Adventures of a Sea Hunter

by James P. Delgado

  The prisoners at Dora were for the most part prisoners of war— Russians and Poles—as well as French resistance fighters, German prisoners of conscience, political prisoners and, later in the war, Jews and Gypsies, who were singled out for particularly brutal treatment by the ss. Other nationalities also joined the ranks of Dora’s inmates. After Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis, the Germans turned on their former allies with a vengeance. A group of Italian officers, sent to Dora to work as slave laborers, balked at entering the tunnels, so the Germans shot them all. A Greek inmate, Anton Luzidis, spoke for all the prisoners at the end of the war when he testified: “The meaning of Dora was fright. I cannot find the proper words to characterize the conditions there. If often happened to me that I asked myself whether I was still alive in the world, or whether I was brought into this hell after my decease.”

  Production of Dora’s first rockets began in January 1944 when the prisoners started work on V-2s. That same month, 679 prisoners died in the camp. By August 1944, work had started on the first V-1 rockets in the tunnels and the death toll of prisoners mounted. The V-1 factory was set up by the SS and their industrial partners in the manufacture of the weapon, Volkswagen. By March 1945, reacting against what they termed “sabotage,” which could be something as simple as using a piece of scrap leather to make a belt to hold up a pair of pants that had grown too large because of starvation, the SS began rounding up inmates and hanging them in groups from the cranes in the underground factory. The executions increased in the last month of the camp’s operation. When American forces began closing in, the SS evacuated the civilian support workers and the last remaining rocket scientists. Most of the inmates were shipped out to other camps for liquidation, while thousands were “death-marched” in the snow. At a barn in nearby Gardelegen, the SS locked 1,050 prisoners in a barn, set it on fire and machine-gunned those who made it out of the burning building. Only thirty-four men made it out alive.

  The SS abandoned the camp on April 4, 1945, and the U.S. Army liberated Dora and its tunnels seven days later. Several hundred starving, dying inmates, all that remained of the approximately sixty thousand slave laborers who had filled the camp and built the rockets, greeted them. The Americans, well aware of the scientific and military value of the German rocket program, removed the parts of about a hundred V-2 rockets from the tunnels before the Russians arrived in July, because the camp and complex were within the recently established Russian zone of occupation. In October 1946, the Russians, too, removed rocket parts and equipment and shipped them to the Soviet Union. The Russians tried to destroy the tunnels with explosives but could not complete the job. In the summer of 1948, they blasted the entrances to the tunnels to seal them, supposedly forever.

  PEENEMÜNDE

  The Sea Hunters visit to Germany starts with a visit to Peenemünde, which, like Dora, was once locked away behind the Iron Curtain and was inaccessible, due to its use as a Soviet and East German fighter base. Peenemünde sits on the Baltic coast, at the end of long, low, sandy peninsula, surrounded by shallow marshes on one side and the open Baltic on the other. The cold wind blowing off the sea chills us to the bone as we drive through the largely intact base. Decades of harsh life under communist rule meant that little changed here, and as we pass fences and grim brick and concrete buildings, it is easy to imagine Peenemünde “in its prime” as a top-level Nazi base. It is a surreal moment made all the more so when we visit the former Luftwaffe airfield on our way to the rocket-launching sites.

  As locked gates swing open, we drive past rows of bunkers, their huge blast doors hanging open, and rows of deteriorating East German MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets. Until 1989, this was part of the vast Soviet bloc, a potential foe that we were prepared to fight, and these aircraft were here to shoot down our planes in the event of war. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the German Democratic Republic, the reunification of Germany and the unraveling of the Soviet Union are such recent events that I shake my head in wonder as our vehicle speeds through the abandoned air base. Not too many years ago, my presence here with a camera would have resulted in a death sentence, just as it would have sixty years earlier when this was the heart of Hitler’s rocket program.

  We stop first at the buckled concrete rails of the V-1 test firing range. Blasted and ruined by the Soviets in 1945, the collapsed bunkers and broken concrete look innocuous, and at the same time simple. Yet the weapon perfected here, and manufactured in the thousands at Dora, wrought enormous devastation and terrorized the skies of free Europe and England. Before I left Vancouver on this trip, my museum’s board chair told me about his childhood just outside London. The memory of “doodlebugs” or “buzz bombs” as the British called the V-1, were still a source of both terror and anger to him. “You could here them coming,” he told me, “and as long as you could hear them, it was alright.” Only when the rocket motor cut off would the V-1 plummet to earth and explode. That’s when you ran and hoped you were outside the blast zone. I think of him and the memories he still carries of these missiles as I gaze out at the now peaceful Baltic from the lip of the V-1 launch track.

  From here, we drive into a forest and park next to a mound of broken brick, glass and twisted steel that was once the assembly building for V-2s at Prüfstande (test stand) 7. Blasted flat by the Soviets after the war, it towered above the plain to house an upright rocket before it was rolled out on rails to its launch platform and the actual test stand. Nestled inside an earthwork that still rings the launch site, the firing position is now a forested glade pockmarked by bombs and designated by a small granite marker. Here, humans first reached beyond the skies into space, but any thrill connected to standing at this monument to the beginnings of the space age is tempered by the grim reality of the evil that drove the invention of these rockets and the horrific human cost of their development and use. We pick our way carefully through the site, closed to public for the very good reason that many unexploded bombs still lie here.

  Our next stop is a lagoon. Frozen by the winter’s cold, it grips the protruding remains of a Lancaster bomber. As we slowly trek out across the ice, pulling our dive gear in a sled behind us, we talk about the raid that blasted Peenemünde and led to the creation of Dora. On the night of August 17–18, 1943, a force of 596 bombers set out to hit Peenemünde. In all, 560 bombers made it in, dropping 1,800 tons of bombs that hit the concentration camp and the scientists’ housing project as well as the liquid oxygen plant and the rocket-launching facilities. A diversionary strike at Berlin drew off German fighters at first, but the Germans caught on and joined with antiaircraft crews on the ground to shoot down forty of the attacking bombers. Sam Hall, who was in one of the bombers, recalls that “after we’d bombed, the mid-upper gunner said, There’s a fighter coming in! It’s got a Lane, it’s got another, it’s got another!’ Three Lancasters were going down in flames. You didn’t waste too much time thinking about it.” Wilkie Wanless, in another bomber, remembered after the war that “They shot down a lot of aircraft from the Canadian Group in the last wave… Very few got out in the dark. At 4,000 or 5,000 feet your chances of getting out are slim.”

  No one got out of the Lancaster that we’re approaching. One of our German guides tells us that this bomber came in burning, hit the shallow lagoon and cartwheeled as it exploded into pieces. Some of these pieces are sticking up out of the ice. Willi Kramer and I identify one as part of the tail of the Lancaster. Lying flat on the ice and wiping it with our gloved hands, we can make out the tail fins and the unmistakable outline of holes punched by cannon fire through the metal. John Davis and Mike Fletcher, meanwhile, outline and then start cutting a hole through the ice as Warren Fletcher gears up and prepares the video cameras. The ice proves to be 6 inches thick. After John finishes cutting the hole, both Fletchers drop into the icy water but find themselves only chest deep. This is a shallow, muddy pond. Dropping down, wedged between mud and ice, they slowly survey the wrecked aircraft as we stand on the ice above their blurred outlines an
d the tracks of their bubbles that form beneath our feet.

  Much of the plane is remarkably well preserved, albeit broken. The crew did not make it out, but the Germans recovered their bodies and buried them. What Mike and Warren find is battle-torn aluminum, original paint and what appears to be the barrels of the tail gunner’s machine gun, stuck fast in the mud, as Warren squeezes inside the tail section. Cold, constricted and seemingly frozen in time as well as into the ice, the downed Lancaster is a shallow but difficult dive into the past. It is also a fitting introduction to the dives that await all of us at Dora.

  DIVING INSIDE A MOUNTAIN

  Our long trek into Dora’s depths takes us to a side tunnel and to the half-flooded Gallery 44, where starving inmates built V-1 rockets. Not only is the gallery flooded, but its upper level, supported by steel beams and a concrete floor, has collapsed into the water. Our lights pick out the shapes of broken slabs and half-crushed rockets beneath the water, which lies one to nine feet deep over the mounded debris along the flooded, 30-foot wide, 500-foot-long gallery. The far end is sealed off, buried by a cascade of rock when the ceiling collapsed. The water is cold and has a sharp metallic smell. A faint scum of rust and oil slicks the surface.

  I’m glad that I am sitting this dive out, watching Mike and Warren as they suit up to take an hour-long snorkel, floating along the surface to film what lies below them. The flooded gallery is so filled with silt and rust that we are keeping our presence in the water to a minimum to avoid stirring it up so the divers can capture the best images possible. The cameras record stacks of V-1 wings and rocket bodies and a stack of gyrocompasses that would have been assembled in the noses of rockets to guide them to their targets. Tumbled workbenches and tables, equipment, and signs painted on machines and walls—warnings to do not touch this and to go in that direction—show not only the assembly line but a little of what life was like here.

  John Davis gives a hand to Mike Fletcher as he climbs out of one of the water-filled tunnels of Dora. James P. Delgado

  We have time for only one other dive, this one in a flooded chamber. It’s my turn to join Mike and Warren, and I quickly dress in the half-darkness, pulling on a thick fleece undergarment and the dense shell of my dry suit. The rubber seals at my throat and wrists will close the suit off from the freezing water. I pull on my weight belt and tank, rigging my equipment tightly against my body to keep the hoses from dragging or catching once I’m inside the tight confines of the flooded room. A neoprene hood leaves only part of my face exposed, and my breath fogs and clouds the inside of my face mask. I’m already chilled as I gear up next to a black mold-covered, slimy piece of canvas that once curtained off this gallery as workers painted V-1 rocket bodies. My natural instinct is to not want to touch anything.

  Mike and Warren go first, disappearing through a hole and into the darkness. I follow, feet first. The cold, even through the suit, is a shock. John Davis watches from above, and on my last glimpse of him through the oil-slicked surface of the hole, I see concern on his face. He should be worried. The three of us are entering a tight dark space that could collapse and bury us. Electric wires and lights still dangle from the ceiling, reaching out to snag us. Rust and silt, dislodged by our bubbles, filter down through the water and black out the light and our visibility. There’s only one way out, through what now seems to be a tiny hole, and leaving it behind as we work our through the murky, dark water, takes resolve.

  I’m spurred on by what I see. A coffee cup sits on the top of a desk, and a book rests nearby. Drawers, some half open, are filled with tools. Paint still covers the walls, and as I gaze up at the ceiling above me, the lights still hang from their wires, with unbroken bulbs inside the metal shades. As I swim forward through this dark, flooded room, I find Mike and Warren poised at a doorway that leads into another room. The door, on a sliding track, is half closed.

  Mike gently reaches out and slides the door open. Slowly and carefully, we glide inside. The room is small and crowded. Tools and equipment lie exactly where they were left by the concentration camp inmates who worked in this hellhole. Like the coffee cup and the tools in the other room, the condition of this workshop is a reminder that we’re the first to enter this space since April 1945. Due to the cold water, everything is preserved in a near deep freeze, and we feel the chill, not only of temperature but of the feeling that comes from the sense of encountering a tragic past. I can almost feel the presence of the SS and the inmates.

  Our dives inside the mountain, into the flooded heart of Dora, provide a good understanding of what else may lie in other submerged chambers. The flooded rooms seem to be far better preserved than the dry portions of the tunnels, with a chance that even paper has survived—as evidenced by our spotting a book. The flooding of Dora was sudden but not catastrophic. The loss of electrical power and the shutdown of the pumps allowed the seeping water to build up and engulf the lower sections, perhaps not too long after the last of the inmates and the SS abandoned the underground workshops and factories in April 1945. Some areas may have even escaped the notice of the teams of American and later Russian searchers who scoured this complex for the secrets of the Nazi rocket program.

  A stack of V-1 rocket gyrocompasses lie on the floor of the tunnels of Dora, abandoned as Nazi Germany collapsed at the end of World War II. James P. Delgado.

  The Dora museum, which manages the site of the camp, with its surviving barracks building and crematorium, SS bunker and numerous foundations, as well as the 5 per cent of the underground facilities open to visitors, preserves this place as a reminder of what happened here. The focus is not on the rockets but on the people who paid the price for those incredible yet terrible technological achievements. The museum’s library is full of survivor accounts, interviews and archives about the Nazi system of camps as a means to eliminate people. After we exit the caves, we stand for a moment in the clear night air, gazing up at the swollen moon, breathing in the fresh air to cleanse the stench of Dora from our lungs and to savor the freedom of being out of those dark confined spaces.

  Such is the power of a place like this, which is why we are visiting Dora to document its flooded and forgotten chambers. This place is more than a museum. It is a mirror that we must hold up to ourselves as a reminder of the worst that we as a species are capable of. As a child, I watched the astronauts with wonder when humanity first reached for the stars. I thrilled with countless others as men walked on the moon. But the roots of that triumph lie here, down in the darkness.

  On our last night, I stroll through the nearby village of Neustadt with soundman John Rosborough. It’s the Christmas festival, and we walk among booths filled with crafts and sample steaming hot mulled red wine. The stars glisten in the night sky, people are bundled up, buying presents and filled with delight. It seems too cheerful in the presence of the grim history we have seen today. And yet I know, from visiting Dora’s museum, that every one of this village’s schoolchildren has, since 1954, visited that camp, and since 1995, has ventured into the tunnels. They have encountered the relics of a horrific past, like many Germans who are facing their history. They, like the survivors of the camp—the Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Jewish, Greek, Gypsy and German inmates who built the rockets in the depths of Mittelbau-Dora—live every day with the memory of those times.

  A new generation of Germans is preserving the past in an effort to learn from it and to ensure that it is never repeated. I think about that as I sit in Neustadt’s tiny church, surrounded by villagers raising their voices in song. As carols fill the air, I am reminded by those words of peace and love of the duality of the human heart. That gives me hope, even as I continue to be haunted by what I saw in the depths of the mountain.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE LAST GERMAN CRUISER

  MAS A TIERRA ISLAND OFF CHILE: MARCH 13, 1914

  Kapitan zur See Fritz Emil von Lüdecke listened carefully as Leutnant Arnold Boker, standing rigidly at attention and breathless from his dash to the bridge
, reported that he had sighted a British cruiser approaching their position. Turning his binoculars to the horizon, Lüdecke could make out the silhouette of the cruiser, black smoke from its funnels staining the morning sky. The enemy was heading straight for his position. The game was up after 21,000 nautical miles, two major sea battles and seven months of war. The German warship Dresden was trapped: her engines and boilers were worn out and her coal nearly gone, and the ship lay at anchor after three months of playing a game of hide-and-seek with the British.

  Even as Lüdecke ordered the alarm to call the men to quarters, the smoke of another British ship appeared on the horizon, this one from the opposite direction. Then Lüdecke spotted the smoke of a third ship. Sharp whistle blasts ordered the crew to muster on the deck, but not at their battle stations. Dresden was, after all, off the coast of Chile in neutral waters, and was safe. The British could not take any hostile action against them.