pynchon-l-digest V2 #1454

[Doug Millison]

Only in rj's fantasies is Dora not a part of the Holocaust. Pynchon 
certainly doesn't make this claim, not on page 666 of GR and not 
anywhere else that I know of, nor is such a distinction supported by 
historians of the Holocaust.

I've previously quoted Neufeld's _The Rocket and the Reich_ . See 
also http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/mittelbau-dora/ where The 
Nizkor Project (an organization that refutes holocaust deniers) lists 
Mittelbau Dora as one of "The Holocaust Camps."

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/buchenwald/press/reuters-040395.html
Survivors of V2 Nazi slave camp mark liberation
By Richard Murphy

MITTELBAU DORA, Germany, April 3 (Reuter) - "This is what hell must be like."

The words of French survivor Jean Mialet express, better than any 
others, the horrors of the underground concentration camp at 
Mittelbau Dora in which slave labourers were worked to death making 
Nazi Germany's V2 "wonder weapon" rockets.

toiled in appalling conditions to produce the rockets that rained 
destruction on London and other cities. Mittelbau Dora, on the 
outskirts of Nordhausen in east Germany, was established as a 
top-secret satellite camp of Buchenwald in 1943 after British bombers 
destroyed the main missile research base at Peenemuende on the Baltic 
coast. Adolf Hitler hoped the supersonic V2s -- the "V" stood for 
Vergeltung, meaning retaliation -- would turn the tide of war back in 
Germany's favour. An
estimated 20,000 prisoners died making them.

Franz Rosenbach is still astonished that he survived. Arrested in 
Austria because he was a gypsy and therefore deemed "racially 
inferior," he was sent first to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald and 
finally, in early 1944, to Mittelbau Dora. He was 15 years old.

"I am still amazed today that anyone survived," he recalls. "We got 
almost nothing to eat, a piece of bread, perhaps two or three 
potatoes. But you know, when you are young, you can take an awful 
lot. And if you are careful not to attract attention...I always 
thought this was not the end for me." Mialet and Rosenbach will be 
among around 800 survivors at ceremonies at Mittelbau Dora on April 
11 marking the 50th anniversary of its liberation by U.S. soldiers.

The tunnels and caves, the entrances to which were blown up by 
Russian troops in 1948, will be partly reopened to serve as a 
memorial to the victims.

The V2 was developed by Wernher von Braun, who after World War Two 
directed the U.S. space programme. In all, around 5,000 V2s were 
fired from sites along the English Channel, killing thousands of 
British civilians.

The first 107 prisoners from Buchenwald were shipped to Mittelbau 
Dora in August 1943 and put to work carving out new tunnels to 
enlarge an existing storage depot. Within six months, 12,000 
prisoners were toiling in dark, unventilated caverns.

Enduring back-breaking labour, malnutrition and disease as well as 
the random brutality of their guards, they were also exposed to the 
gas, noise and dust of explosions. By the spring of 1945, the number 
of prisoners had reached 40,000.

The death toll was horrendous, with nearly 3,000 prisoners dying 
between October 1943 and March 1944 alone. Most were Russian, French 
or Polish.

Thousands of others deemed no longer fit to work were sent to other 
death camps.

"Until the spring of 1994 the prisoners lived underground," says 
Angela Fiedermann, a member of staff at the memorial site. "The 
sanitation was totally inhuman. There were no toilets and there was 
no water. The temperature was eight or nine degrees Celsius (46-48 
Fahrenheit) and humidity was 90 percent. They died like flies."

Rosenbach, who arrived as accommodation blocks were being built above 
ground, worked gruelling eight-hour shifts drilling holes in the rock 
to prepare for blasting.

"When the explosives were set off, prisoners had to start clearing up 
immediately. There were lots of accidents, people buried alive under 
rocks and rubble," he says.

Rene Steenbeke, a retired Belgian army officer, says his worst 
memories are of the executions on the camp parade ground. "I saw 51 
prisoners being hanged, their hands behind their backs, a piece of 
wood in their mouths, hanged in groups of about 12. They could see 
their comrades being killed before them and they had to watch."

By early 1945, Mittelbau Dora was producing around 690 V2s a month. 
The monthly death toll among prisoners in the first three months of 
that year averaged 2,000.

Production ground to a halt in March as Allied troops pushed deep 
into Germany from both east and west. In April, a partial evacuation 
began, with already weakened prisoners sent on brutal forced marches 
to other camps which few survived.

Rosenbach managed to escape from a party of around 500 which set off 
for Oranienburg concentration camp. Only half a dozen of his group 
arrived. The others died or were murdered by their guards on the way.

Liberation for the survivors came on April 11, when Aurio Pierro, an 
acting platoon leader from the U.S. 33rd Armoured Regiment, drove his 
tank up to the gates. They were opened by surprised prisoners, the 
guards having apparently fled.

Before his unit moved on, Pierro obtained a glimpse of what lurked 
within when he entered a building on the periphery.

"There were dead bodies there, naked, emaciated, tied hand and foot," 
the retired lawyer told Reuters from his home in Massachusetts.

The rocket equipment was spirited away by U.S. troops in June 1945, 
filling more than 300 railway wagons, and shipped to the United 
States to help with its space programme.

Today, the grim subterranean passages where the V2s were made are 
still littered with footwear, tools and eating utensils. Visitors 
will gain some sense of the cold, damp and sheer awfulness of the 
place.

Rene Steenbeke hopes they may also reflect on the part Mittelbau Dora 
played in launching modern space travel.

"Everything that is now in space had its origins here, not in America 
or Russia," he says. "This is where a new science started, but it is 
also where science and death met."

http://history1900s.about.com/homework/history1900s/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x06/xm0636.html
(Also known as Dora-Nordhausen), concentration camp in the Harz 
Mountains, 3 miles (5 km) from Nordhausen, Saxony. The camp was first 
mentioned on August 27, 1943, as an external unit of Buchenwald. On 
October 28, 1944, it became a concentration camp under its own name, 
with 23 branches.

In the second half of 1943, thousands of prisoners were transferred 
to Dora-Mittelbau, mostly from Buchenwald, to excavate tunnels for a 
huge plant for V-2 missiles and other arms. Until the late spring of 
1944, the ten thousand prisoners working on the site had no living 
quarters and were housed inside the
tunnels under unbearable conditions. They had to work at a murderous 
pace, and the unspeakable sanitary conditions and lack of safety 
precautions led to a mortality rate higher than any other camp in 
Germany. In the fall of 1944, when maximum production was attained, 
the main camp had a prison population of over
twelve thousand, and twenty thousand more were in the satellite 
camps. Thousands of Jewish prisoners were brought from various 
countries to Dora-Mittelbau, and their mortality rate was higher than 
the other prisoners. Jewish prisoners who could no longer work were 
sent to Auschwitz or Mauthausen, to be killed.

The Underground

An underground formed in the camp to sabotage work and it seriously 
damaged the manufacturing process, upsetting the delivery of weapons 
the Nazis sorely needed. Large numbers of prisoners were jailed or 
killed owing to their role in the sabotage. More than two hundred 
were publicly hanged.

Prisoners are Taken from the Camp

On March 25, 1945, the entire camp complex contained 34,500 prisoners 
and on April 1, 1945 the Nazis began their evacuation. Within several 
days, most of the prisoners were taken out, and the majority were 
sent to Bergen-Belsen. Thousands were murdered en route; near the 
village of Gardelegen several thousand prisoners, mostly Jews, were 
burned to death in a barn. Others succumbed to disease in 
Bergen-Belsen. On April 9, 1945, the United States liberating forces 
found only a few prisoners left in Dora-Mittelbau.

The Dora - Mittelbau Trial

Between August 7 and December 31, 1947, an American military tribunal 
tried nineteen former staff members of the camp; fifteen were found 
guilty. The protective-custody camp leader, Hans Karl Moeser, was 
sentenced to hanging. The other defendants received sentences that 
ranged from five years to life
imprisonment.

Courtesy of:
"Encyclopedia of the Holocaust"
©1990 Macmillan Publishing Company
New York, NY 10022

Historians of the Holocaust do a great job of distinguishing the 
various aspects of the Holocaust, and articulate a sophisticated and 
nuanced discussion about those various aspects and elements --  a 
discussion that does indeed embody respect for victims and survivors. 
Sven Lindqvist, in _Exterminate All the Brutes_, shows how German 
(and the broader European) colonialism in Africa leads directly to 
The Holocaust; he's not the only writer to put the Holocaust in a 
broader historical perspective, either. In GR, Pynchon shows how the 
Holocaust plays a part in what rj refers to as "arms technology and 
production."

Interesting to note rj's back to his original contention, that the 
Holocaust is somehow "absent" from GR. But that's just verbal 
sleight-of-hand. In addition to the countless references and 
allusions to the Holocaust with which Pynchon includes in GR,  Dora 
is in the novel. Jews were exterminated at Dora. The Jewish genocide 
is, in fact, in GR.

Finally, rj is lying when he says I've called him a Holocaust denier. 
I have said he uses the same kind of rhetoric that Holocaust deniers 
use. If rj doesn't like the comparison, he can stop aping their 
rhetoric.

-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>