The prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, putting together V-weapons. By the end of the first two months there were eight thousand men living and working in this cramped underground space. There was no fresh air in the tunnels, no ventilation system, no water, and very little light. “Blasting went on day and night and the dust after every blast was so thick that it was impossible to see five steps ahead,” read one report. Laborers slept inside the tunnels on wood bunk beds. There were no washing facilities and no sanitation. Latrines were barrels cut in half. The workers suffered and died from starvation, dysentery, pleurisy, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and phlegmasia from beatings. The men were walking skeletons, skin stretched over bones. Some perished from ammonia burns to the lungs. Others died by being crushed from the weight of the rocket parts they were forced to carry. The dead were replaceable. Humans and machine parts went into the tunnels. Rockets and corpses came out. Workers who were slow on the production lines were beaten to death. Insubordinates were garroted or hanged. After the war, war crimes investigators determined that approximately half of the sixty thousand men eventually brought to Nordhausen were worked to death.
The Mittelwerk wasn’t the first slave labor camp created and run by the Third Reich. The SS recognized the value of slave labor in the mid-1930s. Humans could be selected from the ever-growing prisoner populations at concentration camps and put to work in quarries and factories. By 1939 the SS had masterminded a vast network of state-sponsored slavery across Nazi-occupied Europe through an innocuous-sounding division called the SS Business Administration Main Office. This office was overseen by Heinrich Himmler but required partnerships. These included many companies from the private sector, including IG Farben, Volkswagen, Heinkel, and Steyr-Daimler-Puch. The most significant partner was Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production. When Speer took over as armaments minister in February 1942 his first challenge, he said, was to figure out how to galvanize war production and make it more efficient. Speer’s solution was to get rid of bureaucracy and use more slave laborers. He himself had been connected to the slave labor programs with the SS for years, including when he was an architect. Speer’s buildings required vast amounts of stone, which was quarried by concentration camp laborers from Mauthausen and Flossenbürg.
The SS Business Administration Main Office specialized in engineering dangerous and fast construction projects, as was the case with the V-2 facility at Nordhausen. “Pay no attention to the human victims,” Brigadier General Hans Kammler told his staff overseeing construction in the tunnels. “The work must proceed and be finished in the shortest possible time.” In the first six months of tunnel work, 2,882 laborers died. Albert Speer praised Kammler for what he considered to be a great achievement in engineering, setting things up so efficiently and so fast. “[Your work] far exceeds anything ever done in Europe and is unsurpassed even by American standards,” wrote Speer.
There were other reasons why the use of slave labor was so important to wonder weapons production, namely, the secrecy it ensured. The V-2 was a classified weapons project; the less Allied intelligence knew about it, the better for the Reich. When Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler met with Hitler in August of 1943 to brief him on the benefits of using slave labor, Himmler reminded the Führer that if the Reich’s entire workforce were to be concentration camp prisoners, “all contact with the outside world would be eliminated. Prisoners don’t even receive mail.”
In the spring of 1944, V-2 production had accelerated to the point where the SS provided Mittelwerk managers with their own concentration camp, Dora, which in turn grew to include thirty subcamps. The man in charge of “personnel” at the Mittelwerk, its general manager, was a forty-six-year-old engineer named Georg Rickhey, an ardent Nazi and party member since 1931. On Rickhey’s résumé, later used by the Americans to employ him, Rickhey described himself as “Mittelwerk General Manager, production of all ‘V’ and rocket weapons, construction of underground mass-production facilities, director of entire concern.” As general manager of the sprawling, subterranean enterprise, Rickhey was in charge of “renting” slaves from the SS. As a former Demag Armor Works executive, he had already overseen the creation of more than 1.5 million square feet of underground tunnels around Berlin, all dug by slaves. With this experience Rickhey had become a veteran negotiator between private industry and the SS Business Administration Main Office in the procurement of slaves. “The SS began, in effect, a rent-a-slave service to firms and government enterprises at a typical rate of four marks a day for unskilled workers and six marks for skilled ones,” writes V-weapon historian Michael J. Neufeld. The slaves were disposable. When they died they were replaced. At Nordhausen the SS gave Rickhey a discount, charging the Mittelwerk between two and three reichsmarks per man, per day.
On May 6, 1944, days after becoming general manager of the Mittelwerk, Rickhey called a meeting to discuss how best to acquire more prisoners for slave labor. Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and Arthur Rudolph were all present. It was decided that the SS should enslave another eighteen hundred skilled French workers to fill the shoes of those who had already been worked to death. The record indicates that von Braun, Dornberger, and Rudolph showed no objection to Rickhey’s plan.