Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [72]
There is nothing pretty about war, and when the pomp and ceremony and the glamour are stripped away, what is left, so visibly on this wreck and on the shattered hulks of Cervera’s sunken fleet, is harsh evidence of the intensity of battle, the costs of war, and the strength of character and love of country that inspires people to sail into harm’s way to fight for a cause or to defend what they hold dear. As we surface from the muddy grave of Merrimac, I think of how raw and untouched this undersea battlefield is compared to the museum-like setting of San Juan Hill and its cleaned-up, memorialized and glorified view of war.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HITLER’S ROCKETS
NEAR NEUSTADT, GERMANY
More than 400 feet beneath the Harz Mountains of Germany, we trudge through darkness, climbing over fallen rock and twisted metal, splashing through pools of stagnant scummy water. The darkness is as thick and oppressive as the silence that fills the tunnel. We interrupt both with flashes of light and the sound of our footsteps as we work our way deeper into the mountain. The chamber stretches on into blackness, and we can’t help feeling some dread as we continue into what we know once was literally the depths of hell itself.
Ahead of us lie 12 miles of tunnels and subterranean galleries, hewn from the rock by slave laborers. Hastily constructed by the Third Reich in the wake of the unrelenting Allied air war against Hitler’s Germany, this underground complex was once part of the Nazi concentration camp system. Buried deep within the mountain was a factory where inmates built jet engines and assembled V-1 and V-2 rockets. Abandoned by the Germans in April 1945, the complex was sealed shut in 1948 and disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, because it was in the Russian occupation zone.
Since 1964, the area above the former KZ (Konzentrationslager— concentration camp) Mittelbau-Dora has been the site of a memorial, and in 1974 a museum was built on the grounds. The barracks, guard towers and barbed wire are gone—only broken concrete foundations, cracked and rutted streets, and the crematorium on the hill that rises above the camp are grim reminders of what happened here. But below the surface, inside the mountain, lies a moment trapped in time. To access that stark, unmitigated evidence of evil and suffering, a reunified Germany completed a new 500-foot tunnel that cut into Kohnstein Mountain in order to reopen some of the underground complex for visitors. Only 5 per cent of the tunnels are open to the public because when the Russians blasted it closed in 1948, they brought down rock and portions of the concrete and metal that divided the tunnels into a multilevel factory. Postwar quarrying of the mountain above also cracked and loosened the rock, so the tunnels are dangerous. Large rocks fall without warning, and some galleries, once open, are now choked shut. To move deeper into the mountain, and back into the untouched past, we are wearing the rig of hard-rock miners as we climb, slip and slide over huge boulders, gravel and mud. Even so, at least a third of the complex lies sealed beneath cold water that has seeped in and flooded the tunnels, along with their assembly lines, workshops and offices.
It’s December, and outside, the temperature is well below freezing, with snowflakes dancing in the wind. Inside the mountain, the temperature hovers just above freezing. Our breath fogs as we haul our dive equipment deep into the heart of the mountain. We will be among the first to slip beneath the water and explore the flooded depths of Mittelbau-Dora. Our goal is to venture into some of its forgotten rooms and bring back film footage to share with the world.
Our Sea Hunters team is now a close-knit band of brothers in the field, underwater, underground, on the decks of ships and in the studio. Producer and team leader John