Mittelwerk was a German World War II factory built underground in the Kohnstein to avoid Allied bombing. It used slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to produce V-2 ballistic missiles, V-1 flying bombs, and other weapons.
Interior of the tunnels
V-1 cruise missile assembly line at the Mittelwerk II underground facility
V-2 weapon in Mittelwerk after liberation
A few of these Operation Paperclip scientists had been at the Mittelwerk.
Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp
Mittelbau-Dora was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany, for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners.
Supervised by American soldiers, German civilians from Nordhausen bury the corpses of prisoners found at Mittelbau-Dora in April 1945.
Otto Förschner, camp commandant (after 11 April 1945)
Richard Baer, camp commandant
Emaciated survivors of Nordhausen discovered after liberation of the camp, 12 April 1945