“If the war is lost,” Hitler famously told Speer, “the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable.” If Germany loses the war, Hitler said, the people deserved existential punishment for being weak. “What will remain after this struggle will be in any case only the inferior ones, since the good ones have fallen,” Hitler said. Following this logic, Hitler decreed that Speer’s ministry need not provide German citizens with even the most basic necessities, including shelter and food. He told Speer that if Speer were ever to give him another memorandum saying the war was unwinnable, and that negotiations with the enemy should be considered, Hitler would consider this an act of treason punishable by death.
Hitler then issued a nationwide “scorched-earth” policy. Speer was to help organize the complete destruction of all German infrastructure, military and civilian—from its transportation and communication systems to its bridges and dams. Officially entitled Demolitions on Reich Territory, this order became known as the Nero Decree, or Nerobefehl, invoking the Roman emperor Nero, who allegedly engineered the Great Fire of 64 AD and then watched Rome burn.
In central Germany, in the naturally fortified Harz Mountains, production of V-weapons continued at a frenzied pace despite every indication that Germany would soon lose the war. By late February 1945, conditions inside the Nordhausen tunnels had reached a cataclysm. It was bitterly cold, thousands were starving to death, and there was barely any food; watery broth was all the prisoners had to live on. The Nordhausen-Dora concentration camp was being overrun with new prisoners arriving on the death marches from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen in the east. Some came on foot and others came in cattle cars. Many arrived dead. Dora’s crematorium was overwhelmed. In this climate, Wernher von Braun and General Dornberger pressed on with plans to create a greater number of rockets each day.
Since moving his offices from the Peenemünde facility to the Harz Mountains, von Braun had been given a promotion. Now he was head of what was called the Mittelbau-Dora Planning Office, a division within Himmler’s SS. Von Braun lived just a few miles from the Nordhausen complex, in a villa that had been confiscated from a Jewish factory owner years before. Each day he drove to his office in Bleicherode, eleven miles from the tunnel complex, where he drafted designs for new and better test stands and launch ramps for the V-2. Despite the reality that the war was lost, the area was abuzz with new armaments factories being built, “dug by workers from some of the forty-odd subcamps now tied to Mittelbau-Dora,” Michael J. Neufeld explains. Von Braun’s vision was to escalate rocket production from two or three rockets a day to two hundred rockets a day. To prepare for this ambitious expansion, he commandeered factories, schools, and mines throughout the region. But rocket assembly was dependent on workers, and the slave laborers in Nordhausen were now dying at an ever-increasing rate. Von Braun had to have known this; he visited the underground tunnels in an official capacity ten times during the winter of 1945.
For the emaciated slave laborers who had managed to stay alive, trying to assemble missiles in filthy, unfinished tunnels without food, water, or sanitation in the bitter cold of winter had become more and more difficult, and it showed in their work. In skies across Europe these hastily constructed rockets began breaking apart in flight. And in the pine forests of northern Germany, including those around the Castle Varlar, quickly assembled rockets were exploding on their mobile launch pads. The managers at Mittelwerk suspected sabotage. To send a message, public hangings were held.
“Prisoners were hanged up to 57 in one day,” read one war crimes report. “They were hanged in the tunnels with the help of an electrically controlled crane, a dozen at a time, their hands bound behind their back, a piece of wood was put in their mouth… to prevent shouting.” The hangings were carried out directly above the V-2 production lines. Laborers were forced to watch their fellow prisoners suffer an agonizingly slow death. In solidarity, a group of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners staged a revolt. The suspects were rounded up. Mittelwerk managers and SS guards decided to make an example of them. After these men were hanged, their bodies were left dangling for a day. Only after Arthur Rudolph, the Mittelwerk operations director, received a memo from one of his German engineers asking when they were going to get their crane back were the bodies taken down.