V-2 site

[jbor]

A friend alerted me to this site:

http://www.v2rocket.com/

There is an excellent section on Mittelwerk-Dora, many photos, extremely
well-documented:

http://www.v2rocket.com/start/chapters/mittel.html

Some excerpts:

> But manpower was in very short supply. Therefore, in April, 1943, Arthur
> Rudolph, the Chief Production Engineer of the Peenemünde V2 assembly effort
> and a pre-war colleague of von Braun, toured the Heinkel aircraft plant
> north of Berlin, and returned enthused about the possibility of using
> concentration camp labor (mostly Russians, Poles, and French) for
> production of the V2. These concentration camp inmates were referred to as
> "detainees" (Haftlinge) and would supplement the "guest workers" who had
> already been recruited (and were paid small amounts of wages) by the Germans.
>
> So in June, 1943, Peenemünde requested some 1400 detainees from the SS
> concentration camps, and initially set the maximum number of these workers
> 2500. An assembly line was set up at Peenemünde on the lower floor of
> Building F1. This line, which opened on July 16th, was the precursor of the
> rail-borne horizontal transport type of assembly later used at Mittelwerk. 
>
> V2 parts, however, were never made fully interchangeable. Combustion
> chambers, fuel pumps, and many valves had to be matched up to each other
> and specifically tested and regulated for each missile.  This meant that
> each V2s power plant had to be test-fired prior to final assembly.  Wernher
> Von Braun was in charge of these so-called "Final Acceptance" tests.

snip
> On August 28, 1943, two days after the choice of Mittelwerk, the SS
> delivered the first truckloads of prisoners from the concentration camp at
> Buchenwald to begin the heavy labor of expanding and completing of the Wifo
> tunnel system. Dora was the name given to the Buchenwald sub camp (which
> became independent about November 1st as "KZ Mittelbau") that was set up
> within the tunnels for the laborers. Later, from the spring of 1944, Dora
> was transformed into a more traditional camp, with 58 barracks buildings
> surrounded by barbed wire being set up about a quarter mile west of the
> south entrance to Tunnel B. Camp construction was not completed until
> October, 1944.
>
> It was during October, November, and December of 1943 that the most
> physically punishing work was done by the Dora prisoners, who struggled
> under terrible, inhuman conditions to enlarge and fit out the Mittelwerk
> tunnels. Prisoners drilled and blasted away thousands of tons of rock. They
> built rickety, temporary narrow gauge tracks to support the multi-ton loads
> of rock that were extracted from the caves.  If the "skips" or small rail
> cars, full of rock fell off these tracks (and this happened frequently),
> prisoners were kicked, whipped, and beaten until they could re-rail and
> reload the cars. 
>
> The prisoners were made to eat and sleep within the tunnels they were
> digging. Thousands of workers were crammed into stinking, lice infested
> bunks stacked four high in the first few south side cross tunnels at the
> mouth of Tunnel "A", in an atmosphere thick with gypsum dust and fumes from
> the blasting work, which continued 24 hours a day. Prisoners had no running
> water or sanitary facilities.  Dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, and
> starvation were constant causes of suffering and death for these
> unfortunate people.
>
> Detainees worked atop 30 foot scaffolds, using picks to enlarge the
> tunnels. From time to time, a prisoner would become too weak to continue,
> fall to his death from the scaffolding, and be replaced by another. Trucks
> bearing piles of prisoner corpses left every other day for the crematorium
> ovens at Buchenwald. All of the manufacturing equipment from Peenemünde had
> to be installed in the tunnels.  This was done by hand by prisoner workers,
> using hand-carts, block and tackle, huge skids pulled by teams of
> prisoners, and the temporary narrow gauge rail lines.

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