A quarter of a century ago, concentration camp Dora—also known as Mittelbau or Mittelbau-Dora—was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Its brief twenty-month existence at the end of World War II had been covered up or ignored by the U.S. government and the Western media because of its inconvenient connection to an American hero: the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), who had helped put the first U.S. satellite in orbit and the first Americans on the moon. It took the 1979 publication of Dora, the translated memoir of a French Resistance leader and camp survivor, Jean Michel, to begin to establish this camp in the public mind. Michel’s book was influential in launching an investigation of the group of former German rocket engineers by the new Nazi-hunting unit of the U.S. Justice Department, which in turn led to the return to Germany in 1984 of one of von Braun’s chief deputies, Arthur Rudolph. Rudolph, who had served as project manager of the Apollo Saturn V moon rocket for NASA, had been production manager of the underground Mittelwerk plant that produced V2 ballistic missiles using concentration camp labor from Dora, leading to thousands of deaths. The Rudolph case spawned muckraking books and television programs by journalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as scholarly research on the rocket program and the Mittelbau-Dora camp in German, French, and English. In 1997 a second important French survivor memoir, Yves Béon’s Planet Dora, appeared in translation in this country.
In spite of all this activity, no full-length history of the Mittelbau-Dora camp system has ever been published in the English language—until now. This fact alone would make the book you hold in your hand an event. But what makes it particularly unique is that it is the product of a Dora survivor and former slave laborer on the V2 production line who also has historical training. In the foreword to the German translation of this book, Eberhard Jäckel, the eminent historian, has compared André Sellier to Eugen Kogon. A former Buchenwald prisoner, Kogon launched the study of the Nazi concentration camps in 1946 with his book Der SS Staat, which appeared in English as Theory and Practice of Hell. Like Kogon, Sellier examines the history of his camp with engagement but also with scholarly detachment, skillfully analyzing all the sources available to him. A History of the Dora Camp is not a memoir, yet Sellier is able to use his memories and those of his fellow survivors to supplement the somewhat meager written record. The extensive use of the memoir files of the Dora-Ellrich and Buchenwald-Dora survivor associations in France, supplemented by interviews and correspondence with French, Belgian, Czech, and Slovenian prisoners, gives the present book a powerful, personal dimension which does not undermine its restrained tone.
It is, to be sure, a French view of what happened in Dora and its subcamps, like the two memoirs that have preceded it in English. The voices of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish prisoners who formed over half the population of these camps have scarcely been heard, even in the new, excellent scholarly literature in German, because of the lingering effects of the division of Europe and the lack of expertise in Slavic languages in the West. (Jewish prisoners, mostly from Hungary, were only a small minority in the Mittelbau-Dora camps until the evacuation of Auschwitz and Gross Rosen in late January 1945.) We can only hope that this deficit, which is common to all works on the topic, will soon be remedied by new scholarly research. But even when it is, there is no doubt that André Sellier’s History of the Dora Camp will continue to be revered as a standard work on the topic. I highly recommend it to all readers.
MICHAEL J. NEUFELD
Washington, D.C.
October 2002