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The prisoners worked twenty-four hours a day in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Tiers of wooden bunks in the dripping wet chambers served as their sleeping quarters, with oil drums cut in two serving as toilets. Very little water was available, save that which wept from the rocks and soaked everyone. Disease broke out and added to the death toll caused by overwork, falling rock and exhaustion. In such hellish conditions, the casualties were high. French historian Andre Sellier, himself a former inmate of the complex, documented the arrival of 17,535 inmates between August 1943 and April 1944. In that period, 5,882 either died and were cremated in the ovens at the complex or Buchenwald, or were “transported.” Those prisoners too ill or too injured to work were shipped to Bergen-Belsen and the Majdanek camps in “liquidation transports.” As new inmates kept arriving, the death toll grew higher. In all, some 26,500 died at Dora, according to Sellier’s research: 15,500 in the camp or on “transports,” and 11,000 at the end of the war, when the SS marched many survivors out of the camp and most of those unfortunates were killed.
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 tu
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 tu
The SS abandoned the camp on April 4, 1945, and the U.S. Army liberated Dora and its tu
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 i
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 co
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 gu