Secret History of Nordhausen

[Steelhead]

Here's a passage from Christopher Simpson's amazing book, Blowback, about
the recruitment of Nazi's by US corporations, military organizations, and
intelligence operations. At the head of the list was Gen. Walter
Dornberger, who oversaw the V2 project at Nordhausen/Dora/Buchenwald.
Dornberger, and other Nazi doctors, bankers, industrialists, and
scientists, were hustled out of Germany under the supervision of that
mastermind of the Cold War George Keenan. Dornberger landed in the US at
Wright-Patterson Airforce base where headed a classified rocketry division.
>From there he graduated to a lucrative career at Bell Aerospace, eventually
becoming a VP of Bell's parent company, the multitentacled Textron.

Steely

"It was not easy being a military rocket chief in Nazi Germany. The SS, in
particular, tried to muscle in on Dornberger's work. Money, engineers, and
slave laborers used in construction seemed always to be in short supply.
And in March 1943 a terrible blow fell. Adolf Hitler had a dream in which
Dornberger's pet project, the giant liquid fueled V-2 rocket, failed to
cross the English Channel. The Furher put great stock in these nightly
visions, and soon the general's project had fallen to the bottom of a heap
of high-priority "secret weapons" that were supposed to extricate Germany
from the mess it had created.

"But General Walter Dornberger was nothing if not determined. He requested
and got a private audience with Hitler during July 1943. With films, little
wooden rocket models, and other audiovisual aids, Dornberger personally
convinced Hitler to authorize the creation of a gigantic underground
factory near Nordhausen for mass production of his machines. This factory
would also house one of the major crimes of the war.

"The Nazi's used slave labor from the nearby Dora concentration camp [a
satellite of Buchenwald, cf. CoL49] to build the Nordhausen rocket works.
In fewer than fifteen months of operation the SS drove Dora's inmates to
hack a mile-long underground cavern out of an abandoned salt mine to house
the facility. The starvation diet and heavy labor generally killed the
toilers after a few months. The assembly line workers who actually built
the missiles once the cave was finished were not much better off.

"At least 20,000 prisoners--many of them talented engineers who had been
singled out for missile production because of their education--were killed
through starvation, disease, or execution at Dora and Nordhausen in the
course of this project.

"The question of who bears responsibility for these deaths has been the
subject of considerable controversy since the war. After 1945, of course,
Dornberger and his subordinates denied that they had had anything to do
with the Nordhausen production line. The SS, no they, they said, had
controlled the labor force at the underground factory.

"The SS surely deserves to bear part, perhaps even the largest part, of
responsibility for the crimes at Nordhausen. But it is a mistake to think
it acted alone. In truth, Dornberger and his aides fought a long
bureaucratic battle with the SS over control of Germany's rocket program,
and the degree of Dornberger's personal authority over what took place on
the production line shifted with Hitler's moods. In late 1944 the general
reached an agreement with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, under which the
SS's representative, Hans Kammler, took over day-to-day management at
Nordhausen on the condition that selected Dornberger subordinates (like
later-day US rocket program administrator Arthur Rudolph) retrained their
positions of authority at the facility. Dornberger himself retained
explicit jurisdiction over production schedules, including the number of
missiles to be built and the mix of the various models.

"Dornberger, in short, did not directly control the slaves at Nordhausen.
His production orders, however, set the schedule by which they were worked
to death. And he was, it seems, an enthusiastic taskmaster. He demanded
more and more rockets--more than there was even fuel to launch--until the
very last moments of the war. Food for the slaves at Nordhausen--never much
in the first place--ran out altogether sometime in February 1945. But
Dornberger's orders for more missiles never stopped, and the labor
battalions worked around the clock without nourishment. The SS simply
crammed more prisoners into the Dora Camp, used the strong ones for labor
until they dropped, and let the weak ones die.

"Thousands of inmates starved to death. Cholera raged through the camp,
killing hundreds each day. At first the SS cremated the dead so as to keep
down disease among the surviving slaves. As the end neared, however, the
ovens couldn't keep up with the demand and the corpses were simply left to
rot. Inmates piled the bodies up in corners, under stairways, anywhere that
was a little out of the way. And the rocket work continued.

"Dornberger visited the Nordhausen factory on many occasions. He knew--or
should have known, for the atrocity was evident to any eye--that the
prisoners who worked on his rockets were being systematically starved to
death. And he knew, for he has said this much himself, that Germany's
defeat was inevitable. Dornberger could have shut down the assembly line on
some technical pretext. He could have demanded adequate rations for the
prisoners. He could have cut back his missile orders to the number that
Germany was capable of launching. He chose instead to accelerate
production.

"The general's postwar autobiography [V2, cribbed shamelessly by TRP],
which was received with some critical acclaim in the West, is filled with
anecdotes about the rocket tests, bureaucratic struggles, and technical
achievements. His machines are described in endless detail with precise
information on takeoff weight, fuel consumption, thrust, and other minutiae
of physics. Yet there is not a phrase of acknowledgment for the prisoners
who actually constructed these machines at the cost of their lives. He
presents events in his book as though his missiles had simply leaped off
their drawing boards and into the skies with no intermediate steps, as
though rockets could somehow build themselves.

"When many American's think of the Holocaust--those, that is, who were not
eyewitnesses--they often think of the images on a certain piece of grainy
motion-picture film, on which cadaverous inmates resembling living
skeletons are shown leaning out from filthy wooden bunks to weakly greet US
Army liberators. The movie then cuts to a scene which hundreds of corpses
are laid out in a row. They appear hardly human even in death. The legbones
are etched clearly against the ground, but the limbs seem too big somehow,
as though they don't fit with the bodies. This is because there is no flesh
left on the remains, only skin; the Nazis and their rocket factory have
made off with the rest. The film flickers as an American officer walks past
the atrocity, his face a mask.

"That documentary film was taken by the US Army Signal Corps at Nordhausen
in April 1945. The Dora Camp and its underground missile works were the
first major slave labor facility liberated by American forces."