pynchon-l-digest V2 #1454

[Can't Wait]

"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."


Doug's not psychotic--he just talks like one!









--- Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com> wrote:
> 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 
=== message truncated ===


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