The Kohnstein is a hill in Thuringia, Germany, 2 kilometres southwest of the village of Niedersachswerfen and 3 kilometres northwest of the centre of the town of Nordhausen. Gypsum mining created tunnels in the hill that were later used as a fuel/chemical depot and for Nazi Germany factories, including the MittelwerkV-2 rocket factory that used Mittelbau-Dora slave labour.
1936: Wifo took over the mines to create a highly secret central petroleum reserve.[2] The Government's Industrial Research Association invested some effort in adapting the tunnels and galleries for the storage of critical chemicals like tetra-ethyl-lead (petroleum anti-knock).[5]
1937–1940: Wifo phases I and II to extend the tunnels were completed, and the site stored oil, gasoline, and chemicals; as well as stockpiles of chemical poisons.[1]
1943 July (mid): A production planner for Gerhard Degenkolb (i.e., the A-4 Special Committee), Paul Figge, determined that the site seemed ideal for A-4 production, but Hermann Göring initially forbade the use for missile production (Hitler overruled).[1][2][3]
1943 November (late): Mittelwerk GmbH leased the Kohnstein mine from Wifo, the owner.[1][3]
1943 September early: Albin Sawatzki, Arthur Rudolph, and about ten engineers moved to the Nordhausen plant from Peenemünde.[1]
1943 September: Conversion of tunnels for V-2 rocket production was started.[6]
1944 Spring: Ventilation and heating construction was completed.[7]
1944 May or June: Mittelwerk had to compress all its facilities into tunnels 21-46, disrupting production.[3]
1945 April 11: After previously entering the Nordhausen plant from the North through the Junkers Nordwerke, 3rd US Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions reached the town of Nordhausen on 11 April 1945 and discovered the dead and sick of the Boelcke Kaserne[3] barracks at Mittelbau-Dora.[8]
1945 June: The US Army left the Nordhausen plant as required by JCS Directive 1067/14, with parts, machine tools, and documents (including blueprints for the projected A-9/A-10 intercontinental missile) left for the Soviets.[8]
1948 Summer: The Soviet army demolished both of the entrances of the tunnel system[2]
1995: A new entrance tunnel was dug to former rail Tunnel A. Subsequently, a section of 710 m of the tunnel system was opened for visitors.
After the 1990 reunification of Germany, the tunnels were frequently looted by treasure seekers who gained access via the private mine in the north of the Kohnstein. Large parts of the system are flooded by ground water, while other parts have collapsed. Willi Kramer, a German archaeologist and scientist who dived in the tunnel system in 1992 and 1998, estimated that 70 tons of material was stolen. Access through these entrances was secured not until 2004, when the mine went into insolvency.[9]
In 1366 the Hohnstein counts had the Schnabelsburg (a castle, later a daytrippers restaurant) built on the Kohnstein. At Maienkopf there was an open-air stage from 1934 which had 500seats. In more recent times the Kaiser Way (an old military road or Heerstraße) runs along the Kohnstein. Nearby is the Karst Trail. Around 550metres east of the summit and about 600metres northwest of the former Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp is an open area in the woods where several trails meet and known as the Komödienplatz. The Komödienplatz hosts the May festivals of Nordhausen Grammar School (Nordhäuser Gymnasium), founded in 1835; schoolchildren put on Latin comedies.
References and notes
1 2 3 4 5 6 Ordway, Frederick I III; Sharpe, Mitchell R (1979). The Rocket Team. Apogee Books Space Series 36. pp.75, 76, 79, 88.
1 2 3 4 Béon, Yves (1997). Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age. translated from the French La planète Dora by Béon & Richard L. Fague. Westview Press, Div. of Harper Collins. pp.XII, XXIV. ISBN0-8133-3272-9.
The Peenemünde Army Research Center was founded in 1937 as one of five military proving grounds under the German Army Weapons Office (Heereswaffenamt). Several German guided missiles and rockets of World War II were developed by the HVP, including the V-2 rocket. The works were attacked by the British in Operation Crossbow from August 1943, before falling to the Soviets in May 1945.
The V-2, with the technical name Aggregat 4 (A-4), was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944.
Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. Conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), it was largely carried out by special agents of the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). Many of these Germans were former members and some were former leaders of the Nazi Party.
Nordhausen is a city in Thuringia, Germany. It is the capital of the Nordhausen district and the urban centre of northern Thuringia and the southern Harz region; its population is 42,000. Nordhausen is located approximately 60 km north of Erfurt, 80 km west of Halle, 85 km south of Braunschweig and 60 km east of Göttingen.
Hans Kammler was an SS-Obergruppenführer responsible for Nazi civil engineering projects and its top secret V-weapons program. He oversaw the construction of various Nazi concentration camps before being put in charge of the V-2 rocket and Emergency Fighter Programs towards the end of World War II. Kammler disappeared in May 1945 during the final days of the war. There has been much conjecture regarding his fate.
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.
Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph was a German rocket engineer who was a leader of the effort to develop the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. After World War II, the United States government's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) brought him to the U.S. as part of the clandestine Operation Paperclip, where he became one of the main developers of the U.S. space program. He worked within the U.S. Army and NASA, where he managed the development of several systems, including the Pershing missile and the Saturn V Moon rocket. In 1984, the U.S. government investigated him for war crimes, and he agreed to renounce his United States citizenship and leave the U.S. in return for not being prosecuted.
Operation Backfire was a military scientific operation during and after the Second World War that was performed mainly by British staff. The operation was designed to completely evaluate the entire V-2 rocket assembly, interrogate German personnel specialized in all phases of it, and then to test and launch missiles across the North Sea.
The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
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.
Magnus "Mac" Freiherr von Braun was a German chemical engineer, Luftwaffe aviator, rocket scientist and business executive. In his 20s he worked as a rocket scientist at Peenemünde and the Mittelwerk.
V-2 rocket facilities were military installations associated with Nazi Germany's V-2 SRBM ballistic missile, including bunkers and small launch pads which were never operationally used.
The Redl-Zipf V-2 rocket facility located in central Austria between Vöcklabruck and Vöcklamarkt and established in September 1943 began operation for V-2 rocket motor testing after Raxwerke test equipment had been moved from Friedrichshafen.
Georg Johannes Rickhey was a German engineer and the general director of Mittelwerk GmbH in Dora-Mittelbau.
The Dora Trial, also the "Dora"-Nordhausen or Dachau Dora Proceeding was a war crimes trial conducted by the United States Army in the aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich. It took place between August 7 and December 30, 1947, on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp, Germany.
Helmut Hermann Wilhelm Bischoff was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer, Gestapo officer and Nazi official. During World War II he was the leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV in Poland and later headed the Gestapo offices in Poznań (Posen) and Magdeburg.
Wilhelm Simon was a German SS-Hauptscharführer and concentration camp functionary. During World War II he held various administrative posts at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. He was convicted of war crimes by the United States in 1947.
Erwin Julius Busta was an Austrian SS-Hauptscharführer and concentration camp functionary. During World War II Busta was also closely associated with the German V-weapons program; serving on the SS staff at the Peenemünde Army Research Center and the V-2 rocket production facility at Mittelwerk. He was convicted of war crimes by a West German court in 1970.
Boelcke-Kaserne concentration camp was a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex where prisoners were left to die after they became unable to work. It was located inside a former Luftwaffe barracks complex in Nordhausen, Thuringia, Germany, adjacent to several pre-existing forced labor camps. During its three-month existence, about 6,000 prisoners passed through the camp and almost 3,000 died there under "indescribable" conditions. More than a thousand prisoners were killed during the bombing of Nordhausen by the Royal Air Force on 3–4 April 1945. Their corpses were found by the US Army units that liberated the camp on 11 April. Photographs and newsreel footage of the camp were reported internationally and made Nordhausen notorious in many parts of the world.
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