Dora as Holocaust Locale?

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

davemarc schrieb:

> 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? 


    raul hilberg, surely a leading expert in that research field, does not write 
    about dora in "perpetrators, victims, bystanders. the jewish catastrophe 
    1933-1945" [1992]. at least i don't remember any reference, which i probably 
    would, since i checked out this study after having read gr already twice. 
    taking the book (- german edition: "täter, opfer, zuschauer", ffm 1992: 
    s. fischer)from the shelf & skimming through the pages, i also find no 
    entry in the index. neither on "dora", nor on "nordhausen", "mittelwerk"    
    or "von braun, wernher". i guess hilberg considers dora to be among the     
    places he (cf. for instance page 207 in the german edition) calls "labour   
    camps". does this sound hair-splitting?! well, i simply think it's important 
    to make the distinction jbor is calling for: "Prisoners in Dora
    being used as labour (and dying) is not the same as prisoners at Auschwitz
    being led to the gas chambers to be systematically annihilated. Slave labour
    and racial genocide are not the same thing." still think that pynchon, if he 
    had wanted to put the holocaust in the novel's centre (- whatever that might 
    be), would have giving us clearer hints, for example by putting in scenes 
    from auschwitz or treblinka. & he probably also wouldn't have used the word 
    "holocaust" itself exclusively in the english candy drill episode.  
                                
please correct me if i'm wrong about hilberg! kfl
 
 ps: my "wrongness" about pynchon is a chosen one ...