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In early December, 1942, Albert Speer, German Armaments Minister, set up the “A-4 Special Committee”, headed by Gerhard Degenkolb, a fanatical Nazi. As a Director of the DEMAG company, Degenkolb had previously succeeded in a remarkably efficient reorganization of German production of railroad locomotives. During 1943, Degenkolb pushed to have production of the V-2 rocket organized more along the industrial model and taken from the control of Army Ordinance (Wa Pruf 11), with its bureaucratic procedures and slow moving organization. Walter Dornberger, chief of Wa Pruf 11, resented and resisted Degenkolb’s attempt to take over V-2 production.
However, manpower was in very short supply. Therefore, in April of 1943 Arthur Rudolph, the Chief Production Engineer of the Peenemünde V-2 assembly effort and a prewar colleague of von Braun, toured the Heinkel aircraft plant north of Berlin and returned enthused about the possibility of
using concentration camp labor (mostly Russians, Poles, and French) for production of the V-2. These concentration camp inmates were referred to as “detainees” (Haftlinge) and would supplement the “guest workers” who had already been recruited (and were paid small amounts of wages) by the Germans. So in June, 1943, Peenemünde requested some 1,400 detainees from the SS concentration camps, and initially set the maximum number of these workers 2,500. An assembly line was set up at Peenemünde on the lower floor of Building F1. This line, which opened on July 16th, was the precursor of the rail-borne horizontal transport type of assembly later used at Mittelwerk.
V-2 parts, however, were never designed to be fully interchangeable. Combustion chambers, fuel pumps, and many valves had to be matched up to each other and specifically tested and regulated for each missile. This meant that each V-2's engine assembly had to be test-fired prior to final assembly. Wernher Von Braun was in charge of these final acceptance tests.
On August 4, 1943, Peenemünde made the decision that V-2 production would be carried out for the most part using concentration camp labor in a ratio reported to have been set at 10 to 15 detainees to every German worker. The SS, which ran the camps, became the supplier and organizer of V-2 production manpower. A small concentration camp was in fact located in the basement of Building F1 at the base.
On the night of August 17-18, 1943, the Allies mounted a massive air raid on Peenemünde. This raid forced the Germans to look for hardened underground production locations for the V-2, and for many other key weapons production projects as well. In a meeting on August 26, 1943, a series of pre-existing tunnels under Kohnstein Mountain near Nordhausen were chosen for the new plant, to become known as the Mittelwerk (Middle Works). The Mittelwerk was incorporated as a private company on September 24, 1943, and received a contract for the production of 12,000 V-2s. After meeting with Hitler on August 18th, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had informed Armaments Minister Speer that he was personally taking over V-2 production and placing SS Brigadier General Hans Kammler in charge of the Mittelbau complex. It was Kammler who had been in charge of building of the extermination camps and gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maidenek, and Belzec.
The tunnel system at Mittelwerk had been started back in 1934 by another government run mining company (Wifo). The Kohnstein Mountain itself into which the Mittelwerk factory was built is gypsum, anhydrite—therefore fairly easily dug. Later, these tunnels had been used as a storage facility for oil, gasoline, and poison gas. In October, 1940, the Armaments Ministry in Berlin approved expansion of the Wifo site, creating two parallel S-shaped tunnels, connected at regular intervals by cross tunnels resembling the rungs of a ladder. By late 1943, 46 cross tunnels existed, and each of the main tunnels (called “A” and “B”) was wide enough to permit twin regular gauge railroad tracks to run through them.
Tunnels.
On August 28, 1943, two days after the choice of the Mittelwerk, the SS delivered the first truckloads of prisoners from the concentration camp at Buchenwald to begin the heavy labor of expanding and completing of the Wifo tunnel system. Dora was the name given to the Buchenwald subcamp that was set up within the tunnels for the laborers. By November of the same year, the subcamp became independant and the surrounding workshops became known as KZ Mittelbau. Later, fbeginning in the spring of 1944, Dora was transformed into a more traditional camp, with 58 barracks buildings surrounded by barbed wire being set up about a quarter mile west of the south entrance to Tunnel B. Camp construction was not completed until October, 1944.
It was during October, November, and December of 1943 that the most physically punishing work was done by the Dora prisoners, who struggled under terrible, inhuman conditions to enlarge and fit out the Mittelwerk tunnels. Prisoners drilled and blasted away thousands of tons of rock. They built rickety, temporary narrow gauge tracks to support the multi-ton loads of rock that were extracted from the caves. If the skips or small rail cars, full of rock fell off these tracks (and this happened frequently), prisoners were kicked, whipped, and beaten until they could re-rail and reload the cars.
The prisoners were made to eat and sleep within the tunnels they were digging. Thousands of workers were crammed into stinking, lice infested bunks stacked four-high in the first few south side cross tunnels at the mouth of Tunnel A, in an atmosphere thick with gypsum dust and fumes from the blasting work, which continued 24 hours a day. Prisoners had no running water or sanitary facilities.
Dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, and starvation were constant causes of suffering and death for these unfortunate people. The Detainees worked atop 30 foot scaffolds using picks to enlarge the tunnels. From time to time, a prisoner would become too weak to continue, fall to his death from the scaffolding, and be replaced by another. Trucks bearing piles of prisoner corpses left every other day for the crematorium ovens at Buchenwald. All of the manufacturing equipment from Peenemünde had to be installed in the tunnels. This was done by hand by prisoner workers using hand-carts, block and tackle, huge skids pulled by teams of prisoners, and the temporary narrow gauge rail lines.
