de-002638
type: Institution
finding aids: Archive Photographs Database: http://fotoarchiv.dora.de/index.php?id=1164#/fotos Death Book Online Ressource: http://totenbuch.dora.de/names/list/letter/a/lang/en
sources: http://www.buchenwald.de/en/29/
sources: YV/ClaimsCon'06
agent has or had location: 1
general description: 1) Estates of concentration camp survivors 2) Reports by witnesses 3) Documents from within the SS hierarchy (transport lists, camp population lists, bookkeeping for forced labour) 4) Trial documents (among others of the Dachau Dora Trial of 1947 and the Essen Dora Trial of 1967-70) 5) Files from the German Democratic Republican Mittelbau-Dora Memorial 6) Press clipping archive 7) Photo archive: A selection of our photographic holdings can be viewed on the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial online database.
has or had agent name: Mittelbau-Dora Memorial
history: The establishment of Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp was preceded by the development of the A4 rocket as a weapon of terror – later known by the propaganda designation"V-" – at the Peenemünde army research centre on the island of Usedom. It was there, as well as at the Rax Works in Wiener Neustadt and at Zeppelin in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, that the serial production of this rocket began in the early summer of 1943. A heavy air attack by the Royal Air Force on the night of 18 August 1943 brought A4 manufacture in Peenemünde to an abrupt halt. At the other two sites, production had also been at least adversely affected by Allied air raids the same summer. The bombing of Peenemünde gave the authorities no other choice but to move the undertaking to regions less exposed to the air. A decision was made in favour of the tunnel system belonging to the Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft (Wifo; economic research society) in Kohnstein Mountain near Nordhausen in Thuringia. Beginning in 1936, the Wifo had been having an underground fuel storage facility built there for the Wehrmacht; by the late summer of 1943 the construction measures were near completion. On August 28, 1943, i.e. a mere ten days after the air attack on Peenemünde, the first 107 concentration camp inmates arrived at the Kohnstein near Nordhausen with their SS guards. A new subcamp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp was thus founded: the Arbeitslager Dora (Dora labour camp), as it was officially designated by the SS. In the weeks and months that followed, further inmate transports arrived from Buchenwald almost daily. By the end of September 1943, there were already more than 3,000 concentration camp inmates in the Kohnstein, by the end of October more than 6,800, and by Christmas 1943 more than 10,500. Yet Dora was not a camp in the strict sense of the word. Because of the fact that no barracks or permanent living quarters had yet been made available for the inmates, the SS housed them in the t…
name: KZ-Gedenkstätte Mittelbau-Dora