Last Secrets of Nazi Terror—an Underground Labor Camp

Article excerpt

By: Luke Harding

Date: October 25, 2005

Source: Harding, Luke. "Last Secrets of Nazi Terror—an Underground Labor Camp." The Guardian. October 25, 2005.

About the Author: This article was originally written by Luke Harding, a reporter for the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, in 2005.

INTRODUCTION

In 2005, a retired mine-pit foreman who had worked in the potassium mines in Wansleben, Germany—apparently misidentified in this primary source as "salt" mines was looking for documents on the history of the mining industry in his area. For reasons that are not clear, he examined records of the Stasi, the secret police of the East German Communist regime (1945–1990). ("Stasi" was short for Staatssicherheit, from the official name of the organization, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, "Ministry for State Security.") After East and West Germany were reunited as a single state in 1990, Stasi's vast records eventually became available to Western researchers.

The Stasi records discovered in 2005 revealed details of an operation at Wansleben am See (Wansleben for short) overseen by the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel or "defense squadron", a separate branch of the Nazi military). Starting in March 1944, the SS employed slave laborers, including at least some French prisoners of war, to dig additional chambers and tunnels in the mine. These spaces were then used for the manufacture of airplane engines for Junkers military aircraft and for the safe storage of valuable library books and art. The slave laborers used to enlarge and run the facility were housed aboveground. The facility at Wansleben was a small satellite camp of Buchenwald, a concentration camp designed primarily to provide slave labor for industrial facilities rather than as an extermination camp. About 1,500 laborers were typically kept at the Wansleben facility.

Late in the war, as Allied and Soviet troops converged on the area, mine laborers were forcibly evacuated to points further East. Most or all probably died there in the confusion of the final days of the war. The Soviets looted the mines of their books, machinery, and art, then allowed them to fill with water. Later, in the 1960s, the Soviet-controlled East German government re-investigated the mines, but it found nothing of value. The entrances to the Wansleben mines were thoroughly sealed using explosives in 1989; today, only rubble is visible on the surface at the site.

PRIMARY SOURCE

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

SIGNIFICANCE

The existence of underground facilities at Wansleben was a response to the threat posed by Allied bombers. It was a largely ineffective response against a largely ineffective bombing campaign.

During the first few years of World War II (1939–1945), British bombing policy was to destroy industrial facilities crucial to the German war effort. However, studies by the British Bomber Command found that only about twenty percent of British bombers were delivering their bombs within five miles of their targets, which was ineffective against objects as small as individual factories, mines, refineries, and the like. Therefore, after February 1942, the British bombing campaign officially switched from war production facilities to cities, which were large enough to strike reliably. The new goal was to break what British documents called the "morale of the enemy civil population" by killing large numbers of civilians. Although Allied bombers killed approximately 600,000 German civilians from 1942 to 1945 and precision bombing techniques for attacking specific facilities were developed in the last few years of the war, bombing did not succeed in either breaking German morale or reducing German production of war materiel.

The German response to Allied bombing was manifold. Fighter planes and antiaircraft guns directly attacked Allied bomber fleets. Camouflage, smoke screens, fake factories, dispersal of functions, and underground factories such as that at Wansleben were all used to evade Allied bombing. For example, another underground aircraft factory was built using slave labor at Rabstejn, today in the Czech Republic. Unlike Wansleben, the Rabstejn underground system was never flooded or sealed, and in 2004 it was partly reopened to the public. One of the biggest underground slave factories was at Peenemunde, where the V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons" were built to harass the Allies in the closing days of the war. A prison camp named Dora, which was, like Wansleben, a satellite of Buchenwald, was built to support construction of an underground rocket factory at Nordhausen (the site mentioned in the primary source). Some 20,000 prisoners died in Dora. German rocket officers who were knowingly complicit in the use of slave labor for Nordhausen, especially SS officer Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), were captured by Allied forces at the end of the war and became honored leaders of the U.S. space effort through the 1960s.

The effectiveness of Germany's underground factories was questioned by the U.S. Air Force in the Summary Report of its Strategic Bombing Survey (Sep. 30, 1945): "Germany never succeeded in placing any substantial portion of her war production under-ground—the effort was largely limited to certain types of aircraft, their components, and the V weapons. The practicability of going underground as the escape from full and free exploitation of the air is highly questionable; it was so considered by the Germans themselves." The Report noted that although underground facilities were safe from direct damage, their operations were impacted by the bombing of surface transport systems.

The Nazi German government made extensive use of slave labor, and not only in underground facilities. At Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps, a separate camp called "I.G. Auschwitz" was built by the I.G. Farben corporation to house slave laborers for the manufacture of synthetic oil and rubber from coal. I.G. Farben also manufactured the Zyklon B poison gas that killed over a million people in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Slave laborers were systematically starved and so were useful for only about three months; when they became too weak to work, they were sent to their death.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Web sites

Ceske Svykarska. "Rabstejn—a complex of underground aircraft factories from World War II." 2004. 〈http://www.cztour.cz/rabstejn/eng/index.html〉 (accessed April 7, 2006).

Detlef, Siebert. BBC. "British Bombing Strategy in World War II." August 1, 2001. 〈http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/area_bombing_03.shtml〉 (accessed April 13, 2006).