Near Nordhausen, Germany: Mittelbau, or the Mittelbau-Dora complex was a sub-camp of Buchenwald located near Nordhausen, Germany. Continuously under attack from allied forces, the Nazis constructed tunnels below Mittelbau, which were used to assemble weaponry out of the sight of Allied planes. Labor was drawn from prisoners from nearby Buchenwald, who were forced to toil underground assembling German rockets. The first inmates of the camp arrived in 1943, being housed in the tunnels. As more and more arrived, barracks were constructed nearby and eventually a crematorium was constructed to destroy the bodies. Although most of the prisoners who labored in Mittelbau did not survive, this was more in part due to overworking and lack of livable conditions, rather than a more organized project of mass murder. Forced to evacuate the camp at the end of the war, thousands of prisoners died in a death march. In the 1990s Mittelbau was reconfigured as a tourist attraction and memorial site, and several of the original buildings still stand today. An extensive museum seeks to present the site from inmates’ point of view, while educating visitors as to the larger Nazi project.
