Neufeld Michael J. - A history of the Dora camp: [the story of the Nazi slave labor camp that secretly manufactured V-2 rockets]

Andr Sellier

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
STEPHEN WRIGHT AND SUSAN TAPONIER

WITH A FOREWORD BY MICHAEL J. NEUFELD
AND AN AFTERWORD BY JENS-CHRISTIAN WAGNER

A HISTORY OF THE DORA CAMP. Copyright 1998 by Editions La Dcouverte & Syros, Paris. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For information, address: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago 60622. Manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

First published in France in 1998 by Editions La Dcouverte as Histoire du camp de Dora. Published in Germany in 2000 by zu Klampen Verlag as Zwangsarbeit im Raketentunnel. First American edition published 2003 by Ivan R. Dee in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The assertions, arguments, and conclusions contained herein are those of the author or other contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The author and the publishers are grateful for the support of lAmicale des dports de Dora-Ellrich, Harzungen et Kommandos annexes; the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States (as part of the program of aid for publication); the French Ministry of Culture; LUnion des Blesss de la Face et de la Tte (Les Gueules Casses); and The European Community.

Sellier, Andr.

[Histoire du Camp de Dora. English]

A history of Dora Camp / translated from the French by Stephen Wright and
Susan Taponier; with a foreword by Michael J. Neufeld and an afterword by Jeus-Christian Wagner.

p. cm.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Museum.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56663-511-X (alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-56663-511-0

1. Dora (Concentration camp)History. I. Title.

D805.5.D6 S4513 2003
940.53'1853224dc21

2002035164

In memory of my father, who reached the front at Les parges in
April 1915, the day he turned twenty, and who left the camp at
Buchenwald in April 1945, the day he turned fifty; and in memory
of all our comrades from that scarred generation.

A quarter of a century ago, concentration camp Doraalso known as Mittelbau or Mittelbau-Dorawas virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Its brief twenty-month existence at the end of World War II had been covered up or ignored by the U.S. government and the Western media because of its inconvenient connection to an American hero: the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun (19121977), who had helped put the first U.S. satellite in orbit and the first Americans on the moon. It took the 1979 publication of Dora, the translated memoir of a French Resistance leader and camp survivor, Jean Michel, to begin to establish this camp in the public mind. Michels book was influential in launching an investigation of the group of former German rocket engineers by the new Nazi-hunting unit of the U.S. Justice Department, which in turn led to the return to Germany in 1984 of one of von Brauns chief deputies, Arthur Rudolph. Rudolph, who had served as project manager of the Apollo Saturn V moon rocket for NASA, had been production manager of the underground Mittelwerk plant that produced V2 ballistic missiles using concentration camp labor from Dora, leading to thousands of deaths. The Rudolph case spawned muckraking books and television programs by journalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as scholarly research on the rocket program and the Mittelbau-Dora camp in German, French, and English. In 1997 a second important French survivor memoir, Yves Bons Planet Dora, appeared in translation in this country.

In spite of all this activity, no full-length history of the Mittelbau-Dora camp system has ever been published in the English languageuntil now. This fact alone would make the book you hold in your hand an event. But what makes it particularly unique is that it is the product of a Dora survivor and former slave laborer on the V2 production line who also has historical training. In the foreword to the German translation of this book, Eberhard Jckel, the eminent historian, has compared Andr Sellier to Eugen Kogon. A former Buchenwald prisoner, Kogon launched the study of the Nazi concentration camps in 1946 with his book Der SS Staat, which appeared in English as Theory and Practice of Hell. Like Kogon, Sellier examines the history of his camp with engagement but also with scholarly detachment, skillfully analyzing all the sources available to him. A History of the Dora Camp is not a memoir, yet Sellier is able to use his memories and those of his fellow survivors to supplement the somewhat meager written record. The extensive use of the memoir files of the Dora-Ellrich and Buchenwald-Dora survivor associations in France, supplemented by interviews and correspondence with French, Belgian, Czech, and Slovenian prisoners, gives the present book a powerful, personal dimension which does not undermine its restrained tone.

It is, to be sure, a French view of what happened in Dora and its subcamps, like the two memoirs that have preceded it in English. The voices of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish prisoners who formed over half the population of these camps have scarcely been heard, even in the new, excellent scholarly literature in German, because of the lingering effects of the division of Europe and the lack of expertise in Slavic languages in the West. (Jewish prisoners, mostly from Hungary, were only a small minority in the Mittelbau-Dora camps until the evacuation of Auschwitz and Gross Rosen in late January 1945.) We can only hope that this deficit, which is common to all works on the topic, will soon be remedied by new scholarly research. But even when it is, there is no doubt that Andr Selliers History of the Dora Camp will continue to be revered as a standard work on the topic. I highly recommend it to all readers.

MICHAEL J. NEUFELD

Washington, D.C.
October 2002

A HISTORY OF THE DORA CAMP

Since the end of the Hitlerian Reich, along with the concentration camps that were one of its essential characteristics, literature on the subject has never ceased to grow within Germany itself and in the other countries concerned, in Europe as well as in the United States and Israel. Thus on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war and the liberation of the camps, a number of excellent commemorative works were published, most often in the form of anthologies. This particular study of the Dora camp, however, is of a quite different sort. It is a historical study, written by a historian, who also happens to have been a Hftling, a prisoner, in the camp, where his identity was reduced to the number 39570. In undertaking to write this book, I was seeking to meet the expectations of my fellow prisoners, who wanted it to be done by a professional historian.

For a variety of reasons the concentration camp world was not, for many years, systematically studied from a truly historical perspective. In 1945 we were confronted with a previously unknown type of institutionunknown, at any rate, in terms of the extent of its criminal perfection. Its analysis was not made any easier by the mediocrity of information provided by those in charge of the camps themselvesthat is, the SS. From 1933 to 1945, everything that had anything to do with the camps was secret, and many of the relevant documents were destroyed during the wars final weeks.