The Kohnstein Mountain
In 1917 the Badische Analin und Soda Fabriken (BASF) started to dig for Anhydrite from the Kohnstein massive for the production of Ammoniac, an important raw material for the production of explosives. The winning of Anhydrite left a number of tunnels in the Kohnstein.
In 1934 these tunnels were bought by the Wirtschaft Forschungs Gesellschaft mbH (WiFo). There purpose was to store strategic important raw materials in the tunnels. They called this installation "Ni", probably named after the nearby village of Niedersachsenwerfen.
In 1935 was decided to enlarge the system in the Kohnstein massive. They started to build two parallel tunnels (Stollen "A" and "B"). These two parallel tunnels were mutual liked up by transverse tunnels. There were 46 of those chambers. The tunnel got the codename "Ni 109" and was wide enough to permit twin regular gauge railroad tracks to run through them.
After the massive air raid of August 17-18, 1943, on Peenemünde, the Germans were forced to look for underground production locations for the V-2, and for many other key weapons production projects as well. In a meeting on August 26, 1943, a series of pre-existing tunnels under Kohnstein Mountain near Nordhausen were chosen for the new plant, to become known as the Mittelwerk (Middle Works). The Mittelwerk was incorporated as a private company on September 24, 1943, and received a contract for the production of 12,000 V-2s. After meeting with Hitler on August 18th, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had informed Armaments Minister Speer that he was personally taking over V-2 production and placing SS Brigadier General Hans Kammler in charge of the Mittelbau complex. It was Kammler who had been in charge of building of the extermination camps and gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maidenek, and Belzec.
When Dornberger and von Braun resisted his advances, the SS arrested von Braun, charging that he had tried to sabotage the V-2 program. Himmler cited as evidence remarks that von Braun had made at a party suggesting developing the V-2 for space travel after the war. Dornberger's intercession won von Braun's release, but Himmler had made his point. Von Braun's defenders cite his arrest as proof of his differences with the Nazi Party and his distance from the use of slave labour. Von Braun's relationship to the Nazi Party is complex; although he was not an ardent Nazi, he did hold rank as an SS officer. His relationship to slave labour is likewise complicated, for his distance from direct responsibility for the use of slave labour must be balanced by the fact that he was aware of its use and the conditions under which prisoners laboured.
Labour for V-2 production became a pressing problem in 1943. In April Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the Peenemünde factory, learned of the availability of concentration camp prisoners, enthusiastically endorsed their use, and helped win approval for their transfer. The first prisoners began working already in June. On August 28, 1943, two days after the choice of the Mittelwerk, the SS delivered the first truckloads of prisoners from the concentration camp at Buchenwald to begin the heavy labour of expanding and completing of the Wifo tunnel system. Dora was the name given to the Buchenwald sub-camp that was set up within the tunnels for the labourers.
By November of the same year, the sub-camp became independent and the surrounding workshops became known as KZ Mittelbau. Later, beginning in the spring of 1944, Dora was transformed into a more traditional camp, with 58 barracks buildings surrounded by barbed wire being set up about a quarter mile west of the south entrance to Tunnel B. Camp construction was not completed until October, 1944.
It was during October, November, and December of 1943 that the most physically punishing work was done by the Dora prisoners, who struggled under terrible, inhuman conditions to enlarge and fit out the Mittelwerk tunnels. Prisoners drilled and blasted away thousands of tons of rock. They built rickety, temporary narrow gauge tracks to support the multi-ton loads of rock that were extracted from the caves. If the skips or small rail cars, full of rock fell off these tracks (and this happened frequently), prisoners were kicked, whipped, and beaten until they could re-rail and reload the cars.
The prisoners were made to eat and sleep within the tunnels they were digging. Thousands of workers were crammed into stinking, lice infested bunks stacked four-high in the first few south side cross tunnels at the mouth of Tunnel A, in an atmosphere thick with gypsum dust and fumes from the blasting work, which continued 24 hours a day. Prisoners had no running water or sanitary facilities. Dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, and starvation were constant causes of suffering and death for these unfortunate people. The Detainees worked atop 30 foot scaffolds using picks to enlarge the tunnels. From time to time, a prisoner would become too weak to continue, fall to his death from the scaffolding, and be replaced by another. Trucks bearing piles of prisoner corpses left every other day for the crematorium ovens at Buchenwald. All of the manufacturing equipment from Peenemünde had to be installed in the tunnels. This was done by hand by prisoner workers using hand-carts, block and tackle, huge skids pulled by teams of prisoners, and the temporary narrow gauge rail lines. Historians estimate that from 1943 until 1945, 60,000 prisoners worked in these factories. Of these, 20,000 had died from various causes including starvation, fatigue and execution.
On April 11, 1945, the spearhead of the advancing American troops, Combat Command B (CCB) of the 3rd Armoured Division, under Brig. Gen. Truman Boudinot, entered Nordhausen. Here CCB was to pause and link up with the 104th Infantry (Timberwolf) Division before continuing its drive to the east. Third Armoured had been warned by Army Intelligence to “expect something a little unusual" in the Nordhausen area, but they knew nothing of the horrors to be soon discover. One of the first sickening encounters took place at the Boelcke-Kaserne (also called the Nordhausen Camp), a former German military barracks that the SS had used as a dumping ground for prisoners from Mittelbau camps and projects who were too weak or diseased to include in the transports and forced marches out of the area. The dead also included prisoners killed in an Allied bombing raid aimed at Nordhausen. An estimated 1,300 to 2,500 corpses were found here, along with a few survivors, cared for by the 104th Division's medical staff. Then, troops from the 104th and Third Armored discovered Dora and the entrances to the Mittelwerk tunnels.
Army Pfc. John M. Galione was one of the men who discovered Camp Dora -- the underground factory staffed by slave labour. “We thought nothing could hurt us. We were hard from war,” Galione wrote in a post-war remembrance. “But, when we walked in there, we couldn't help getting choked up. Some of the soldiers even got sick to their stomachs --they turned aside and threw up by the fence. There were dead bodies piled up. The smell was so bad, like nothing you can imagine. We couldn't believe any human being could be so cruel.”
The Americans found two complete underground factories and a treasure mine with unusual contents. The corps G-5 rounded up several hundred German civilians to bury the dead in the concentration camp and evicted several hundred others from their homes in the town to provide accommodations for the survivors. The 23,000 displaced persons and prisoners of war in the slave labor camp had been employed in the Mittelwerk, one of the underground factories. In the last months they had been dying at the rate of 150 a week; and 9,000 were sick, 1,000 with tuberculosis. The Nordwerk, the other factory, was an assembly plant for Jumo jet aircraft engines. These state-of-the-art engines were used for the Messerschmitt Me 262, the Heinkel He 162 and the Arado jet bomber.
The Mittelwerk had all the equipment needed to manufacture V-2 rockets, from the components to the completed projectile, and the Germans had left behind enough finished parts to make 250 rockets. The Berntrode Mine, outside Nordhausen, contained the remains of Frederick the Great, Frederick William I of Prussia, and Paul yon Hindenburg and his wife; the Prussian royal regalia, scepter, orb, crowns, helmet, broadsword, and seal; over two hundred regimental standards; the lest hooks from the Prussian royal library ; several dozen palace tapestries; and 271 paintings, all valuable, among them several by Lucas Cranach. The MFA&A officers could find only one defect in the mine as a storage place: although it was dry and had a constant temperature, it had been used since 1937 to house a munitions factory and still held 400,000 tons of ammunition, some of it in highly doubtful condition.
Major William Castille, Intelligence Officer for CCB, is quoted as having said that entering the Mittelwerk tunnels was “like being in a magician's cave." The Americans were stunned to discover orderly rows of V-2 parts and subassemblies stretched out through the tunnels. Work had stopped at Mittelwerk on April 10, 1945, but the assembly line was left with its electric power and ventilation systems still running, as if the former occupants had gone out for lunch, and would return after a while.
The team designated to investigate the Mittelwerk tunnels (Special Mission V-2) was headed by Maj. James Hamill of Ordinance Technical Intelligence. He was assisted by Maj. William Bromley in charge of technical operations and by Dr. Louis Woodruff, an MIT electrical engineering professor, as special advisor. This team was supposed to rescue the secrets of German rocket technology but what they did not know at that time, was that all the documents had already left Nordhausen.
Von Braun correctly suspected that Kammler had preparing to hold him and the Nordhausen evacuees hostage as a bargaining chip with the Americans, and sought to create some leverage of his own. On April 3, 1945, he sent a convoy to carry 14 tons of the most important V-2 plans and documents and conceal these in an abandoned salt mine in the tiny village of Dornten. The roof of the mine was then dynamited, concealing the cache.
Meanwhile, Army Ordinance’s Special Mission V-2 was busy doing an inventory of the Mittelwerk tunnels and trying to figure out how to disassemble, pack, and move a huge quantity of V-2 parts and subassemblies to the port of Antwerp, and thence to the United States. One of their first moves was to call for some U.S. troops with basic mechanical skills—in this case, the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly (MVA) Company, which had been working the docks in Cherbourg. This unit arrived at Mittelwerk on May 18th, and joined the 319th Ordinance Battalion for the task of moving V-2 parts out of Mittelbau.
After rounding up captured German rolling stock and clearing a way into the tunnels, Special Mission V-2 succeeded in loading up and sending off its first 40 car trainload of V-2 parts On May 22, 1945. Shipments like these reportedly continued for the next nine days, and on May 31st, the last of the 341 rail cars left Nordhausen for Erfurt, and then Antwerp. Although the British properly protested that by prior agreement half the captured V-2s were to be turned over to them, the Americans ignored these protests. Sixteen Liberty ships, bearing the parts for 100 V-2 rockets, finally sailed from Antwerp, bound for New Orleans and WSPG. But the V-2 documentation hidden by Von Braun’s staff was still unaccounted for, and without it, the Americans would have had a hard time making operational V-2s from their boxes of parts.
On May 12 Major Staver from the Hermes Project (first major US ballistic missile program), located his first V-2 engineer, Karl Otto Fleischer, who began to put him in touch with other Mittelbau engineers who had not been part of the caravan to Bavaria. Then on May 14 Staver found Walther Riedel, Chief of the rocket motor and structural design section, who was interrogated through May 18. Riedel emphasized the use of the V-2 for space travel, and urged the Americans to import perhaps 40 of the top V-2 engineers to America. As it turned out, Fleischer was the only person remaining in the Nordhausen area who was aware of the general location of the V-2 documents hidden by von Braun’s group. Staver succeeded in tricking him into believing that von Braun had already authorized him to reveal the location of the papers, and on May 20 Fleischer named the Dornten tunnel.
But by this point, the Americans had only one week to go before the Dornten area would fall into the hands of the British, who would then remove the documents themselves. There followed a frantic scramble to locate sufficient manpower to excavate the demolished tunnel and enough transport to move the document crates back to Nordhausen. On May 27, with only a few hours to spare before the British occupied the area, the Americans succeeded. The stolen documents were quickly shipped to Paris and then back to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
On June 8, 1945, senior Mittelbau engineers who had been part of the von Braun contingent arrived back in the Nordhausen area at Staver’s request, to assist him in identifying which of the thousands of German technicians and their families should be offered evacuation to the American Zone, in advance of the Russian occupation of the Nordhausen area, which had been finally scheduled for June 21. Then, less than 24 hours before the Russians arrived, some 1,000 German V-2 personnel and their families were gathered up and placed aboard a 50 car train, which finally made it to the small town of Witzenhausen, 40 miles to the southwest and just inside the American Zone. Months later, at White Sands in the New Mexico desert, the first reassembled V-2 was successfully launched on June 28, 1946.
Source: Paul Grigorieff for V2Rocket.com
Source: Paul Grigorieff for V2Rocket.com