Mittelbau-Dora Tunnel Complex

Mittelbau-Dora was a concentration camp that was inaugurated in August 1943 near the town of Nordhausen. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau-Dora became an independent concentration camp with approximately forty "Außenlager". The purpose of the camp was to support the German war industry by using prisoners as labor for the production of V1s and V2s.
The reason for the construction of this concentration camp was the bombing of Peenemünde in the night of 17 to 18 August 1943, when the test station for the development of rocket weapons was hit. It was decided to move the production of missiles to underground factories. In the Kohnstein mountain near Nordhausen, an extensive tunnel system had already been created by the extraction of anhydrite rock. Concentration camp prisoners had to enlarge the mines and convert them into a missile factory, the so-called "Mittelwerk", which was led by Arthur Rudolph.

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Source

• Text: Bert Deelman
• Photos: Koos Winkelman (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), Bert Deelman (6, 7, 8)