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Located in the middle of Germany near the town of Nordhausen, about 35 miles from the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, the Dora labor camp (later Mittelbau-Dora) became the primary center for the manufacture of V-1 and V-2 rockets after Allied bombing raids struck Peenemünde in August 1943. The bombers did not cause extensive damage, but Peenemünde’s work was not a secret and it was vulnerable to further attack. Production and assembly of the rockets was taken over by the dreaded SS, which decided to relocate rocket production to underground factories built and manned by slave laborers from concentration camps. In late August 1943, the SS established a sub-camp of Buchenwald in an underground fuel storage facility at Kohnstein. A series of tunnels, originally excavated in the mountain for a gypsum mine, became the basis for a massive underground factory known as the Mittelwerk.

While scientific research and testing continued under von Braun at Peenemünde, the underground camp and complex were being hacked out of rock to serve as the primary production facilities for both the V-1 and V-2 rockets. From late August 1943 through to the end of the year, prisoners from Buchenwald lived in the tunnels, drilling, blasting and hauling rock in grueling twelve-hour shifts in the midst of incessant noise, dark and damp conditions that killed thousands. Jean Michel, a French resistance leader arrested by the Gestapo, who arrived at the Dora complex on October 14, 1943, described his first day as “terrifying”:

The Kapos [prisoner bosses] and SS drive us on at an infernal speed, shouting and raining blows down on us, threatening us with execution, the demons! The noise bores into the brain and shears the nerves. The demented rhythm lasts for fifteen hours. Arriving at the dormitory [in the tunnels]… we do not even try to reach the bunks. Drunk with exhaustion, we collapse onto the rocks, onto the ground. Behind, the Kapos press us on. Those behind trample over their comrades. Soon, over a thousand despairing men, at the limit of their existence and racked with thirst, lie there hoping for sleep which never comes; for the shouts of the guards, the noise of the machines, and explosions and the ringing of the bell reach them even there.

The prisoners worked twenty-four hours a day in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Tiers of wooden bunks in the dripping wet chambers served as their sleeping quarters, with oil drums cut in two serving as toilets. Very little water was available, save that which wept from the rocks and soaked everyone. Disease broke out and added to the death toll caused by overwork, falling rock and exhaustion. In such hellish conditions, the casualties were high. French historian Andre Sellier, himself a former inmate of the complex, documented the arrival of 17,535 inmates between August 1943 and April 1944. In that period, 5,882 either died and were cremated in the ovens at the complex or Buchenwald, or were “transported.” Those prisoners too ill or too injured to work were shipped to Bergen-Belsen and the Majdanek camps in “liquidation transports.” As new inmates kept arriving, the death toll grew higher. In all, some 26,500 died at Dora, according to Sellier’s research: 15,500 in the camp or on “transports,” and 11,000 at the end of the war, when the SS marched many survivors out of the camp and most of those unfortunates were killed.

The prisoners at Dora were for the most part prisoners of war— Russians and Poles—as well as French resistance fighters, German prisoners of conscience, political prisoners and, later in the war, Jews and Gypsies, who were singled out for particularly brutal treatment by the ss. Other nationalities also joined the ranks of Dora’s inmates. After Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis, the Germans turned on their former allies with a vengeance. A group of Italian officers, sent to Dora to work as slave laborers, balked at entering the tunnels, so the Germans shot them all. A Greek inmate, Anton Luzidis, spoke for all the prisoners at the end of the