The Allies were obsessed with the Nazis’ V-weapons. If they had been ready earlier, the course of war would have been different, explained General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. “It seemed likely that, if the German had succeeded in perfecting and using these new weapons six months earlier than he did, our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible,” Eisenhower said. Instead, circumstance worked in the Allies’ favor, and by the fall of 1944, Allied forces had a firm foothold on the European continent. But back in Washington, D.C., inside the Pentagon, a secret, U.S.-only rocket-related scientific intelligence mission was in the works. Colonel Gervais William Trichel was the first chief of the newly created Rocket Branch inside U.S. Army Ordnance. Now Trichel was putting together a group of army scientists to send to Europe as part of Special Mission V-2. The United States was twenty years behind Germany in rocket development, but Trichel saw an opportunity to close that gap and save the U.S. Army millions of dollars in research and development costs. Trichel’s team would capture these rockets and everything related to them for shipment back to the United States. The mission would begin as soon as the U.S. Army arrived in the town of Nordhausen, Germany.
The British had the lead on intelligence regarding V-weapons. Their photo interpreters had determined exactly where the rockets were being assembled, at a factory in central Germany in the naturally fortified Harz Mountains. Trying to bomb this factory from the air was useless, because the facility had been built underground in an old gypsum mine. While the Americans made plans inside the Pentagon, and while von Braun and his colleagues drank champagne at Peenemünde, the men actually assembling the Reich’s V-2 rockets endured an entirely different existence. Nazi science had brought back the institution of slavery all across the Reich, and concentration camp prisoners were being worked to death in the service of war. The workers building rockets included thousands of grotesquely malnourished prisoners who toiled away inside a sprawling underground tunnel complex known by its euphemism, Mittelwerk, the Middle Works. This place was also called Nordhausen, after the town, and Dora, the code name for its concentration camp.
To average Germans the Harz was a land of fairy tales, of dark forests and stormy mountains. To those who read Goethe, here was the place where the witches and the devil collided at Brocken Mountain. Even in America, in Disney’s popular film Fantasia, these mountains had meaning. They were where forces of evil gathered to do their handiwork. But at the end of the Second World War, the Reich’s secret, subterranean penal colony at Nordhausen was fact, not fiction. The Mittelwerk was a place where ordinary citizens—of France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Poland, and Germany—had been transformed into the Third Reich’s slaves.
The underground factory at Nordhausen had been in operation since late August 1943, after a Royal Air Force attack on the Peenemünde facility up north forced armaments production to move elsewhere. The day after that attack, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, paid a visit to Hitler and proposed they move rocket production underground. Hitler agreed, and the SS was put in charge of supplying slaves and overseeing facilities construction. The individual in charge of expanding Nordhausen from a mine to a tunnel complex was Brigadier General Hans Kammler, a civil engineer and architect who, earlier in his career, built the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The first group of 107 slave laborers arrived at the Mittelwerk in late August 1943. They came from the Buchenwald concentration camp, located fifty miles to the southeast. The wrought-iron sign over the Buchenwald gate read Jedem das Seine, “Everyone gets what he deserves.” Digging tunnels was hard labor, but the SS feared prisoners might revolt if they had mining tools, so the men dug with their bare hands. The old mine had been used by the German army as a fuel storage facility. There were two long tunnels running parallel into the mountain that needed to be widened now for railcars. There were also smaller cross-tunnels every few meters that needed to be lengthened to create more workspace. In September 1943 machinery and personnel arrived from Peenemünde. Notable among the staff, and important to Operation Paperclip, was the man in charge of production, a high school graduate named Arthur Rudolph.
Rudolph’s specialty was rocket engine assembly. He had worked under von Braun in this capacity since 1934. Rudolph was a Nazi ideologue; he joined the party before there was any national pressure to do so, in 1931. What he lacked in academic pedigree he made up for as a slave driver. As the Mittelwerk operations director, Rudolph worked with the SS construction staff to build the underground factory. Then he oversaw production on the assembly lines for V-weapons scientific director Wernher von Braun.