Detail

Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp was established in the summer of 1943 as a satellite camp of Buchenwald concentration camp. At that time, German armaments production sites were coming under increasing attack from Allied bombing. After the bombing of the Army Research Centre on the island of Usedom, the production of Aggregat 4 rockets (V2) was moved to a tunnel facility near Nordhausen. In order to expand the tunnel system and continue rocket production, the SS set up the Dora labour camp, to which they deported prisoners from Buchenwald concentration camp. The majority of the prisoners were forced to work in construction detachments, expanding and converting the tunnel system for the armaments industry.

To accommodate them, the SS and the companies involved set up new satellite concentration camps, which in the autumn of 1944 were merged with the Dora camp as the main camp to form the now autonomous Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. By shortly before the end of the war, its system of nearly 40 satellite camps extended over the entire area of the Harz Mountains.

Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp typifies concentration camp forced labour and the moving of armaments production underground in the final phase of the Second World War. More than 60,000 prisoners from almost every country in Europe were forced to work for the German armaments industry in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex between August 1943 and April 1945. Around one in three prisoners died because of the working and living conditions.

Since the 1960s, there has been a memorial on the historic site of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Today, the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial is an international place of learning and remembrance. Remains of buildings on the site of the former camp, the parts of the tunnel system accessible to visitors, and other surviving sources and survivors’ memories bear witness to the crimes, but also to the changing way in which the history of the place has been dealt with since the immediate post-war period. The permanent exhibition presents Mittelbau-Dora not only as a model case of concentration camp forced labour and the relocation of production underground, but also as an example of how the concentration camps were inextricably woven into the fabric of German society.

The memorial’s educational work includes a variety of formats. In addition to the permanent historical exhibition and temporary special exhibitions, the memorial offers daily guided tours of the site. Educational formats of several hours and group projects of several days allow an intensive engagement with the place and its history and form a main focus of the work at the memorial.