Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial

KZ-Gedenkstätte Mittelbau-Dora

Since 1954, a memorial on the site of the former Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, close to Nordhausen on the edge of the Harz mountains, commemorates the fate of the prisoners who were slave labourers here. Between 1943 and 1945, the prisoners had to extend the tunnels in the Kohnstein mountain to construct an arms factory there.

History

On August 18, 1943, the British air force attacked the V-2 rocket production site in Peenemünde. In reaction to this, the National Socialist authorities decided to move production below ground. It was decided that the underground factory was to be situated in a tunnel in the Kohnstein mountain in the Harz region. There, the Wirtschaftsforschungsgesellschaft (WiFo; economic research society) had been building an underground fuel storage facility for the Wehrmacht since 1936. Already on August 28, 1943, 107 prisoners from Buchenwald concentration camp arrived in the new subcamp »Dora«. There were more than 3,000 prisoners there at the end of September; by the end of December, there were more than 10,000. The prisoners had to live in the underground tunnel system, where they worked and slept in moist, cold and dusty shafts. They had to construct an underground rocket factory. The strenuous physical work and the disastrous living conditions quickly led to many deaths. Almost 2,900 people died between October 1943 and March 1944 in Dora, and the SS deported around 3,000 weak prisoners to the Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. When »V-1« and »V-2« rocket production began, the SS moved part of the prisoners to a newly built barrack camp. The SS now required highly qualified prisoners for the production efforts - these received better supplies and were permitted to live in barracks. Beginning March 1944, first subcamps of the »Dora« camp were established in the area. At the end of 1944, the SS transported many thousands of prisoners from the Auschwitz and Groß-Rosen concentration camps to camps in the west, thus fleeing the approaching Red Army. 16,000 prisoners were brought to Mittelbau-Dora alone. The SS evacuated Mittelbau-Dora between April 3 and 6: thousands of prisoners were taken to Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, leaving behind a few hundred sick prisoners in the main camp of »Dora«. They were liberated by the US Army on April 11, 1945.

Mittelbau-Dora Camp, Summer 1944, Entrance to gallery A of the Mittelwerk, Bildarchiv Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Nordhausen, 2006, The part of the transport tunne which is accessible today, Ronnie Golz

Victims

Between 1943 and 1945, the SS deported around 60,000 people to Mittelbau-Dora and its subcamps. Prisoners from the Soviet Union made up the largest group, among them prisoners of war. Large groups came from Poland and France. It is no longer possible to determine how many people fell victim to the forced labour and catastrophic living conditions. According to estimates, around 20,000 people perished.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

From April 1945, the Allies used the former concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora as a contact point for former prisoners, whose return home as »displaced persons« (DP) was to begin here. On April 11, 1946, the anniversary of the camp's liberation, the Soviet military authorities organised a commemorative celebration at the former crematorium. The building was dedicated as a »site of honour« in 1954, the grounds, however, remained derelict. In 1966, the »Mittelbau-Dora Memorial« was opened on initiative of the Nordhausen SED (communist party of the GDR) leadership. During the 1970s, the memorial administration expanded the site: the former roll call ground was redesigned as a parade ground and furnished with a platform for the 25th anniversary of the GDR. A few years later, a copper relief by artist Heinz Scharr was added, depicting the suffering of the prisoners. After Germany's reunification, extensive restructuring of the memorial began in 1991: foundations and relics were uncovered and since 1994, there is a new access tunnel for the former underground rocket factory. In 2006, the permanent exhibition of the new museum building was opened.

Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, 1945, US soldiers find dead and dying prisoners in one of the barracks of the liberated camp, National Archives Washington

Nordhausen, 2005, The museum building, Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial, J. M. Pietsch

Possibilities

Exhibition on the history of the camp, permanent exhibition in the tunnel system of the former Mittelwerk assembly plant

Open

1 October to 31 March: 10.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.;
1 April to 30 September: 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.; Exhibitions closed on Mondays.

Contact

http://www.dora.de

info@dora.de

+49 (0)3631 4958-20

Kohnsteinweg 20
99734 Nordhausen

Nordhausen, 2006, The severely corroded copper relief by Heinz Scharr, Stiftung Denkmal

Nordhausen, 2006, Entrance area to the former camp site, Ronnie Golz

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