rev. of recent book on Dora, slave labor, V-2

[pynchonoid]

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German at h-net.msu.edu         (April
2004)

Andre Sellier. _A History of the Dora Camp: The Untold
Story of the
Nazi Slave Labor Camp that Secretly Manufactured V-2
Rockets_.
Translated by Stephen Wright and Susan Taponier.
Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2003. ix + 576 pp. Photographs, drawings, maps,
notes,
bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
1-56663-511-x.

 [...]  Sellier himself was a
prisoner in Dora in 1944-45, working at the relatively
safe and
comfortable task of electrical quality control in the
tunnel factory of
Mittelwerk.  Nevertheless, Sellier ably maintains a
critical distance from
his subject, drawing on his own experiences only
rarely while relying on
his sources to dictate the path of his narrative and
demonstrate his
arguments.  [...] 

Sellier bases his book on the oral histories collected
in the Dora-Ellrich
Former Prisoners' Association Archives in France. 
[...] 

 By the
middle of 1943, Germany's crumbling hegemony over
Europe was forcing a
reassessment of the military potential of more
conventional weapons as
well as armaments production in general.  To make
matters worse for the
Nazi regime, Germany also faced a severe shortage of
labor to staff
factories in the armaments industry.  German
authorities increasingly
turned to forced and slave labor to make up for the
shortfall.  Forced
labor had been in use at Peenemuende since 1940, but
after the bombing of
the ultra-secret rocket research facility at
Peenemuende on the Baltic
coast, Himmler convinced Hitler to move rocket
production underground and,
in order to maintain the strictest secrecy
considerations possible, use
concentration camp prisoners to produce the weapon.

[...]

This story of the installation of the rocket factory
is relatively
well-known.[3] However, Sellier adds two important
dimensions to the
history of the Dora camp experience.  The first is a
heretofore unseen
picture of the internal dynamics of the prisoner
community at Dora and its
sub-camps that was established during this period. 
According to Sellier,
the camp dynamic at Buchenwald was initially
responsible for relations
between prisoners at Dora.  Political prisoners at
Buchenwald, the
so-called "Reds," were in charge of most of the
important prisoner
functionary positions and were able to have many
German criminal
prisoners, the "Greens," sent to Dora, where they in
turn were put in
charge of many important functions.  Eventually, the
Reds managed to seize
control of the important positions at Dora and
relegated the Greens to the
key positions in satellite camps such as Ellrich and
Harzungen, thereby
making even worse the terrible disparity between
conditions at Dora and
the sub-camps.  Sellier shows that the greens, reduced
to subordinate
positions at Buchenwald and Dora, had the opportunity
to vent their
frustration and did not hesitate to take it. 
Moreover, their deep-seated
xenophobia was played out on the other nationalities
within the camps as
they murderously beat average prisoners in the various
work _Kommandos_.
"The harder the Kommando," Sellier points out, "the
stronger the national
antagonisms" (p. 144).  He argues that through their
physical abuse and
twisted supervision of the work, they were responsible
for working many
prisoners to death (pp. 109, 88).

This deadly arrangement of the prisoners' living and
working conditions
exacerbated rivalries between nationalities in the
Dora camp system.  For
Sellier, the Soviet prisoners, usually Russians and
Ukrainians, were the
most rapacious of the various ethnic groups, stealing
from, beating, and
cheating their fellow prisoners.  Poles "formed a
proletariat deprived of
any national political or cultural framework.... They
did not have a good
reputation; in fact, they were often detested by
Western prisoners,
particularly the French" (p. 110).  Czechs, many of
whom had German
language ability and a certain level of organizational
prowess, held many
important positions, both in the camp and in the
factory, and were
respected by other inmates somewhat more than the
Polish and Soviet
prisoners.  French prisoners, whose testimonies form
the bedrock of the
book, were often given privileged positions in the
camp hierarchy. Sellier
shows that some were even able to reconstitute
resistance groups and
engage, with varying levels of success, in sabotage in
the factory. His
treatment of the political and national dynamics of
the camps' social life
is an important addition to historians' knowledge of
forced and slave
labor communities in the Third Reich, even if one
questions the broad
generalizations that Sellier makes about each group.
[...]  With such a
vast supply of prisoner labor and more pouring in
almost daily, the SS did
not give any regard to the needs of the prisoners who
worked in these
camps and on these construction projects.  Their very
numbers made the
prisoners expendable. [...] 

How did these engineers and technicians [[ cf. Pokler
]] justify  
using concentration camp labor to mass produce
rockets?  For those
civilians who did intervene in the day to day life of
the prisoners either
in a positive or negative sense, did they do so out of
humane
considerations or economic and military necessity?  If
they were in fact
"indifferent," what social, cultural, and political
factors were at play
to make them so?  Sellier's refusal to engage these
questions is
unfortunate [...] 

In contrast, Sellier's treatment of the complicity of
prisoner
functionaries and the SS is first-rate.  The political
and national
antagonisms between prisoners have been noted above,
and Sellier
attributes a great deal of the blame for criminal
excesses to the dynamic
between prisoners.  He carefully notes, however, that
"to pass on to some
Haeftlingsfuehrung or other ... is to forget rather
hastily the role of
the SS and especially of those in charge of the
manufacturing operation of
the V2s, to which the camp was intrinsically linked"
(p. 89).  The SS
wardens, he maintains, were the central feature in the
structure of abuse
at Dora-Mittelbau. [...]  Even after
mass production began and the role of the SS in the
factory itself
partially gave way to civilian authority, Sellier
shows that the
prisoners' dread of the ever-present SS did not abate.

[...] Finally, Sellier's important emphasis on
the satellite camps shows conclusively that the
Dora-Mittelbau complex was
not merely a site dedicated to building Germany's
"wonder weapons."
Rather, Sellier makes clear that it was a massive
construction project in
which the murderous dynamic of slave labor under the
Nazis was fully
realized.  The cumulative radicalization of Hitler's
Germany in the
closing years of the war reached its crescendo in
these projects at
Dora-Mittelbau.  Sellier's work brings historians
closer to a greater
understanding of how this phenomenon developed and its
effects on the
unfortunate victims of the Nazi regime.

[...] 

         Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights
reserved. [...]

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