In Europe the past decade has been marked by profound political change—one of the main aspects of which was the reunification of Germany, coming about at the end of a peaceful process. Its consequences are manifold, but one of them is to situate the “places of memory”—including the concentration camps—in a new environment. These changes can be measured with regard to Dora on two levels: the practical level (free movement of persons, modified administrative trusteeship, privatizing of businesses) and the ethical level—having to do with the very meaning of the commemoration.
The “fall of the Berlin Wall” occurred on November 9, 1989. The reunification treaty was signed on September 12, 1990, and came into effect on October 3. The first joint legislative elections to be held across Germany took place on December 2.
Chronologically speaking, the first consequences of these events in people’s lives was the reestablishment of free circulation of persons between the two parts of Germany. What happened on November 9, 1989, at 6:57 P.M. was East Germany’s decision to open all of the border points toward West Germany and West Berlin. The Berlin Wall was but one of the aspects—though admittedly a particularly spectacular aspect—of the “Iron Curtain,” which had cut the country in two. In an article in the Belgian bulletin put out on Dora, Albert Van Hoey mentioned a telephone conversation he had on November 12 with Mrs. Monicke from Walkenried—whose name will reappear later. She told him that the border had been opened in various places in the Harz Mountains and that eight trains had passed through the railway tunnel between Walkenried and Ellrich. Locally this was quite an event, comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also culminated, as will be shown, in the regrouping of the components of the Ellrich camp.
One important political consequence of the reunification was the reappearance of Länder in eastern Germany. The division into Länder, bearing historical names, dating from 1945, had been replaced in 1952 by a division into smaller Bezirke, named according to their principal towns. Thuringia, for instance, had been divided into the Bezirke of Erfurt, Gera, and Suhl. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was an authoritarian and centralized state. On October 14, 1990, however, elections were held in the reconstituted Länder, and the governments were given real decision-making power in the realm of culture—extending, for instance, to concentration camp memorials.
A third consequence was the planned privatization of the state-run companies, which was dealt with by a financial organization created for this purpose, known as the Treuhand Anstalt. It so happened that one of those state-run companies was still mining anhydrite at Kohnstein.
When German academic Peter Reichel’s book—initially published in German in 1995 under the title Politik mit der Erinnerung—was published in French in March 1998, it was decided to entitle it Germany and Its Memory. Reichel emphasizes the fact that, for a period of fifty years, “commemoration” in East Germany and West Germany was utterly different; the question arises as to what should be celebrated—and in what way—in unified Germany, especially in reunified Berlin, once again the capital city. Much of his study was of course devoted to the concentration camps. In this respect, from a purely material point of view what was done in the GDR was far more impressive than in the FRG. Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were made into large monument complexes, and Ravensbrück and Dora, with more modest means, were by no means overlooked. In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on the other hand, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen had been dealt with discreetly while Neuengamme—and still more so Flossenbürg—had been neglected altogether.
In fact, memory had not played the same role in the East and in the West. In the GDR the objective was to magnify the antifascist struggle, both in the camps and elsewhere. The last brochure put out at Dora is explicit in this regard: it begins by asserting that “responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in the Dora-Mittelbau camp lies with the triple alliance of monopoly capital, the governing and terrorist fascist apparatus with its generals and SS, all within a conjunction of monopoly state-capitalism.” And it concludes that the “antifascist memorial brings back to life the terrifying and moving history of these camps along with the merciless and reasoned struggle of antifascists under the leadership of Communists against the malign enemy of German fascist imperialism.”
This manner of writing history accounts for the characteristics of the Buchenwald monument. “It represents a child and ten men. But their faces are not emaciated; they bear none of the stigmata of death. The group’s stance is that of fighters, brandishing flag and rifle, the hand clenched in a fist or raised as if to swear an oath: the victims are at once fighters and victors.”1
For fifty years in the FRG these sorts of reassuring certainties did not exist. Memory was played out above all in the writings of historians. Joseph Rovan writes: “When one gets right down to it, it was history and its interpretation which, by far and away, dominated the culture of the Federal Republic. Historians in the GDR were obliged to be crafty with the orthodoxy. If they had any talent, it had to be sought out behind the ideological mumbo-jumbo. On the other side of the border, in the FRG, the situation was plethoric—a situation of abundance. For years and in a variety of forms, the debate on German history kept the intellectual world spellbound; that is also, in my opinion, how the literary qualities were best preserved.”2
Reunifying German memory and commemoration will require, quite obviously, some considerable time. It is first of all the unity of the sites themselves that has to be recovered—and the example of Ellrich is especially striking.
THE REDISCOVERY OF ELLRICH. On the very grounds of the Ellrich prisoners’ camp were placed the boundary markers separating the districts of Ellrich and Walkenried—that is, the Soviet and British zones of occupation. In 1945 the camp buildings were destroyed and the limit was materialized. A little further to the west the village of Juliushütte, where the SS camp had been set up, was abandoned. Though administratively dependent on Walkenried, its inhabitants were linked to Ellrich for their day-to-day life. It seems that, in the years to come, a good many Germans leaving the Soviet zone passed clandestinely from Ellrich to Juliushütte, whose houses served as relay points. In 1953 they were destroyed by fire, and the Brunswick (Lower Saxony) authorities subsequently had the ruins eliminated.
In any case, an electrified barricade henceforth prohibited passage. The whole border area, extending three miles back, was a prohibited zone, a Sperrgebiet. No border crossing was open to traffic between the GDR and the FRG between Helmstedt, well to the north of the Harz Mountains, all the way to Duderstadt far to the south. In June 1989, Van Hoey had to pass through Worbis and Duderstadt—in other words, a sixty-mile detour—to go from Ellrich to Walkenried.3 The hill that overlooked the former camp, with its crematorium on the other side of the barricade, was overgrown with vegetation.
Interest in the Ellrich camp was relaunched by the German historian Manfred Bornemann, whose Chronik des Lagers Ellrich was written in 1987. He was in contact with former deportees, including the Belgian Ernest Abel. Through him, contact was established between a town councilor from Walkenried, Mrs. Ruth Monicke, and Van Hoey, the representative of the Belgian association of former Dora prisoners. The decision was made in June 1989 to erect a monument near the foundations of the crematorium, which were finally located. When the stele was inaugurated on May 13, 1989, reunification had already taken place and those participating in the ceremony traveled freely from the east and the west.4
The day before, another stele had also been inaugurated at Blankenburg following contacts between the Belgian association and the local municipality. Van Hoey himself, as mentioned in chapter 13, had been a prisoner at Blankenburg.
Until 1990 there was an “international committee” for Buchenwald-Dora but no committee for Dora per se. Its creation in the context of Germany’s new situation resulted from an initiative taken in the summer of 1990 by the representatives of the former French and Belgian deportees, supported by their Dutch and Czech fellow prisoners. The constitutive meeting was held in Paris on October 18, and Jacques Brun, its founder, was placed in charge of the legal registration of its statutes in France. It was a nonprofit organization conforming to the French law of 1901 regarding associations with international objectives. It was officially registered under the name “European Dora, Ellrich, Harzungen and Ko Committee ‘For Memory’ ” (“Comité européen de Dora, Ellrich, Harzungen et Ko ‘Pour la mémoire’ ”).5 Since then, the new committee and the International Buchenwald-Dora Committee have coordinated their activities without problems.
The committee’s French president, Jean Mialet, is still in office. The Belgian Van Hoey is first vice president; along with the Dutchman Van Dijk, second vice president, who is in constant contact with the German officials in their language. The founder, Jacques Brun, gave up his position as general secretary in 1996 to Marie-Claire du Bois de Vroylande, the daughter of a Belgian deportee who died at Ellrich on December 15, 1944.
The European Committee’s task is twofold. It represents all the former prisoners of Dora-Mittelbau and their families in their dealings with the competent authorities. It is part of the group of international Nazi concentration camp committees, of which there are nine in all: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald-Dora, Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. These groups meet informally to undertake actions of common interest. Their decisions are taken in unanimity. The group’s presidency changes every year, following the alphabetical order of the camps.
The international committees have endeavored on a number of occasions to interest international authorities in the preservation of the camps and their archives. One of their initiatives was aimed at the CSCE—the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe—which had met for a symposium in Krakow in June 1991. The declaration adopted on June 6 declared: “The participating states will endeavor to preserve and to protect these monuments and places of memory, including, particularly, the extermination camps and the archives linked to them, which themselves bear witness to the tragic experience of the common past.”
Another initiative took place in Strasbourg on December 15–16, 1992, in the presence of the presidents of the groups in the European Parliament. A common resolution drafted by the groups was adopted almost unanimously on February 10, 1993, by the Parliament. In particular, the resolution “asks member states, the Council and the Commission to provide support, including financial support, for any initiatives seeking to conserve the meaning of the Nazi concentration camps in their specificity and to place them under European and international protection.”
Not all the camps concerned were located in Germany. Mauthausen was in Austria and Struthof in France. With regard to the Federal Republic of Germany—which henceforth corresponds to reunified Germany as a whole—there is no common policy on the subject; however, in early March 1994 the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Commission organized a public hearing of experts on the “federal state’s participation” in these places of memory. Until such time as any decisions are made in this regard, the Länder remain responsible for the camps located on their territory. The camps are Dachau and Flossenbürg in Bavaria, Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony, Neuengamme in Hamburg, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück in Brandenburg, Buchenwald and Dora in Thuringia. But Saxony-Anhalt, for instance, also has commemorative monuments and necropolises on its territory, including Blankenburg, Langenstein, and Gardelegen.
In April 1991, as noted by a delegation of the European Committee that traveled to Dora, a “Mahn- und Gedenkstätte” still exists, but its status is highly uncertain. It was only in August 1991 that the Nordhausen Kreistag—or district council—took things into hand and designated a Kuratorium to look after the functioning of the Gedenkstätte Mittelbau-Dora. This administrative body was comprised of representatives of the different religions and various political factions of the Kreistag as well as academics. It elected the Reverend Joachim Jaeger as president. The victims of Nazism are also represented: Jews, Gypsies, and former prisoners in the camp, including the Belgian Van Hoey and the Dutchman Van Dijk from the European Committee. Dr. Cornelia Klose, scientific adviser for the Gedenkstätte in May 1991, was appointed director on November 11, 1992, by the Nordhausen Landkreis.
This formula was only temporary because the Ministry of Science and Culture of the Land of Thuringia itself designated in September 1991 a commission of experts presided over by the historian Eberhard Jäckel. Its role was to consider the renovations of the land’s commemorative sites—in other words, Buchenwald and, incidentally, Dora. It filed its conclusions in early 1992. It recommended that the exhibition dealing with the history of the Buchenwald concentration camp put an end to the partiality imposed by East German historiography. It also suggested that everything to do with the Speziallager 2, set up at Buchenwald by the Soviets between 1945 and 1950, be dealt with by a special museum clearly separated from the one devoted to the Nazi camp. (The necessary renovation work has now been carried out.) The commission of experts also visited Dora, looked carefully at the conservation of the camp and tunnels, and adopted Dr. Klose’s recommendations as laid out at a meeting of the European Committee on January 10, 1992, in Brussels.
It was in March 1994 on these bases that the new organizational setup was established, concretized by the creation of a “foundation” known as the Stiftung Gedenkstätte Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora. Its purpose was defined as follows: “The purpose of the Foundation is to preserve the memorials as places of mourning, where the memory of the crimes committed there are kept, to fit out these memorials on a scientific base and to make them accessible to the public in a suitable form, as well as promoting the study and transmission of the attendant historical processes. The Buchenwald memorial shall give priority to the study of the history of the concentration camp. The history of the Soviet internment camp shall be dealt with in scholarly publications and a museographical presentation in a suitable form. In the Mittelbau-Dora memorial, account will be taken of the particular problem of the exploitation of the prisoners in manufacturing weapons of extermination. Finally, the history and instrumentalization of the memorials during the time of the German Democratic Republic will be exhibited.”
The Foundation is headed up by a council, the Stiftungsrat, with representatives of the Land of Thuringia, the federal state, the Nordhausen Landkreis, and the city of Weimar as well as the Central Council of the Jews of Germany. It is assisted by a Kuratorium (at the Land level) of qualified persons, historians, museum curators, and so on. This Kuratorium is itself assisted by three Beiräte, scientific councils of former prisoners, for each of the three camps: Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, and the special Soviet camp. The Dora Beirat is comprised of a German Jew, a German Gypsy, an Italian, a Belgian (Van Hoey), a Dutchman (Van Dijk), and two Frenchmen (Gamier and Mialet). Mialet was elected president.
Commemorative monuments are located on the different Mittelbau sites. Ellrich and Blankenburg have already been mentioned. There is a monument in the Harzungen cemetery for the sick killed by the SS after the evacuation of the camp. Another is located at the bottom of the Heimkehle cave for the victims of the Rottleberode. Another is at Nordhausen near the Boelcke Kaserne, whose ruins have disappeared and been replaced by other buildings. Lastly a large necropolis at Nordhausen commemorates the dead of the Boelcke Kaserne and the last to die at Dora. A stele erected in 1986 must also be mentioned; it marks the location of the former synagogue, burned down in 1938 during Kristallnacht. Interned in a camp, Raphael Katz is a survivor of the Jews who were deported at that time. The Gedenkstätte’s principal activity remains the conservation and fitting out of the Dora camp itself, which are regularly examined during the Beirat’s meetings. But the essential modification of the Dora site was the reopening of the tunnel, which, though partial, is highly significant.
In 1945 the Kohnstein was dug in three different ways. In the middle was the Dora Tunnel with its A and B tunnels running from north to south and linked by the halls. It was entirely occupied by the three factories: Nordwerk (Junkers), Mittelwerk I (V2), and Mittelwerk II (V1). To the west near Woffleben what was undertaken on work site B 12 had made it possible to dig large galleries. This situation was the same near Niedersachswerfen to the east on work site B 11. On each side of the A and B tunnels, secondary galleries ensured connections with galleries B 12 and B 11.
After 1945, each of the three parts of the Kohnstein had a different history. The Soviets, when they abandoned the tunnel in the summer of 1948, blew up the north and south entrances to tunnels A and B and caved in parts of the underground complex. One of B 12’s three access points—the closest to the north entrance to tunnel B—was also blown up, but the others still offered access to those galleries that were still intact and used in part by a refrigeration warehouse, in part for a storehouse for potatoes, and so on.
Things evolved very differently regarding B 11. For a long time it was here that the Kohnstein anhydrite was extracted from a quarry on the east side of the hill, gradually cut away by the mining. It was used above all to supply the synthetic-fertilizer factory at Leuna near Merseburg controlled by IG Farben. After 1945 the company running the operation came to be known as Leuna Werke, and the use of the anhydrite remained unchanged. The mining operation over a period of fifty years, with its ups and downs, ended up destroying the B 11 galleries and by 1990 had reached almost all the way to tunnel A itself. The company exploiting the quarry was then known as the Harzer Anhydrit Werke GmbH.
Tunnels A and B seemed threatened, and in August 1991 a wave of concern was expressed in the local press. If the Kohnstein massif were to collapse, ecologists predicted a considerable impact on the local microclimate. The Dora European Committee, the French and Belgian associations, and the International Buchenwald-Dora Committee made contact with the federal government, the Land of Thuringia, and the Nordhausen Landkreis.
Such was the situation when the commission of experts, designated by the Land of Thuringia to write a report on the future of Buchenwald and Dora, came to visit the tunnel on November 15, 1991. Though he had not been invited, Van Hoey joined them. On November 16 in a press conference the commission declared, in particular, that tunnels A and B had to be conserved and that some portion of them had to be integrated into the Gedenkstätte and opened to the public. It would appear that the law of January 6, 1993, regarding the protection of historical monuments in the Land of Thuringia, also aimed at sites of cultural interest, made it possible to register tunnels A and B along with their lateral galleries as classified monuments in order to ensure their protection.
Contrary to what appeared to be the case, access into the tunnel by circuitous routes such as B 12 had been possible for some time; it was thus that the commission of experts was able to evaluate its sheer size. Souvenir hunters also knew about it. According to a 1994 inquiry, a London-based auctioneer actually proposed in his catalog pieces of missiles that had been abandoned by the Russians. But though it was possible to get inside, access was not authorized and entailed the risk of an accident.
Attention was thus given to putting in a new entranceway that would be more practical, based on the work undertaken in 1988; but this entranceway was abandoned for lack of money and sealed up. The plan had been to dig a gallery running from the south entrance to tunnel B just before the caved-in section, connecting diagonally with tunnel A beyond the collapsed section. Work started up again in late 1992 and had reached tunnel A by September 1993, which enabled a muddy and flashlit “inauguration.” The entranceway was completely finished in June 1994, enabling people to go down tunnel A as far as Hall 46—one of the “dormitories” at the tunnel’s beginnings. Today the heaps of fallen earth have largely been cleared out of tunnel A all the way to Halls 46 and 45 as well as those halls themselves. The arches have been consolidated and the whole complex lit up. Modifications to facilitate visits are under way. To go farther, tunnel A—obstructed at the level of Hall 44—would have to be cleared out.
Meanwhile, on September 30, 1992, the Treuhand, in charge of privatizing state-run companies, sold the Kohnstein open-pit anhydrite mine to a Bavarian company called Münchner Baustoff Werke Wildgrüber, the name of its owner.
As the Dora Tunnel itself reappeared, what was left of B 12 and B 3 remained accessible, though it continued to be used by companies. B 3 had been turned into a very large mushroom bed—very much like those in the former underground limestone quarries in the Paris area.
It is especially important that the renovations of the Dora Tunnel be continued. Indeed, the camps themselves in their current state provide a necessarily imperfect picture of concentration camp life. In Buchenwald the very monumentality of the commemoration and the disappearance of the blocks used for housing leave the visitor perplexed—above all if the visitor happens to be a former prisoner. At Dora the entirely charming natural setting tends to make one forget what the site, long ago and for a relatively short period of time—some twenty months overall—was used for. The author, on the basis of putting things together and examining what remains of the foundations, was able to find the site of his former block and to reconstruct it in his mind; the average visitor, however, cannot carry out such an exercise. In terms of its size and indestructible character, the Dora Tunnel is no doubt the place of memory most suited for the final phase of the Nazi concentration camp system—and the 1991 commission of experts made no mistake about that.
As is customary for former deportees as well as veterans, pilgrimages to the sites are organized on a yearly basis by the various associations concerned. With regard to Dora, the European Committee, the International Buchenwald-Dora Committee, the Belgian and French associations (Dora-Ellrich and Buchenwald-Dora) were these past few years especially active.
But other initiatives have been undertaken by young people: high school students from Liffré in France (in the Ille-et-Vilaine), from Waremme in Belgium, from Luxembourg, and from many other places have traveled to Dora and elsewhere in Germany, with students from the Robert-Koch High School in Clausthal-Zellerfeld and their teacher Joachim Neander, and students from the Hamberg High School in Göttingen along with their teacher Renée Grihon, for instance.
Given the interest taken in the Dora-Mittelbau complex by various groups of young Germans, an organization known as “Jugend für Dora”—Youth for Dora—was created in 1995 in the course of a meeting between deportees and young people on the basis of a suggestion put forth by the European Committee. Its founder and president is Dorothea August, a young woman from Ellrich. Among its activities, every year Jugend für Dora organizes an international camp for youth. The 1998 program was devoted to Ellrich. Under the supervision of an archaeologist, the goal was to find and reveal the foundations of the former camp and write an account of the findings. Leisure time was devoted to visiting the Harz Mountains. The former prisoners’ associations supported this initiative. It is encouraging that, just as he was concluding this book, this was the last piece of information to reach the author—as is the fact that it came from Germany. He felt it important to emphasize that.