For more than fifty years now, associations of Dora survivors have existed in various countries. They maintain the memory of the Mittelbau complex with a certain amount of support from officials and historians. It may be useful for the contemporary reader to point out some of the more striking episodes of this long period.
When a war comes to an end, the veterans are always concerned with the idea of getting back together in a great élan of unity. Among the French soldiers of World War I—the so-called poilus—the slogan “United as we were on the front” was on everyone’s lips. But in the end, once they had returned to civilian life the veterans joined various associations based, generally speaking, on political cleavages. The author—son of a First World War veteran, involved in various forms of political activism—still has a clear memory of such a situation in the 1930s. What was striking to note at the time was the simultaneous pursuit of close ties at the level of former military units. The regiment associations, for instance, had no trouble bringing together men who, in a more general sense, belonged to different veterans’ associations.
There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that a similar evolution can be observed after 1945 in the movement of the former deportees. The subject has been addressed by Annette Wieviorka in Déportation et Génocide,1 and its systematic study cannot be undertaken here. Several remarks on the French deportees will suffice.
The first is the heterogeneity of the concentration camp population. The Jews deported from Drancy and submitted to a selection upon their arrival at Auschwitz must first of all be distinguished from the mass of the deportees from Compiègne, themselves different from one another: Résistants or not, communists or “Gaullists,” hostages or victims of roundups, even various small-time offenders.
Certain among them were staunch activists whose convictions were not dulled by their deportation. The major political vicissitudes of the postwar period, particularly in a country like France, later led to cleavages that culminated in schisms, as for instance in the trade union movement. But on closer inspection the consequences are not always very clear, particularly with regard to the French from Buchenwald.
The second remark has to do with the importance of the “camp associations” whose membership has very generally remained united. What also must be pointed out is the existence, alongside the camp associations, of a certain number of “Kommando associations” that have remained very active—such as those of Neu Stassfurt and Langenstein. This was pointed out in chapter 20. With regard to Dora, two arrangements were ultimately arrived at. According to one, because Dora was for a long time a Kommando of Buchenwald, an association for Buchenwald-Dora had to be set up, without discrimination. According to the other, the life of the prisoners at Dora had been dissociated to such an extent from that of the prisoners at Buchenwald that a separate association was necessary. Many of the prisoners from Dora chose to join both associations. Most of them had been members of the first convoys. Those who had spent time at Ellrich alone on the other hand generally lost interest in Buchenwald.
In Belgium the Dora and Kommandos Political Prisoners’ Association was entirely distinct from the Buchenwald association.
The Association of Political and Resistance Deportees of Dora, Ellrich, Harzungen and Annex Kommandos was established on May 11, 1946,2 by the fusion of two associations created on October 28, 1945: the “Dora Deportees” and the “Political and Resistance Deportees of Ellrich.” The usual term used is the “Dora-Ellrich Association,” which concerns the former prisoners from the whole Mittelbau complex such as it was defined in late 1944.
The association’s first president, until the time of his death in 1960, was Pierre Ségelle. A doctor, he had treated his fellow prisoners in the Ellrich Revier, and at Schwerin following the evacuation of Sachsenhausen. After his return he collaborated on researching the illnesses of deportees and the possible causes of these illnesses.
In its first years the Dora-Ellrich Association, like the other former prisoners’ associations, was mainly concerned with helping its members, informing families, doing research on missing persons, and denouncing war criminals. Its social service activities were especially important, under the direction of the widow of a deportee, Mrs. Sanchidrian, with the assistance of Olivier-Jacques Courtaud, whose memoirs were cited in chapters 11, 12, and 18. Georges Sanchidrian was at Ellrich, as were Courtaud and Ségelle. The problems that had to be dealt with were of such magnitude that Courtaud took the initiative of creating, in December 1949, a separate association, “Orphans’ Aid,” for the assistance of widows and their children. The association brought together the needs of the Dora-Ellrich Association and those of the Résistance network CND-Castille, of which Courtaud was a member. Its objective was to help the orphans in every respect—materially, but also through stipends for studies, summer camps, and so on, and finally through a personal link through godfathers and godmothers. In all, 83 families were involved, representing 183 orphans, 95 girls and 88 boys.
The resources came from members of the associations concerned but also from the very large number of outside members, recruited thanks to the activity of Courtaud, who, as a radio-navigator with Air France, mobilized an extensive network of relations in France and abroad. A publication, Le Lien3 (The Link), kept members, families, and children informed. Fifty issues came out between 1950 and 1962. Courtaud devoted himself completely to the association, as did his wife. Their home served as headquarters. He was known as Jacot, the name he had used in the Résistance, and his wife was known as Jacotte.
They had practically accomplished their task by 1962. There were some fifteen young people to support for several more years. The association was disbanded on March 31 and the remaining funds divided between the two associations on a pro rata basis depending on the number of orphans they still had to support. The Dora-Ellrich Association took over the publication of the Lien, directed by Pierre Goasguen, until issue 65 in June 1970. Marien Leschi then replaced Pierre Ségelle as president. He died in 1971. He was succeeded by Gustave Leroy until 1978, Gabriel Lacoste until 1983, Pierre Dejussieu until 1984, Louis Gamier until 1993, and Jean Mialet until 1999. At that time the presidency was taken on by Yves Mével, son of the former prisoner Louis Mével.
At the same time they showed their solidarity with the families of their late fellow prisoners, the former Dora-Ellrich prisoners were concerned from 1949 on with preserving the memory of the trials they had undergone, by putting together a variety of testimonies in a single publication. A 142-page, large-format collection was thus established and entitled Mémorial des camps de Dora-Ellrich (Memorial of the Dora-Ellrich Camps). It was comprised of twenty-two accounts of various lengths, five poems, and eight drawings. The rule having been to maintain the anonymity of the contributions, the historian is somewhat frustrated, though various cross-checks make it possible to identify some of the authors.
Many of the texts are of great interest, and it is important that they be preserved in this way. As a whole, however, the collection lacks coherency, and the absence of notes does not allow moments and places to be situated with accuracy. It can be assumed that Abbot Jean-Paul Renard—who already in the tunnel was known as “der Dichter” (the poet)—played a determining role in putting the collection together, and that he was himself the author of a long text entitled “Death Tunnels and Living Tabernacles.”4
In the preceding chapters the author quoted at length the various accounts in the Mémorial on Ellrich, which were especially relevant. With regard to Dora, other sources appeared more complete. There were no further collections of this kind, which are difficult to put together.
As seen above, the Buchenwald site was not available for a commemoration before 1950. The same went for the Dora site, for different reasons.
In Thuringia until October 1946 the Russian rocket specialists with the assistance of German technicians controlled all the sites connected with the V2s, such as the Dora Tunnel, Bleicherode and Kleinbodungen, and even Lehesten. Then in October 1946, as pointed out, the Soviets transferred the German rocket technicians along with the others they had recruited in other fields to the USSR; their own specialists went with them. Behind them, other teams systematically dismantled the corresponding material, which was shipped on behind them. The Russians proceeded everywhere in the same fashion—in the Junkers factory, for instance. The tunnel factory was thus stripped of all its equipment, including cables, piping, and so on.
The final liquidation operation took place during the summer of 1948: the Russians blew up the tunnel. More precisely, they blew up each of the four exits, at the north and south ends of tunnels A and B. They also caved in the interior at several points, in Halls 14 to 17, 25 to 28, and 35 to 38. They simultaneously obstructed other of Sonderstab Kammler’s underground sites, including the former mines at Neu Stassfurt and Wansleben.
Near the tunnel the camp barracks were used until 1945–46, first as a place of internment and later to shelter the refugees from the Sudetenland. They were then abandoned and the materials were recovered by those nearby. This is true of the Dora, Harzungen, and Woffleben prisoners’ camps, for instance, but also of the camps that housed the SS or the German and foreign civilian workers. The area was not far from the demarcation between the Soviet and the British zones, which was ever more closely controlled. And the population was confined in the surrounding area. The camp that held up least to the destruction was Ellrich, which was, as has been mentioned, divided between the two zones. The prisoners’ blocks were in Thuringia but the various buildings of Juliushütte, where the SS were located, were in Lower Saxony along with the crematorium above the camp.
When the Mémorial was published in 1949, the foreword began as follows: “In anticipation of the pilgrimage we all want to make some day to Dora and Ellrich . . .” In April 1950, pilgrimages began to Buchenwald, and a French group, which Jean-Pierre Couture5 was part of, was authorized to travel by bus to Dora, to the crematorium, and to Nordhausen and the Boelcke Kaserne necropolis.
The Soviets having abandoned Buchenwald in early 1950, the GDR authorities were able to give some thought as to what to do with the site. Major work was carried out until 1958, culminating with today’s commemorative and monumental complex that makes up the memorial, the Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte, “national place of exhortation and memory”—the largest in the country. It was solemnly inaugurated on September 14, 1958,6 by Otto Grotewohl, copresident of the SED (East German Communist Party) and head of the GDR government, in the presence of eighty thousand people. Investigations into the behavior of the “Roten Kapos” were over, and in 1959, Walter Bartel edited Buchenwald Mahnung und Verpflichtung.
At Dora the commemoration came later and was more discreet. A memorial was set up only in 1964 in the form of a sculpted group of five prisoners on a small square near the crematorium, which had been preserved. Only a few barracks remained; all that was left of the others were the foundations progressively grown over by the vegetation. That was already the case in 1950.
There is strictly no comparison between Buchenwald and Dora as far as the symbolism inspired by the commemoration is concerned. Buchenwald is near Weimar, making it possible to recall the memory of Schiller and Goethe. The latter had taken walks on the Ettersberg, and the burned-out remains (following the bombing of August 1944) of “Goethe’s oak tree” can be seen in the camp. But no reference was made to the Weimar Republic.
Buchenwald was above all one of the large classical camps of the essentially German period of the concentration camp system, where a great many communist activists were interned. It was at Buchenwald, though not in the camp itself, that on August 18, 1944, the SS executed Ernst Thälmann, the great leader of the German Communist Party before 1933. The conditions of the liberation of the camp on April 11, 1945, were utterly exceptional. Nowhere else did the liberators find a camp of such magnitude (it still held more than twenty thousand people) still under the effective control of an international leadership of prisoners. At Buchenwald, however, there are no great heroes who stand out on the individual level. The period of suspicion left its mark.
It was at Dora that one finds heroes to be honored—Albert Kuntz foremost among them. He had been an important figure at Buchenwald, and along with Bartel was one of the three clandestine communist leaders from his arrival in 1937 until his departure for a Kommando at Kassel in 1943. As seen in chapter 9, he later ended up at Dora as a Prominent from the very beginnings of the camp. He was Bauleiter and seems to have been listened to by Förschner, who had also come from Buchenwald, where he had not left a bad memory. It is likely that Kuntz was thus behind two other communists sent from Buchenwald being appointed LÄ1 and 2 in the summer of 1944.
He was nevertheless arrested in December and died in January 1945 in the course of an interrogation session. The fact that he had been the head of the German communists at Dora was obvious, and the Gestapo right from the beginning could not have been unaware of the fact. That he also died in this capacity is just as obvious.
The execution just prior to the evacuation of seven of his comrades is an indication of the will to do away with this team of communist leaders. Pröll, in committing suicide, had anticipated such an outcome, mentioned in chapter 16. It was thus entirely normal that the GDR authorities make heroes of these nine victims—and of Kuntz in particular. It is perhaps inevitable that, on that basis, overzealous propagandists ended up producing sometimes outrageous hagiography. That these hagiographical excesses in turn led to reactions that are themselves no doubt excessive is also understandable.
The brochure Geheimwaffen im Kohnstein by Kurt Pelny and Manfred Weisshaupt, distributed at Dora in 1964, also accords a large place to the account of Dr. Cespiva, the Czech doctor in the Revier. It has been vigorously contested, particularly by the Pole Krokowski, in his correspondence with Hermann Langbein.7 With regard to the history of Dora the most substantial contribution nevertheless remains that of Professor Dr. Walter Bartel of the Humboldt University in Berlin dating from September 1968. It was published in 1970 in Frankfurt-am-Main under the title Wehrwirtschaftführer Geheimwaffen KZ. Gutachten über Rolle und Bedeutung des KZ Dora-Mittelbau und die Funktion der SS bei der A4 Produktion. In the same year of 1970, two other works were published in German. One appeared in the GDR, at Nordhausen: KZ Dora. Produktionsstätte des Todes by Götz Dieckmann and Peter Hochmuth. The other appeared in the FRG, in Stuttgart: “Das KL Dora-Mittelbau,” in Studien zur Geschichte der Konzentrationslager by Manfred Bornemann and Martin Broszat.
While Dora was becoming a subject of historical study in Germany, its memory was occulted in the United States and Great Britain due to the considerable interest in von Braun. Indeed, there had been a shift from the development of rockets for strictly military purposes to the space race. The rivalry between the United States and the USSR was symbolized by a “duel for the conquest of space.” It was Von Braun contre Korolev, as Pierre Kohler and Jean-René Germain put it in the title of their French book, one of the many publications of the subject.
This personalization was characterized by the number of biographies on von Braun. In his 1990 study “Le silence sur Dora: pourquoi?” (“What Is Behind the Silence Around Dora?”) Jacques Delarue indicates no less than six titles between 1959 and 1969.8 The period in question is in truth marked by a succession of noteworthy events: orbiting of the first satellite Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958, launch of the Apollo space program in 1961, first successful trial of Saturn V on November 9, 1967, and, finally, Armstrong and Aldrin’s lunar landing on July 20, 1969. Von Braun, an American citizen since 1955, was covered in honors.
His fame reached France. In the spring of 1996, Match published a story on him, and the president of the Dora-Ellrich Association, General Leroy, protested vigorously. On March 15, 1967, von Braun was awarded the Galabert Prize for astronautics. The indignation of the former Dora prisoners was all the greater that the ceremony was held at the Lutétia Hotel, where the deportees were received upon their return from Germany in 1945. Maurice Rolland, president of the Association of Judges from the Resistance, wrote to General de Gaulle.9 But Wernher von Braun’s brother, Sigismund, a career diplomat, was the FRG’s ambassador to Paris between 1968 and 1972. On December 12, 1969, the president (Leroy) and the vice presidents (Pouzet and Dejussieu) wrote to the editor of the journal Historia following an article on von Braun neglecting to mention the Dora Tunnel.10
Von Braun left the Huntsville space center in February 1970 and quit NASA on June 30, 1972, to join an aerospace firm. Operated on for cancer on August 6, 1975, he died on June 16, 1977, at the age of sixty-five. Sergei Korolev died on January 14, 1966, in the course of an operation, at the age of fifty-nine.
The books published on von Braun do not entirely overlook the Dora Tunnel. In the biography written by Bernd Ruland in 1969 and translated into French in 1970, he himself acknowledged having gone to the Dora factory (but not the camp) and having seen the fate of the prisoners. He of course disclaimed any personal responsibility. The biographies of von Braun are perhaps not the most revealing works of this period. The fact of wanting to minimize his possible responsibility and that of the other Germans at Peenemünde was one thing. But what was more important at the time was to glorify the action of the American and British intelligence services in “hunting down the secret German weapons,” which contributed first to the victory and then enabled the United States to take part in the conquest of space. The phrase just quoted is how the title of James McGovern’s book, Crossbow and Overcast, was so well translated into French. Published in 1964, it appeared in French in 1965. It is clear and well documented, and a certain number of facts were taken from it to illustrate the chapters of the current study.
McGovern’s account begins with the 1943 discoveries that led to the bombing of Peenemünde and ended with the launch of the Saturn rocket in 1964. The French edition of the book is 215 pages long. The only passage on Dora is the following, on page 71: “The handling work was reserved for non-Germans. Kammler had assigned 6,000 slave laborers to the Mittelwerke, taken from the neighboring concentration camps of Nordhausen and Dora, as well as Buchenwald, some thirty-five miles away.”11 Not only is it very little, but the information itself is extraordinarily mediocre. There would be further instances of such mediocrity in American publishing.
However surprising this text may be, it is positively banal in comparison with the screenplay of the film Operation Crossbow,12 with which it is entirely contemporary in that it dates from 1965. The film has to do with an underground secret weapons factory that has to be destroyed. It is located, or so it would seem, at Peenemünde.
But the factory is something out of a science fiction or James Bond film, without the slightest hint of prisoners in striped uniforms. Secret agents sneak in as workers, communicate with the outside, and guide in an air raid of surprising accuracy. In spite of its mediocrity the film is still frequently rerun on television, in France and elsewhere. The fact that the indecency of the screenplay struck neither the producer at the time nor the broadcasters of today is mind-boggling.
One of the repercussions of Watergate in the 1970s was to spark questions in Congress regarding the functioning of the American intelligence services in the past. It was thus that Elizabeth Holtzman, a representative from the State of New York, came to take an interest in 1974 in Nazi war criminals who were in the United States, and the conditions under which they had immigrated.13 In 1978 she attached the “Holtzman amendment” to the law on immigration, which provided a legal basis for expelling Nazi war criminals and preventing their entry as either immigrants or visitors. She thus obtained the opening, at the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, of the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI.
Among the investigators, Harvard law student Eli Rosenbaum came upon the trail of Dora when reading Jean Michel’s recent book. In 1975, Jean Michel had published, along with Louis Nucera, a book entitled Dora, bearing the subtitle In the Hell of the Concentration Camp Where the Nazi Scientists Prepared for the Conquest of Space. It would have been hard to be more explicit. The subtitle reflected the emotion of the former Dora prisoners in 1966 and 1967, referred to above. The book was awarded the Résistance literary prize and was translated into English in 1979. It was well received in the United States.
A discreet inquiry was then carried out by the OSI into the case of Arthur Rudolph, who seemed to have had particular responsibilities in running the Mittelwerk factory.14 The investigators discovered in particular an intervention in favor of Wilhelm Simon, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947 for his role at the head of the tunnel Arbeitseinsatz. Rudolph, retired in California, was interrogated on October 13, 1982, then again on February 4, 1983. He could not deny the facts. Threatened with indictment, he chose to give up his American citizenship, which he had acquired in 1955, and leave the United States. He settled in Hamburg and later got back his German nationality. Later, in 1990, he sought to return to the United States through Canada, but had to leave Canada shortly thereafter. He died on January 1, 1996, in Hamburg at the age of eighty-nine.
It is noteworthy that Rudolph was forced to leave the United States for good even though the real extent of his responsibility was not yet known. In the notes provided by Linda Hunt regarding the questions he had been asked figures the following passage: “When Sher asked him directly if he had asked that more forced laborers be sent into this underground hell, he admitted it.”15 Reference is to the meeting of May 6, 1944, the minutes of which were analyzed in chapter 7. The request for supplementary manpower is a banal point on the meeting’s agenda, and Sher seems to be unaware of two aspects of the situation. The first is that for almost a year Rudolph had been asking for prisoners from the SS, from Maurer and then from Kammler, for his factory, and he had obtained thousands of them, many of whom died there. The second aspect is Kammler’s refusal in May 1944. He himself needed new prisoners for his underground work projects and felt that Mittelwerk had enough personnel as it was. It is indeed unfortunate for these new prisoners that they were not sent to the factory, where the risks had by then diminished.
What an American investigator in 1983 cannot of course even imagine is that, in the preoccupations of the people in charge of the rocket program, the prisoners’ fate was of no concern whatsoever.
In the postwar years there was no dearth of testimony on Dora and its Kommandos. The publication of the Mémorial in 1949 is characteristic of this concern to testify. But these accounts are not, for the reader, clearly situated in time and space, and they do not really allow Dora to be characterized in relation to the other camps, which were, at the same time, the object of other no less dramatic accounts.
The image that dominated opinion was that of a vast and ill-defined concentration camp complex symbolized by several especially well-known names such as Buchenwald and Dachau, or even Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. Nothing at the time, for instance, drew attention to the particular fate of the Jews at Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen seemed a usual sort of camp.
Putting together collections of testimony implies thematic classification. This was Olga Wormser and Henri Michel’s decision in their classic Tragédie de la déportation,16 which dealt successively with the following subjects: the convoys, arrival in the camp and the quarantine, daily life, work, social categories, spiritual life and resistance, the Revier, death, evacuations. Their collection, like a certain number of others put together later following an identical schema, enables the description of the concentration camp system, but does not make it possible to see its evolution or to distinguish one situation from one another, though they were often very different from one moment or camp to another.
It had become necessary to introduce history in a serious way, with monographs by camp or by Kommando in chronological order. Studies of this type had certainly already been carried out, for instance on Mauthausen: the historian (medieval specialist) Michel de Bouard, a former prisoner of that camp, had described its development in a study in 1954.17 The sociologist Germaine Tillion had done the same for Ravensbrück.18 But these were isolated examples.
This approach became generalized from the 1970s on, generally at the initiative of the associations. The most notable example is that of the collective work entitled Sachso, which was mentioned in chapter 21. Put together by the French deportees to Sachsenhausen, it was published, with the success it deserved, in 1982.
With regard to Dora and the various Mittelbau Kommandos, a conjunction of initiatives now enable a truly historical approach to the documents on the work sites and the camps. Within the Belgian Dora association, beginning in 1976, deportees’ accounts were collected, which enabled a young historian, Christine Somerhausen, to write a study on the “Belgian deportees to Dora.” Research was continued in 1985 by another historian, Brigitte d’Hainaut. Under their joint signature, in 1991, Dora, 1943–1945 was finally published under the patronage of the association. The rule of the anonymity of the testimonies was respected. The Slovenian association proceeded differently. The book that came out in 1989 in Ljubljana entitled Dora KL Mittelbau is made up of a collection of thirty-four texts by thirty-one deportees. The collection is preceded by a long study by Milan Filipcic.19
In France a first synthesis was published in the second half of 1989 in the form of a brochure “put out in the framework of the Dora, Ellrich, Harzungen and Kommandos association.”20 It was comprised of eleven parts, representing the beginning of a plan for a monograph. This publication was followed on April 25, 1990, by a “historical symposium” in Vincennes, France, with various contributions, including that of the historian Jacques Delarue, who raised the question quoted above: “Le silence sur Dora: pourquoi?” and concluded by addressing the former Dora prisoners directly: “To you survivors of one of the most horrendous experiences ever lived by humans, allow me to give the friendly advice of an historian: if you do not want to be definitively forgotten, if you want to carry out the ultimate sacred duty of preserving the memory of your fellow prisoners assassinated at Dora, at Ellrich, or in one of the Kommandos, you shall have to testify while you are still able to do so. Write your testimonies, put together as complete, as precise and as thorough a dossier as your memory permits. Be careful of any imprecision, for our memory is fickle, it works unbeknownst to us and often betrays us.”
A historical commission was set up within the association. It was run by Lucien Fayman and subsequently by Georges Soubirous. It managed to bring together a large number of testimonies in the widest variety of forms. The majority of the author’s quotations are taken from that collection. At the same time, in the course of the past few years, testimonies that had long been out of print were republished, and new books of memoirs came out, which are often updated versions of older texts that had been abandoned by their authors. In France as elsewhere, retirement has often been used profitably for this return to the past, after a long active life. The author himself had this very experience, having written practically nothing on the subject previously.
The curiosity of two students has contributed to this effort of memory. The first is Florent Brayard, who became interested in Paul Rassinier—initially in his capacity as a prisoner at Buchenwald, then at Dora. Through the association, Brayard distributed a questionnaire in 1990, the answers to which are of a more general interest. Brayard, no doubt caught up with reverence for a former deportee, ended up giving Rassinier’s testimony too much credit.21 In 1991 the student Anne Le Turdu was placed in charge of analyzing a series of oral testimonies on Dora that she herself had collected, on the basis of which she produced a useful study on various aspects of the camp’s history.22
As the former Dora prisoners were preoccupied with putting together and publishing their memoirs, historians were doing important work focusing on various aspects of rocket production in the Reich. There was first of all the Canadian Michael J. Neufeld’s book, published in 1995 and entitled The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. It made it possible to follow, on a technical level, all the stages in the invention of rockets, from the first attempts of the amateur enthusiasts in the 1920s until the collapse of the Reich in 1945. At the same time it made it possible to situate precisely the competencies and rivalries of the various people involved throughout this whole period: the Wehrmacht artillerymen, the scientists and engineers, the technocrats from the Arms Ministry and their counterparts in the big companies, and finally the SS, providing the concentration camp labor force and ultimately taking control over firing the V2s.
The German Manfred Bornemann situated his research in the north of Thuringia, where he was born. He put together a Chronik des Lagers Ellrich 1944/45 on the basis of various documents. This chronicle, written in 1987, was published at Nordhausen in 1992. In 1994 it was appended to a broader study entitled Geheimprojekt Mittelbau, which traces the history of the Dora Tunnel from the WIFO depot right up to the destruction of the entranceways by the Russians, with indications on the work sites of the neighboring camps.
German academic Rainer Eisfeld devoted several successive studies to determining the responsibility of the people at Peenemünde in the use of camp prisoners in producing the rockets. He showed, in particular, the role played in this regard by Rudolph in the spring of 1943, long before the bombing of Peenemünde and the transfer of its rocket production unit beneath the Kohnstein. It is obvious that, already at this time, both military and civilian specialists—with von Braun leading the way—were aware of what was going on. Eisfeld’s last book, published in 1996, is entitled Mondsüchtig. Wernher von Braun und die Geburt der Raumfahrt aus dem Geist der Barbarei.
These indications have blocked the inevitable attempts to glorify von Braun in Germany. Already in 1980 the West Berlin Senate had wanted to name the airport Tegel-von Braun. It is true that the airfield corresponds to the Reinickendorf Raketenflugplatz, where in 1930 the rocket enthusiasts carried out their tests mentioned in chapter 2. In the framework of Berlin’s quadripartite regime, Tegel was then situated in the French sector, whose military governor opposed the initiative: Gen. Bernard d’Astorg happened to have been part of the first convoy of French deportees to arrive at Dora.23 But it was above all at Peenemünde where there was a recent move to put up a sort of memorial to German aerospace technology. These sorts of projects have run up against strenuous opposition.
The most recent German historical study on Dora is Joachim Neander’s thesis, Das Konzentrationslager Mittelbau. Neander defended it in Bremen on April 30, 1997, and published it in November of that year. It had to do with the Mittelbau concentration camp complex, and more particularly with the period of the evacuations.