The Dora prisoners ate, slept, and worked underground. Before long, they were barely recognizable. When he arrived in early 1944, the Dutch prisoner Hendrikus Iwes was shocked by the sight of men who “were no[t] real persons anymore.” Conditions improved somewhat during the following months, as inmates were gradually transferred to a new barrack camp above ground and a growing number of them were used in skilled production jobs. But this came too late for many: by the end of March 1944, more than one in three Dora prisoners were already dead. Most died from illness and exhaustion, though there was also an unusually large number of suicides.1
Dora had been established hastily in August 1943, following a British bombing raid on the village of Peenemünde on a small island on the Baltic coast. The central German military testing facility for missiles, Peenemünde was the site of the production plant and development works of the A-4 rocket, later known as the V2, masterminded by the young engineer Dr. Wernher von Braun (recruited by the United States after the war, the former SS officer became the father of NASA’s space program). The attack on Peenemünde caused great concern among Nazi leaders, who had invested much hope in their “miracle weapons”; Heinrich Himmler had visited the facilities, where some six hundred KL prisoners toiled, only a few weeks earlier. Just days after the air raid, Hitler, Himmler, and Speer agreed to relocate V2 production to an underground location, with the help of concentration camp labor; this, Himmler promised, would guarantee the program’s secrecy. In the end, the new plant became a joint venture between the SS, the army, and Speer’s Ministry for Armaments. Himmler carved out a major part for his SS, including the construction of the new underground facility.
The location of the plant was quickly settled: an existing tunnel system in the Harz Mountains near the city of Nordhausen (Thuringia) in central Germany. Under construction since 1936 as an army fuel depot, it offered over one million square feet of manufacturing space in two parallel tunnels, almost a mile long, which were connected by forty-six side tunnels resembling a giant, curving ladder. Using KL labor, this huge tunnel system would now be extended and made operational for rocket production. Dora, a new satellite camp of Buchenwald, was set up on site, and the first prisoners arrived on August 28, 1943, just ten days after the Peenemünde attack. Seven weeks later, Heinrich Himmler appeared for an inspection.2
More subterranean concentration camps followed. Nazi leaders saw the underground relocation of arms production as a surefire way to protect key resources from Allied bombing, and the KL system was meant to play an important part: in mid-December 1943, Heinrich Himmler pictured his troops as “new cavemen” who would establish the “only truly protected production sites.”3 By then, several new sites had emerged already. In addition to Dora, more than five hundred prisoners were held in the Mauthausen satellite camp Ebensee (code-named Kalk, later Zement). The prisoners slept inside a former factory building, before moving to a barrack camp, and had to dig two huge underground tunnels for the Peenemünde rocket development works. Another new Mauthausen satellite was set up in Redl-Zipf, some fifteen miles from Ebensee. By the end of 1943, some 1,900 prisoners worked near the camp (code-named Schlier), extending the cellars of a local brewery for an oxygen factory and digging tunnels to connect it to test ranges for V2 engines (produced in Dora) on a mountain behind; in December alone, ninety-three of the prisoners lost their lives here.4 The German navy also used KL labor for building shelters. In Farge, a new satellite of Neuengamme outside Bremen, prisoners were helping to erect a massive bombproof bunker (code-named Valentin) that would hold a high-tech factory for submarine assembly. By the end of 1943, some five hundred KL prisoners worked on site, sleeping in an empty fuel tank.5 Pioneering projects like these paved the way for prisoner mass deployment in gigantic and often pointless underground relocation schemes.
Inmate numbers reached staggering heights in 1944, as did inmate deaths. The KL population more than doubled, shooting up from an estimated 315,000 prisoners (December 31, 1943) to 524,286 (August 1, 1944) and then 706,650 (January 1, 1945).6 Hundreds of thousands were now working for the German war effort. Most inmates were sent to new satellite camps that sprang up at an incredible rate near factories and building sites. Prisoners were constantly on the move, or so it seemed, taken from one site to the next. Everything was in flux, reflecting the camps’ breakneck economic mobilization. Recent calls to improve conditions often went unheeded as SS officials focused their energies on the exploitation of slave laborers at any price. It was imperative, Oswald Pohl lectured the Monowitz SS in September 1944, “to report lazy prisoners for punishment.”7
The wider changes in the KL system in 1944 were exemplified by Dora, the first relocation camp for war production.8 Not content with the rocket program inside the Kohnstein tunnels, the planners in the Ministry for Armaments, supported by industry, handed many more projects in the region to the SS, which was soon building new tunnels for airplane and motor manufacturing. Losing touch with reality, these plans became ever more outlandish, turning Dora into a big KL complex in its own right. Prisoner numbers reached over thirty-two thousand in late October 1944, and they were still rising. Most inmates worked in the surrounding satellite camps, which eventually numbered around forty, with names like Hans, Anna, and Erich betraying the SS penchant for camouflage; in addition, almost all SS Building Brigades were stationed nearby, supporting the gigantic relocation effort. WVHA leaders officially recognized the importance of Dora in autumn 1944. Previously a satellite camp, it was now awarded the status of main camp. Called Mittelbau, it would be the last main concentration camp founded in the Third Reich.9
IN EXTREMIS
Sometime in late May 1944, Ágnes Rózsa was deported to Auschwitz, together with her parents, from her hometown of Nagyvárad. The city had been part of Romania between the wars, as it is again today (Oradea), but in 1940 it was annexed by Hungary with the rest of north Transylvania. This is why Ágnes Rózsa, a thirty-three-year-old high school teacher, was sucked into the maelstrom of the Nazi deportations of Hungarian Jews, which began soon after the German invasion in March 1944. Rózsa arrived in Auschwitz on June 1, 1944, during a period when the Birkenau killing apparatus reached its murderous peak. At the same time, the SS pressed more prisoners than ever into the war economy and Ágnes Rózsa was among those spared for forced labor. After several months in Birkenau, she was deported to a small satellite camp of the Siemens-Schuckert works in Nuremberg.10
Rózsa belonged to the vast number of Jewish slave laborers who poured into camps deep inside the old German borders during 1944, following the regime’s U-turn on the deployment of Jews. For the first time since late 1938, Jewish inmates became a major presence across the KL system as a whole, as several older camp complexes, which had held virtually no Jews since 1942, quickly filled up. The prisoners from occupied Poland brought with them news of the Nazi Final Solution. In camps like Dachau, some veteran inmates already had a general idea of what was happening in the east, after the earlier arrival of clothes, shoes, suitcases, and other belongings of murdered Jews from Auschwitz and Majdanek.11 But only now did they learn more details about the deportations, the selections, and the crematoria. The truth came out quickly, sometimes at the moment Jewish newcomers stepped into the showers and screamed, “Not gas! Not gas!”12
Going Underground
What started in autumn 1943 as a project to move the secret German missile program underground quickly extended to the air industry as a whole, which would eventually occupy more than one-third of all working KL prisoners.13 When German airplane factories were hit in late February 1944, during a major Allied bombing campaign (the “Big Week”), the Air Ministry was planning dozens of underground projects. Some were already under way, in fact, and many more would soon follow. On March 1, 1944, the so-called Fighter Staff (Jägerstab) was formed, one of several powerful new Nazi agencies aimed at overcoming critical setbacks to war production, which added even more layers to the polycratic Nazi dictatorship in its twilight year
s. The remit of the Fighter Staff was to protect and increase the production of planes for defending German airspace, which was beginning to be penetrated almost at will by Allied bombers, and there was widespread agreement from the start that the best solution was to move the facilities underground. In a conference on March 5, 1944, Hitler himself announced that this was just the beginning of relocating “all German industrial plants under the earth.” The scramble for underground construction had well and truly begun.14
The KL played an important role in these plans. The Fighter Staff brought together senior officials from the Armaments Ministry, Air Ministry, and private companies. But the SS also sat at the table, greatly raising its profile, as the aviation sector had become the biggest part of the German arms industry by 1944. The main reason for the SS involvement was its mass of slave laborers and its promise of providing even more. Labor shortages were biting harder than ever. Brutal efforts by Fritz Sauckel to capture millions more foreign laborers had failed, as the German stranglehold over much of continental Europe was broken, leaving the SS as one of the last sources of available labor.15
The SS was put in charge of special construction orders within the Fighter Staff, having impressed Albert Speer and others with its apparent success in Dora. Soon, the SS oversaw a range of high-profile relocation projects for the air industry, working together with private contractors. Satellite camps were set up near these new sites, and by June 1944 around seventeen thousand prisoners were toiling there, with many more on the way. Some schemes aimed at the speedy conversion of existing tunnels and caves. But the aircraft industry soon realized that this was a dead end, since corrosion and cramped spaces undermined efficient production. Instead, hopes turned to more complex projects: vast purpose-built tunnels, also dug by the SS. The closer the Third Reich came to defeat, the more monstrous these plans became, in terms of their size and speed of construction, and their human cost.16
Among the largest schemes was a network of tunnels near the town of Melk in Lower Austria; this was to house a factory (code-named Quarz) of the Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG, which had lobbied hard for the project and was heavily involved in its implementation. To provide the necessary labor, a satellite camp of Mauthausen was set up in Melk in April 1944, holding some seven thousand prisoners by mid-September. Conditions were infernal; there were constant accidents and most of the tunneling and cementing had to be done by hand. In all, almost one in three prisoners deported to the camp lost their lives there—more than the entire civilian population of the adjacent town of Melk.17
The manager of the gigantic SS-run underground program was Dr. Hans Kammler, the leading technocrat of terror in the WVHA. The trained architect had joined Pohl’s sprawling organization full-time in 1941 to oversee SS construction (from 1942 as chief of Office Group C), having proven himself, during his time as a civil servant in the Nazi Air Ministry, as a capable manager of large building projects. He impressed his new SS superiors with his technical expertise, drive, and ideological commitment (he had joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and the SS two years later), and quickly became a key figure in several major projects, from the vast settlement plans to the killing machinery in Auschwitz. In 1943, his career really took off, propelling him toward the top of the German war industry. The first major step was his commission by Himmler and Speer, in late August 1943, to turn Dora into an underground missile factory. This was followed in March 1944 by an even more prestigious post: managing all SS relocation projects for the Fighter Staff, as the head of a new “Special Staff Kammler.” He pressed ahead regardless of prisoner lives; what counted was the rapid completion of building tasks, not how many died in the process. After all, there still seemed to be enough new prisoners ready to be “pumped” into his projects, as Kammler put it.
Kammler quickly gained a formidable reputation. A restless workaholic in his early forties, this gaunt man, with his thin and haggard face, cut an intimidating figure. He spoke resolutely and rapidly, making clear to everyone that he knew what he wanted and how to get it. Heinrich Himmler was an early admirer and frequently met with him, and Hitler placed equally great faith in Kammler. Albert Speer paid his respects, too. Soon after he had inspected the Dora tunnels on December 10, 1943, Speer commended Kammler for the “near-impossible” speed with which he had built the underground factory, “which has no equal anywhere in Europe.”
Dr. Kammler became the man for the most difficult SS missions. Heinrich Himmler expected results, whatever the obstacles, and the loyal Kammler promised to deliver. However, ruthlessness did not equal effectiveness, and several of his high-profile projects failed to live up to his hubris. And yet, there was no stopping his rise. After the Fighter Staff folded in summer 1944 into the Armaments Staff (Rüstungsstab), Kammler’s remit for underground relocation expanded from airplanes to other arms programs. His attention also turned back to rocket production, which gained added urgency after the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. More and more missiles were rolling out of Dora, and it was Kammler who traveled to supervise their deployment, with the rank of army general; the first V2s fell on England in September 1944 and the rockets later hit France, Belgium, and Holland. Over the coming months, Kammler accumulated yet more projects—including the construction of an enormous underground headquarters for Hitler in Ohrdruf, a top-priority project where more than ten thousand KL prisoners worked by late 1944—and by spring 1945 he controlled almost the entire arms production for the air force. Kammler was even talked about as a successor to Speer as armaments minister. At this late stage, of course, with the Third Reich already in ruins, there was no more armaments output to speak of, as Speer pointedly noted in his memoirs.18
Powerful as Hans Kammler was, he had no monopoly over underground construction for the German air industry. While his SS office oversaw most of the major Fighter Staff relocation projects, the rival Organization Todt (OT) established itself as another key player. This Nazi construction agency, set up along military lines in 1938, had grown rapidly during the war. Relying largely on foreign labor, the OT ran a huge number of building projects all across Nazi-occupied Europe—including bridges, roads, and defensive installations—and it expanded into German domestic construction, as well. This led to tensions with the SS, after Hitler commissioned the OT in April 1944 to build gigantic concrete bunkers for fighter aircraft factories. Even though this urgent project was supervised by the OT, the SS had to supply much of the labor force. Starting in June 1944, a total of fifteen Dachau satellite camps were established around Kaufering and Mühldorf am Inn, where several tens of thousands of prisoners built four huge bunker complexes. The OT, which subcontracted the work to private firms, was now the largest slave driver of the Dachau prisoners.19
This was not the only major OT project using concentration camp labor. In April 1944, the OT took over the construction of a big network of bunkers for Hitler and the top echelons of the regime (code-named Riese, or “giant”). Turning a large wooded area of Lower Silesia into a building site, KL prisoners and other forced laborers had to erect huge underground structures and infrastructure. In all, thirteen thousand Jewish men were held in some twelve new satellite camps of Gross-Rosen, known collectively as “Work Camp Riese”; around five thousand of them lost their lives.20
Elsewhere, KL prisoners were exploited during desperate Nazi efforts to protect the fuel supply. Following major Allied bombing raids on German hydrogenation plants in May 1944, Hitler invested Edmund Geilenberg, a top official in Speer’s Armaments Ministry, with special powers to keep tanks rolling and planes flying. The main aims of the new Geilenberg Staff were the repair of damaged hydrogenation plants, the construction of new plants, and the underground relocation of production. Many of the construction projects were once again run by the OT, but the SS was involved, too, managing some sites and supplying slave labor to others. By late November 1944, an estimated three hundred and fifty thousand workers toiled on the Geilenberg sites, including tens of thousands of KL prisoners, disper
sed across several satellite camps. Some of these camps had originally been erected for other purposes; in Ebensee a huge fuel refinery was set up in the tunnels originally intended for the V2 development works. Other sites were hastily set up from scratch. In Württemberg, for example, the SS created three new Natzweiler satellites to push ahead with project “Desert” (Wüste), extracting local shale oil for fuel production. Together with inmates from associated satellite camps, over ten thousand KL prisoners were forced into project “Desert,” mostly working in construction; thousands died.21
The relocation of the German war industry transformed concentration camp slave labor. It is impossible to say exactly how many prisoners were deployed in this way, but numbers were very substantial. At the end of 1944, according to an estimate by Pohl, around forty percent of all the working KL prisoners came under Kammler’s authority, the vast majority of them in relocation camps; many more worked on similar projects managed by the OT.22 In all, hundreds of thousands of KL inmates were forced into the new relocation camps, and while there were many differences between individual sites, all of them placed inmates in mortal danger. To keep alive their hopes of a miraculous German victory, Nazi leaders sacrificed entire armies of prisoners.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 63
