#Dora-Mittelbau factory

[zentarablog]

The Secret Labs of WWII: Innovations in Warfare

World War II was a conflict fought on battlefields, in the skies, and across the oceans. But it was also a war fought in the shadows, in laboratories hidden away from prying eyes, where brilliant minds raced against time to develop technologies that could turn the tide of the conflict. These “secret labs” were hotbeds of innovation, where scientists, engineers, and researchers worked on projects…

[the-aleator]

endeavour musings

Featuring: Fred Thursday's Traumatic Backstory and the War

In "Rocket" (s1e3), in the second half of the episode, we get the discovery of the rocket guidance schematics in Lenny Frost's pocket, which Thursday notices, looks at, and goes "huh" eyebrow. Then we get another scene with Dr Volk, our very German engineer, who Morse questions about the source of the documents, and Thursday...has other questions in mind.

THURSDAY: "Volk, What's that? German, is it? Worked long at British Imperial?" VOLK: "18 years." THURSDAY: "When would that be? Early '47? [switches to German] Where were you before? Kiel, Peenemunde, Nordhausen?" VOLK: [German] "I was a young Engineer. It was a long time ago." THURSDAY: "Yeah. [German] But some of us have a good memory."

The triple layer of conversation (yay! intertextuality) going on here is brilliant: Morse is looking confused, from one to the other, Thursday is using fluent German to confront Volk over the War (on his own territory, so to speak), and Volk is hugely on the defensive.

I'm pretty sure Volk uses the word "Zeit" when he says it was a long time ago, implying that that's both ancient history and also nothing to do with him, and Thursday rebuts him that he has a "good memory." Also, I wish had the screenshots for the venom on Thursday's face.

MORSE: What was that all about? THURSDAY: It was him and a load more like him flattened my street. MORSE: I'm sure it wasn't personal. THURSDAY: Wasn't it? You're too young to remember.

Then Thursday accuses of him excusing Vexin because she's a "looker" and in return Morse accuses him of him being xenophobic, ("I based it more on the fact that she isn't German") and then sort of apologises, with a reluctant, "Sir."

There are a lot of implications here to tease out. The first being that many German scientists were transported, mostly to the US, but some to the UK, (Operation Paperclip) regardless of what they may or may not have done during the war. Even at the time, the ethical implications of that were...messy. It's pretty clear that what's Thursday is accusing Volk of. Then the list of places: 1. Kiel, which was a major port for the Kriegsmarine, had a bunker to build and repair u-boats 2. Peenemunde, which was a factory for V-1 missiles until 1943 and a German testing facility and factory for both the V-2 and the Wasserfall missile. 3. Nordhausen, which was a factory for the V-2 missiles.

Kiel and Peenemunde used forced labor of POWs.

But Nordhausen was an offshoot of Mittelbau-Dora and was specifically built to be a V-2 factory fueled by the concentration camp. An estimated 60,000 people passed through the camp, although the precise number of people who died isn't possible to determine, but figures range from 15,000 up to 25,000.

Volk's response is to deny responsibility based on his age, just as, interestingly, Thursday absolves Morse of responsibility of remembering or understanding because "he's too young."

Thursday says that it's personal because Volk / German engineers flattened his street, but there's something more to it:

THURSDAY to GULL: "Oh, I've looked into the eyes of far worse than you. People who've committed real atrocities. And they were sane. Next to them, you're nothing more than a third-rate freak show. A bearded lady with glue running down her chin." (Fugue, S1E2, my emphasis)

Justice is a personal thing for Thursday, as in, it's about the individual (unlike Morse, "The truth will be buried"), it's Thursday who rejects with force the idea that Olive Rix is a "gold-digger," to Henry Bloom Sr. ("She might not have had the best start in life, but at the time she went missing, she was working hard to make something of herself.") It's hard not to hear Thursday himself in that sentence. The implications buried here, I think, are that Thursday, as a sergeant with the Eighth Army, who speaks fluent German, probably did liberate, or participate in the liberation of a concentration camp. Which: queue more traumatic backstory for Thursday. I think one of the things that the interchange with Volk shows is that Thursday has long learned the lesson, for himself, personally, that justice doesn't always happen. He can't do anything about Volk: all he can do is remember what happened. And thus, MORSE: "That's not enough." THURSDAY: "Sometimes it has to be. Not every question gets an answer. Learning to live with that is the hardest lesson there is." The whole of Morseverse in two lines of dialogue.

[spaceintruderdetector]

The V-2 concentration camp

The name Mittelbau refers to a complex of factories, storage depots, facilities and prisoner camps, some underground, that were used from August, 1943 until April, 1945 to manufacture and test the V-2 rocket near Nordhausen in central Germany. The main V-2 assembly line was located in an underground factory called Mittelwerk that was excavated beneath Kohnstein Mountain, about 2 km southwest of the town of Neidersachswerfen. The Dora concentration camp (later called Mittelbau KZ), where most of the Mittelwerk workers were imprisoned, was located on the southwest edge of the Kohnstein, near the southern portals of Mittelwerk tunnels A and B. Immediately after the war, while America was building its own rocket program on the foundations of German technology, the horrible reality of slave labor used during V-2 production was concealed from the public. Only in the past 10 years, as prisoners’ histories have been published, have we begun to understand more. Estimates put the number of prisoners used by the Germans for V-2 production at Mittelbau at more than 60,000. Over 25,000 of these were killed either by beatings, starvation, and sickness in the complex, or by the brutal efforts of the SS to relocate them before the Americans arrived in April, 1945. We now know that many of the most shocking “concentration camp pictures” that are seared into our common consciousness from this era were taken by U.S. troops as they entered the Mittelbau camps.

http://www.v2rocket.com/start/chapters/mittel.html

[stevekennedyuk]

This happened, dad Bar mitzvah, Breslau 1940, days/weeks/months before school closed and then slave labourer in factory, Auschwitz III-Monowitz/Buna, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen, DP Camp, England … book bought in Redu, Belgium, today came back to our family and resting at my Mum’s … why was dad given an English book? How did it survive the war, how did it end up in Belgium? Then on Twitter, then random search and reunited with family - wish dad was alive for this (at East Finchley, London N2) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb0zFzqqw9j/?utm_medium=tumblr

[amera-ibz]

WWII sites in Europe I wish to visit!

1)Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, Krakow, Poland

2)Oradour-Sur-Glane, France

3)The Wolf’s Lair, Poland

4)Cabinet War Rooms, England

5)Auschwitz- Birkenau, Poland

6)Musee de la Reddition, France

7)Dachau Memorial and Museum -Dachau

8)Nazi Party Rally Grounds -Nuremberg

9)Holocaust Memorial -Berlin

10)Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) – Obersalzberg

11)Mittelbau-Dora Memorial -Nordhausen

12)Soviet War Memorial -Berlin

13) Anne Frank House - Amsterdam

[dragon-knight1990]

#WeRemember the six million Jews, and countless Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, homosexuals, transgender, intersex, disabled and differently abled, political prisoners, innocent civilians, and others murdered senselessly in the Holocaust. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno. Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka. Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen. Bergen-Belsen, Flossenberg, Dora-Mittelbau. Gross-Rosen, Ravensbruek, Westerbork. Sachenshausen, Plaszow, Drancy. Theresienstadt, Stutthof, Neuengamme. Natzweiler, Jasenovac, Mussolini's Italy. Say them. Say what they truly are. Killing fields. Factories of death. I remember studying Night by Elie Wiesel in the 10th grade and wondering how this could happen. I'm afraid that it is happening now. This was real. The horrors and atrocities were real. These things happened. And I will always remember. And I echo those promises made...NEVER AGAIN. I will fight every attempt to repeat history. I Remember. We remember. Remember.