The men who built the rockets lived in filth, underfed, malnourished, and brutalized. Packed into the barracks of Dora in their striped uniforms, in bunks stacked four high, the workers froze in the winter, roasted in the summer, and died by the tens of thousands all year round. They were worked beyond their capacity to endure, in primitive and dangerous conditions. The tunnels were hot, dark, cramped, crowded. They were filled with fumes, smoke, and the racket of machinery. Discipline was severe and the guards bestial. Minor infractions were punished by kicking, beating, torture, mutilation; fear of insurrection resulted in regular mass executions. The condemned would be hanged six at a time from a massive crane used to transport rocket assemblies from one part of the line to the next, in full view of the workers on the factory floor and of the project’s scientists and engineers from von Braun on down the line. Bodies were left to dangle instructively overhead. Sabotage, though subject to swift and savage retribution, was rife and, along with the abysmal conditions and demoralized work force, may have led directly to the relatively high rate of failure experienced by the V-2.* In time a crematorium was built at Dora to save the trouble and expense of sending dead inmates all the way to Buchenwald.
The 104th Infantry (Timberwolf) and the 3rd Armored (Spearhead) divisions rolled into Nordhausen on April 11, 1945, and found it abandoned by the enemy. They stumbled first across the subcamp in the town itself. Ravaged by an untreated outbreak of typhus, the Boelcke-Kaserne had also borne the brunt of an Allied air raid the week before that killed fifteen hundred inmates and wounded hundreds more. The death marches, forced transports, mass burials, and other attempts by the evacuating Germans to conceal the enormity of Nordhausen had left only the most enfeebled and grievously maimed in the Boelcke-Kaserne. The liberators had not even begun to grasp what they were seeing when they came upon Dora—these were among the first U.S. troops to enter a concentration camp. Photographs and film footage they took there featured in newsreels and on front pages all over the world. Even after the name and the business of Nordhausen had been carefully mislaid by history (at least in the adopted homeland of Wernher von Braun), the imagery of its horror endured: The dead ranged in corduroy roads to the vanishing point, bone-men slumped and staring. In the tunnels under Kohnstein Mountain, among incomplete rocket assemblies and machines left running, the liberators found the men of the Mittelwerk’s final shift, abandoned by their captors, too weak to move, let alone try to escape. Heaps of sticks atop which solemn heads stood regarding them like owls. In the infirmary the bodies of the Mittelwerk’s last on-the-job fatalities lay naked on tile slabs, drained of blood and awaiting transport to the crematorium.
Having come six hundred miles through some of the most brutal combat and one of the bitterest European winters of the twentieth century, the liberators were as inured to the routine of battlefield horror as any men have ever been obliged to become. When they saw what there was to see in the camps and under Kohnstein Mountain, according to their own subsequent accounts—accounts followed closely by Pynchon when he had his engineer P?kler tour KZ Dora—a considerable number of these men with their thousand-yard stares broke down in tears or turned away to vomit.
The liberators could not have endured so long and so much, however, without having learned the knack of repressing futile emotion. They soon moved on to anger and a desire to impose some measure of justice or, failing that, retribution, if clear distinction could be made between the two. They looked around for someone to lay their hands on. The SS guards and functionaries had all fled the area, along with the Mittelwerk’s personnel. I couldn’t find anything to suggest that the liberators contemplated trying to punish or even gave much thought to the brains of the operation, the men with slide rules and soldering irons whose great invention, only incidentally the first long-range ballistic missile, was a process by which horror could be converted into terror by dint of cruelty.* At any rate, had the liberators of Dora made this imaginative leap, there would have been no way to act upon it. Von Braun’s rocketeers were miles away, scattered across southern Germany and Austria. In the end the townsmen paid the debt of horror. The liberators returned to Nordhausen from Dora and the Mittelwerk, rousted the men from their houses, and ordered them at gunpoint to fetch shovels and start digging until all the dead of KZ Dora-Mittelbau were buried.
That is what I found in the public record that night at the Montclair Public Library when I went to look up Nordhausen. Between the impressment of the local citizens as gravediggers and the beginning of the end of my grandfather’s war, I can offer only informed speculation, combined with a few little facts that he inadvertently dropped over the course of the next few days.
I know that he arrived at Nordhausen the day after its liberation, along with the news that FDR was dead. He steered the Zündapp through the empty streets of the town. With every barrier lifted and every gateway open to him as a result of his “Eisenhower pass,” he had no trouble entering the various subcamps or the factory under the mountain. Like the men of the Timberwolf and Spearhead Divisions, he had been hardened by prolonged exposure to violence. Like them, I imagine, what he saw around Dora-Mittelbau may have brought him to the point of tears or nausea. It was clear from what he told me afterward that, like the liberators, he looked around to find a fitting object of his rage when his tour of this particular hell and its environs was complete.
What he saw that day, and what he heard from the survivors he questioned, persuaded him that there was no way Wernher von Braun could have been technical director of the V-2 program while remaining unaware of how business was conducted in the Mittelwerk.* Von Braun could not be crowned with the glory of the rocket without shouldering the burden of its shame. All the suffering my grandfather saw had been amassed and all the cruelty deployed at the prompting and in the service of von Braun’s dream. It turned out that the V-2 was not a means to liberate the human spirit from the chains of gravity; it was only a pretext for further enchainment. It was not an express bound for the stars but a mail rocket carrying one simple message, signed in high-explosive amatol with the name of Baron von Braun. Maybe the man’s dream had begun as something beautiful and grand. For a time, maybe, its grandeur and its beauty had blinded von Braun to all the ways in which he was busily betraying it. That was only human, the common lot. But once your dream revealed itself, like most dreams, to be nothing but a current of raw compulsion flowing through a circuitry of delusion and lies, then that was the time to give it up. That was the time to damn your dream and trust your eyes. And maybe cock your revolver.
Over the course of that long day in Nordhausen my grandfather trusted his eyes and gave up the dream he had shared with the Wernher von Braun of his imaginings. Along with it, he surrendered the memory of a rocket in a clearing, a half hour of something that had felt like peace, a midnight conversation with the rector of Our Lady of the Moon. When those things were gone, there was a bad moment as my grandfather found himself confronted once more with the void that surrounded the planet of his heart for a thousand parsecs in every direction. After that, as with the liberators of Nordhausen putting away their disgust and useless anguish, there was only the matter of his anger and where to point it.
*
“I went to track him down,” my grandfather said. “Like I was supposed to. More or less.”
“More or less?”
“Well, I wasn’t supposed to go solo. But that didn’t make any sense to me under the circumstances.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about a specific, local set of circumstances or the general ones under which, like some gumshoe, he always preferred to work alone. He had made an exception in the case of Aughenbaugh; he would never entirely recover from the lapse. I nodded, but I must have looked confused.
“The circumstances being that when I found him, I was planning to, y’know,” he said.
“Kill the guy.”
“Right. On the other hand, I did have a fair amount of latitude. I had an Eisenhower pass signed by Ike himself, all of us CIOS guys did. I had been given a degree of discretion,” he said. “Which I totally abused.”
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