Holocaust victims at Dora Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1458

[Doug Millison]

That's a good suggestion, about querying experts.

I submitted the question to Ken McVay at The Nizkor Project as 
davemarc  suggested.  I've just posted that question, and McVay's 
reply, to Pynchon-L. Of the Dora deaths, McVay said, "I would 
certainly consider these people victims of the Holocaust. To
me, that term addresses the death of 12 million people."

The story that davemarc included in his post bears some resemblance 
to the account in that Reuters article I posted the other day, of 
Franz Rosenbach who was moved from Auschwitz to Buchenwald to 
Mittelbau Dora:

"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. "
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/buchenwald/press/reuters-040395.html


Here's another readily available reference that doesn't seem to agree 
with rj's distinction about Dora:

http://history1900s.about.com/homework/history1900s/library/holocaust/blchart.htm
In a chart entitled,  "Concentration and Death Camps" this reference 
describes Dora/Mittelbau as a concentration camp, not a labour camp: 
"Sub-camp of 
Buchenwald; Concentration (After 10/44)".  The types of camp listed 
on this chart are:  extermination, concentration, assembly/detention, 
transit, concentration/extermination, and concentration/transit -- no 
listings for "death camps" or "labour camps". This chart is part of 
About.com's larger discussion of the Holocaust, of course.

This page also provides a link 
(http://history1900s.about.com/homework/history1900s/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x06/xm0636.html) 
to the Wiesenthal site, which describes Dora-Mittelbau as a 
"concentration camp" in the article I posted to pynchon-l the other 
day.  That link (the direct link -- unframed by About.com) is 
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x06/xm0636.html, of which rj said, 
"No. Nowhere on this page is Dora defined as a "Holocaust camp." -- 
and that's right, the Wiesenthal site describes Dora as a 
"concentration camp."

By the way, the ADL appears to include slave laborers in its coverage 
of Holocaust issues, including a press release issued in July, 
http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust.html.

Another ADL press release 
(http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust.html ) includes: "We now 
know that several of Germany's largest conglomerates and some 
American firms helped to promote genocide during the Holocaust and 
used slave labor to boost their bottom lines," said Abraham H. 
Foxman, ADL National Director. "Although the findings of these 
studies raise as many new and complex questions as they answer, the 
process indicates a positive turn towards honesty and openness."

  This press release refers to an issue of Dimensions, "a journal of 
Holocaust studies published by ADL's Braun Holocaust Institute," that 
includes among its contents:

"University of Pittsburgh Professor Simon Reich discusses the 
involvement of Henry Ford and foreign subsidiaries of his car 
manufacturing company in fulfilling German government contracts and 
employing slave labor with the help of the Nazi regime. Mr. Reich has 
helped Ford investigators locate crucial information about the 
company's wartime activities, including the documented use of slave 
laborers at Fordwerke's Cologne plant between 1941 and 1945."

and

"Neil Gregor, a lecturer in Modern European History at the University 
of Southampton, U.K. and the author of Daimler-Benz in the Third 
Reich offers a case analysis of Daimler-Benz and its use of slave 
labor in automotive and armament plants in Berlin, southern Germany 
and the German-occupied territories. "


Thanks,
Doug

>
>Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 14:37:12 -0400
>From: "davemarc" <davemarc at panix.com>
>Subject: Dora as Holocaust Locale?
>
>People, people, people....
>
>Why not send email to a few *experts*, explain that you're having a
>disagreement about an aspect of the novel Gravity's Rainbow, and ask them
>whether they would consider deaths at Dora to be an aspect of the Nazi
>Holocaust?  I thought you could contact Ken McVay of Nizkor, but a quick
>visit to the site gave me the perception that his email address was removed.
>(I hope he's okay.)  You could, however, check out the ADL site and maybe
>the site for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  You could also open the question
>to subscribers of a relevant newsgroup and/or mailing list, and get back to
>us about it.  Maybe they will have questions about Thomas Pynchon that can
>be answered in this forum.
>
>In the meantime, I do note the presence of Dora references at the Nizkor
>site--especially the presence of Dora on the list titled Holocaust:  The
>Camps <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/>.  Furthermore, noting the
>following account by Benjamin Jacobs, a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz who was
>eventually transferred to Dora (where he saw his former Hebrew teacher dead
>on his bunk), I wouldn't dare suggest that his Dora experience was distinct
>from his Auschwitz experience as far as the Holocaust is concerned.
>
>Jacobs on Dora:  "It was rumored that in a few days we would be transferred
>to a satellite camp of Buchenwald, called Dora-Mittelbau. It was a terrible
>camp, the Buchenwald inmates said. We left Buchenwald and marched for four
>hours. We passed a few German towns, including the city of Blankenburg, and
>then we went east. Here, too, with the war near an end, the German people
>seemed not to be affected by our condition as we marched past them.
>Hauptscharf¸hrer Max Schmidt, Lager”ltester Josef Hermann, and all
>F¸rstengrube guards and Kapos came with us. After ten more kilometers we
>came to Dora-Mittelbau. It was like other camps, only this one stood among
>trees without a fence around it."
>
>Continued at
><http://mindit.netmind.com/searchit/track.shtml?URL=http://www.nizkor.org/fe
>atures/dentist/chapter-16.html&SOURCE=5>.
>
>d.
>
>

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