and missiles destroyed before the firings under various circumstances. It is interesting to note that no stock of V2s was found waiting to be fired, which would have saved a lot of trouble at White Sands and Kapustin Yar.
In all there were more successful V1 firings (21,770) than V2 firings (3,255). The V1 firing campaign in June and July 1944 from France was effective before the British began destroying the missiles in flight. It should be noted that at the time the devices were not being produced in the Dora Tunnel. Subsequently a large percentage of the V1s fired on Holland were destroyed by Allied air defenses before reaching English or Belgian soil.
The total number of people killed by V1s and V2s was 8,938 in England (6,184 for the V1s and 2,754 for the V2s) and 6,448 in Belgium (no distinction made). For purposes of comparison, there were nearly 6,000 deaths among the Dora prisoners in September 1943 and in April 1944 alone.