The Space Race Began With 16,000 Prisoners Slaving Away On Wernher Von Braun’s Nazi Rockets by daxe
Ultimately, tens of thousands of slave laborers worked on the V-2 at no fewer than three separate sites. Theset up a camp at Peenemünde—a secret military laboratory on the Baltic coast—to house the slaves working at that facility.
In the early 2000s, researchers began to piece together P.O. Box 1142’s secret history. In 2007, veterans of the facility gathered to remember their work—and to denounce brutal torture tactics that the administration of Pres. George W. Bush practiced in Iraq. Moritz and his colleagues eventually determined that the prisoners were talking about a rocket-factory on the Baltic coast. This conversation might have helped lead British intelligence to Peenemünde—and to the V-2 program.
The S.S. pulled—among others—Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, French and Italian prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp and other prisons both to build Mittelwerk and, later, to operate its underground plants. They lived in a new camp called Mittelbau-Dora, all 16,000 of them. It took four months to prepare the tunnels and move equipment into the new underground factory.
The tunnels themselves were dark, cold and damp. Mud in and around the underground work sites was often feet deep. During the initial excavations, the Germans allowed the workers just a few hours of sleep between shifts. There was no time to bathe, so filthy miners collapsed onto their mattresses, which quickly became “mud pies,” one prisoner told Sellier.
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