Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [78]
Our dives inside the mountain, into the flooded heart of Dora, provide a good understanding of what else may lie in other submerged chambers. The flooded rooms seem to be far better preserved than the dry portions of the tunnels, with a chance that even paper has survived—as evidenced by our spotting a book. The flooding of Dora was sudden but not catastrophic. The loss of electrical power and the shutdown of the pumps allowed the seeping water to build up and engulf the lower sections, perhaps not too long after the last of the inmates and the SS abandoned the underground workshops and factories in April 1945. Some areas may have even escaped the notice of the teams of American and later Russian searchers who scoured this complex for the secrets of the Nazi rocket program.
A stack of V-1 rocket gyrocompasses lie on the floor of the tunnels of Dora, abandoned as Nazi Germany collapsed at the end of World War II. James P. Delgado.
The Dora museum, which manages the site of the camp, with its surviving barracks building and crematorium, SS bunker and numerous foundations, as well as the 5 per cent of the underground facilities open to visitors, preserves this place as a reminder of what happened here. The focus is not on the rockets but on the people who paid the price for those incredible yet terrible technological achievements. The museum’s library is full of survivor accounts, interviews and archives about the Nazi system of camps as a means to eliminate people. After we exit the caves, we stand for a moment in the clear night air, gazing up at the swollen moon, breathing in the fresh air to cleanse the stench of Dora from our lungs and to savor the freedom of being out of those dark confined spaces.
Such is the power of a place like this, which is why we are visiting Dora to document its flooded and forgotten chambers. This place is more than a museum. It is a mirror that we must hold up to ourselves as a reminder of the worst that we as a species are capable of. As a child, I watched the astronauts with wonder when humanity first reached for the stars. I thrilled with countless others as men walked on the moon. But the roots of that triumph lie here, down in the darkness.
On our last night, I stroll through the nearby village of Neustadt with soundman John Rosborough. It’s the Christmas festival, and we walk among booths filled with crafts and sample steaming hot mulled red wine. The stars glisten in the night sky, people are bundled up, buying presents and filled with delight. It seems too cheerful in the presence of the grim history we have seen today. And yet I know, from visiting Dora’s museum, that every one of this village’s schoolchildren has, since 1954, visited that camp, and since 1995, has ventured into the tunnels. They have encountered the relics of a horrific past, like many Germans who are facing their history. They, like the survivors of the camp—the Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Jewish, Greek, Gypsy and German inmates who built the rockets in the depths of Mittelbau-Dora—live every day with the memory of those times.
A new generation of Germans is preserving the past in an effort to learn from it and to ensure that it is never repeated. I think about that as I sit in Neustadt’s tiny church, surrounded by villagers raising their voices in song. As carols fill the air, I am reminded by those words of peace and love of the duality of the human heart. That gives me hope,