Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [75]
Production of Dora’s first rockets began in January 1944 when the prisoners started work on V-2s. That same month, 679 prisoners died in the camp. By August 1944, work had started on the first V-1 rockets in the tunnels and the death toll of prisoners mounted. The V-1 factory was set up by the SS and their industrial partners in the manufacture of the weapon, Volkswagen. By March 1945, reacting against what they termed “sabotage,” which could be something as simple as using a piece of scrap leather to make a belt to hold up a pair of pants that had grown too large because of starvation, the SS began rounding up inmates and hanging them in groups from the cranes in the underground factory. The executions increased in the last month of the camp’s operation. When American forces began closing in, the SS evacuated the civilian support workers and the last remaining rocket scientists. Most of the inmates were shipped out to other camps for liquidation, while thousands were “death-marched” in the snow. At a barn in nearby Gardelegen, the SS locked 1,050 prisoners in a barn, set it on fire and machine-gunned those who made it out of the burning building. Only thirty-four men made it out alive.
The SS abandoned the camp on April 4, 1945, and the U.S. Army liberated Dora and its tunnels seven days later. Several hundred starving, dying inmates, all that remained of the approximately sixty thousand slave laborers who had filled the camp and built the rockets, greeted them. The Americans, well aware of the scientific and military value of the German rocket program, removed the parts of about a hundred V-2 rockets from the tunnels before the Russians arrived in July, because the camp and complex were within the recently established Russian zone of occupation. In October 1946, the Russians, too, removed rocket parts and equipment and shipped them to the Soviet Union. The Russians tried to destroy the tunnels with explosives but could not complete the job. In the summer of 1948, they blasted the entrances to the tunnels to seal them, supposedly forever.
PEENEMÜNDE
The Sea Hunters visit to Germany starts with a visit to Peenemünde, which, like Dora, was once locked away behind the Iron Curtain and was inaccessible, due to its use as a Soviet and East German fighter base. Peenemünde sits on the Baltic coast, at the end of long, low, sandy peninsula, surrounded by shallow marshes on one side and the open Baltic on the other. The cold wind blowing off the sea chills us to the bone as we drive through the largely intact base. Decades of harsh life under communist rule meant that little changed here, and as we pass fences and grim brick and concrete buildings, it is easy to imagine Peenemünde “in its prime” as a top-level Nazi base. It is a surreal moment made all the more so when we visit the former Luftwaffe airfield on our way to the rocket-launching sites.
As locked gates swing open, we drive past rows of bunkers, their huge blast doors hanging open, and rows of deteriorating East German MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets. Until 1989, this was part of the vast Soviet bloc, a potential foe that we were prepared to fight, and these aircraft were here to shoot down our planes in the event of war. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the German Democratic Republic, the reunification of Germany and the unraveling of the Soviet Union are such recent events that I shake my head in wonder as our vehicle speeds through the abandoned air base. Not too many years ago, my presence here with a camera would have resulted in a death sentence, just as it would have sixty years earlier when this was the heart of Hitler’s rocket program.
We stop first at the buckled concrete rails of the V-1 test firing range. Blasted and ruined by the Soviets in 1945, the collapsed bunkers and broken concrete